Making It Through The Night: Hope and Movies in 2017

Taking a look at memorable moments in Logan, Wonder Woman, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, with as many spoilers as required.

“Why do I love movies?”

I believe most movie fans have asked themselves this question before, wondering why they spend so much time and money on something so intangible. There could be an infinite number of answers, depending on who you are and what you want, and all of them are correct.

For some fans, the breathtaking imagery and technical perfection that only the camera can achieve fuels the desire to see more. For others, it could be as simple as wanting to be entertained. You might also love movies that help you understand what others are experiencing. Whatever your personal reason may be, we would not be here if movies were not, at their core, about creating feelings and emotions.

And this is what I love most about the vast world of cinema: how they make me feel. The past year brought us the creeping dread of Get Out, the humbling sense of cosmic scale in A Ghost Story, and the wall-to-wall comedic craziness of Logan Lucky. But the moments that hit me the hardest and linger in my mind are the ones that made me cry.

I value these cinematic moments because they pierce through my sense of emotional control with either harrowing sadness or beautiful catharsis. They reaffirm my love of movies, when I start to understand myself just a little bit better by examining what truly affects me. And in Logan, Wonder Woman, and The Last Jedi, I found my perfect movie moments of 2017.

Logan and the Benefit of Exhaustion

If you had to summarise the tone of James Mangold’s Logan in one word, you might use “weary”. So many elements of the movie come together to create this atmosphere, the most obvious of which is the arid desert setting for most of the movie, infusing Logan with the stoicism of old Western films.

There is also Logan himself and Charles Xavier, now two old men waiting to die. We are introduced to them at the start of the movie as “just wanting to earn enough money to run away” and “losing his grip on his incredible psychic powers” respectively. At the end of their lives, they are either unwilling to help others, or unable to help.

The opening scene of the film already shows Logan’s gore-filled fighting style in its full glory. We see for the first time, deserving of the R rating, exactly how disturbing and brutal it is to rip out someone’s throat with those adamantium claws. However, unlike many blockbusters that increase the intensity of each subsequent action scene, setting up a dramatic finale, Mangold never shies away from showing us the damage inflicted on or by Logan. As the film moves into its final act, we are as tired and ready for everything to end as he is.

And here we find ourselves, a sequence where the mutant children are trying to escape the authorities and seek asylum in Canada, tinged with a hint of finality. Going into the movie, we know that it’s the last time Hugh Jackman plays this version of the Wolverine, as iconic a performance as any in movie history. When my generation thinks of Wolverine, we see Jackman’s mutton-chopped face, before the yellow mask of the original.

As a result, this scene serves as a final hurrah for both Jackman and Logan, one more chance to leave an impact on an entire generation, the exclamation mark on the end of an incredible story. There is an amazing sense of joy and anticipation at watching Logan become the hero once again. Logan tears through mercenaries with whatever strength remains, driving those famous claws through human flesh until there is nothing left to kill.

Instead of merely giving Logan a final act of sacrificial heroism, Mangold digs even deeper into the well of emotional connection between Logan and Laura. She cuts him down from the tree stump he’s been gruesomely impaled on, signifying the switch of the movie’s tone from ultraviolence to serenity. The camera switches from wider shots that show us action to close-ups that take us into their souls, one leaving and one tormented. Laura reaches out and grabs Logan’s hand, finally connecting.

In that moment, Laura calls him “daddy”, and Logan flashes a smile of incredible joy, sparking his eyes with whatever life was left. His final words are deeply meaningful and reflect a man at peace, for once: “So this is what it feels like.” It feels immensely cathartic to see his arc completed, from a man waiting to die, to giving his life to save a loved one he’d barely known, to having that same love returned to him at the very end.

Do you ever feel like you’re more emotional when you’re tired? Minor problems suddenly seem to become way worse than they actually are, and every insignificant issue bugs you to no end. I usually keep very late nights, and that’s also when I watch a lot of movies on my laptop. This means that I crash in the middle of movies more often than I’d like to admit.

But on the occasions where I make it through to the end, I find myself more likely to cry or be moved by scenes that were never as powerful in other viewing environments. When you’re tired, you have less control over yourself, and any wave of emotion you feel comes pouring out.

Which is why that’s not the point in Logan where I lost my emotional control. The high of the fight scene was still fleeting, and the weariness was just starting to set in again. Instead, I will always think of Laura’s eulogy at the very end. Her words are borrowed from the 1953 Western film Shane, which Xavier shows to Laura in the hotel room, where the lone gunman prepares to leave the world he no longer belongs to, in a better place than when he arrived.

Because even more than sacrificing himself to defeat the villains, even more than experiencing love at the very end of his life, it’s the brighter future that he leaves for the children that is the most beautiful aspect of Logan. It’s no longer about waiting to die, it’s about giving the future more days to live.

“And there are no more guns in the valley.”

Wonder Woman and the Art of Sincerity

Let’s talk about heroism, and what it means, for a second. It’s easy to point to anyone with a “save the world” mentality as a hero, even in a genre populated with beings powerful enough to save multiple worlds with barely any effort (see: Superman). It has to be more than that; we need our heroes to fully believe in what they’re saving, and we need to believe in them too. Think about it this way, if we don’t understand why the world is worth saving to this one figure, the whole idea of “saving the world” loses all its meaning.

This is why the best superhero movies have at least one defining moment where we see the hero at their idealistic best. Think about the subway fight in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, embodied in the murmur of “he’s just a kid” when the passengers see Peter without his mask on. The undying love that Spiderman shows to New York is reciprocated and reinforces why he will always fight for them. Spiderman doesn’t just protect New York, New York protects Spiderman.

Along the same lines, also consider the scene in Captain America: The First Avenger where Steve Rogers jumps on a grenade to save his teammates, whose first instincts are to look for cover. It’s a dud, of course, but what’s real is Steve’s will to save others. In this instance, we don’t understand what drives him to do it, but all we need to believe in is that Steve will fight to save everyone around him at all costs.

These are the scenes that you could absolutely lose for pacing purposes, but these are also the scenes that, noticeable or not, can make entire franchises work, providing multiple movies’ worth of audience goodwill. And no other scene this year has made more of a cultural impact than the No Man’s Land scene in Wonder Woman.

Before the instantly iconic fight begins, we are told that the townspeople are being enslaved by the German army, and Diana immediately feels driven to rescue the town. Her earnest plea is shut down by Steve Trevor, who, more accustomed to these moral grey lines, makes the case that if they don’t focus on their mission, the whole world will die. Diana is once again kept from saving people, her sole reason for leaving Themyscira in the first place. So she simply decides to save them anyway.

As Diana ascends the ladder into the battleground, the slow-motion signals to us that something momentous is happening. This is the first time she is actually helping mankind, finally doing something that causes an actual change in people’s lives, and we are given our first shot of Diana in that stunning Wonder Woman costume.

The bright red, blue and gold stands out from the dreary green-grey of the battlefield like a beacon of hope. Gal Gadot ascends to the heights of pop culture with a strut that exudes strength and confidence. It feels like she was born to play this role, waiting all this time for the right moment.

It is impossible to talk about Wonder Woman without placing it in the larger context of 2017. If the lack of separation between film and culture disgusts you, you could skip the next three paragraphs. But I’d appreciate if you stay, and we can talk more about my critical failings afterwards.

It’s a bit of hindsight, but after seeing the fall of powerful, abusive men in Hollywood and the rise of various movements and groups dedicated to supporting the victims of sexual assault and harassment, it’s important that one of the year’s biggest movies was focused on a woman, and was directed by a woman too.

I had, and still have, a lot of issues with the execution of Wonder Woman, specifically that I think everything on Themyscira is way too rushed, and the ending dissolves into a messy fight just because “we have to have a CGI final fight”. And I can pile on even more criticism, or I could recognise that Wonder Woman, just by existing, has made a larger cultural impact than most movies could even hope to. Isn’t that what we hope movies achieve?

It would be wrong to dismiss Wonder Woman for its technical flaws, because something very real has caught on with people, and to ignore them would mean that movies matter very little outside of our understanding of technical proficiency. And anything that excludes people engaging with art ignores its very purpose.

I believe it is Diana’s core sincerity that has captured this cultural fascination. She is the first superhero since Captain America in The First Avenger who proudly owns up to her fundamental love for humanity. In the midst of so much gloom and doom, maybe all we really needed was for a symbol of hope to loudly declare, “I believe in love”.

The Last Jedi and Hope

At this point, almost everything that can be written about The Last Jedi has been, and you could build up a galaxy’s worth of judgement about my views if I call this Rian Johnson’s masterpiece. Which I do. And since trying to justify every plot thread and theme would take a painful amount of time (and a whole separate piece), I’m just going to focus on the key that holds The Last Jedi together: the indomitable Rose Tico.

Let’s start with what we learn about her in her first scene. What is remarkable is that she’s not even the main focus of the very first moments we see her. She is introduced grieving her dead sister, a war hero whose act of bravery we experience alongside her in the opening space battle. Immediately, Rose is contextualised by her relationship to her sister, and it informs her motivation as she stops people trying to abandon ship. Rose doesn’t want her sister’s death to have been for nothing. This is why she fights on.

The Last Jedi tries to cover a wide range of themes, which Johnson deftly converts to characterisation, so that his thematic exploration is tied into character arcs. For example, he explores the difference between easily lionised leaders and true strategic planners with Poe Dameron and Admiral Holdo, and the complexities of guilt and failure with Luke Skywalker. Above all, Johnson seeks to explore the notion of hope and make a statement.

If we are going to talk about hope, then we have to address what this movie honestly and succinctly puts across: war mean death. It sounds stupidly obvious, but no other Star Wars movie, except maybe Rogue One, has been so focused on the body count as a true stumbling block to success as this one. To this, the movie owes a huge debt to the late Carrie Fisher, delivering a sublime, subdued final turn as General Leia.

Take a second look at the moment after the opening scene bombing run, when she learns that they have lost their entire bombing crew. The pain she expresses tells us that this is a war veteran who is intensely aware of how precious each life in the Resistance is. Her farewell to Admiral Holdo shows this again, as she genuinely struggles with having to lose another ally, another familiar face, another friend. This is great, nuanced work by one of our greatest actresses, channeled through one of pop culture’s most important characters, and a fitting tribute to a defining talent gone too soon.

That having been said, Johnson isn’t quite satisfied with making us feel how important hope is, even with lines like, “Hope is like the sun. If you only believe it when you see it you’ll never make it through the night.” Johnson wants us to know why we even have hope in the first place, and as articulated by Rose, it feels like a universal truth we’ve always known but somehow forgot.

“We’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.”

This line comes right after she saves Finn from going on a suicide run, in a futile attempt to destroy the First Order superweapon that would seal their fate. Yes, nitpickers, it is a futile attempt. Poe tells us that it’s too late and calls off the attack run, and while I think it could have been emphasised how useless their attempt would be, there it is. Anyway, Finn is upset that he’s been prevented from “becoming a hero”, and Rose simply tells him why.

And now we see how her entire character clicks into place. Why she takes her task of stopping deserters so seriously. Why she was willing to trust that the name of the Resistance would inspire hope, not fear, in a random Canto Bight farm boy. Because it’s always been about putting faith in love, and being willing to save it.

When I watched this scene for the first time, I cried at how simple yet beautiful it was. I still tear up when I think about it and what it means. It gets at the heart of why we even bother to fight for what is right in the first place.

We don’t get moved to action, swept up in the moment, by destroying those who hate us. We do it because we want to protect what is dear to us, to defend what we treasure the most. The Last Jedi needed Rose to be the person who spread hope to helpless farm boys. Its message needed to be as sincere and as genuine as the sentiment it carried. And we need to remember it.

Endings and Beginnings

I remember growing up as a teenager, thinking that I had the world figured out, and that if I could somehow block off all my emotions, it would be an absolute sign of greatness. So for years, I tried. I purposely sought out the outrageous and profane to desensitise myself, becoming ever closer to the perfect, unemotional ideal I dreamed of. And so it went for years.

In 2013, Spike Jonze released his film, Her. It’s my absolute favourite movie of all time, because of an amount of personal context that’s basically impossible for any other film to replicate. It broke me, and stranger yet, compelled me to keep coming back to it anyway, and I broke again every time.

For some reason, I loved how it made me feel small and fragile, no matter how I refused to admit it to myself. Somewhere along the line, I gave up trying to push aside my feelings, and desperately yearned to feel again.

That’s when I grew to love the movies. They gave me emotions that I wanted to feel, or at the right times, emotions that I needed to feel. “So that’s what that feels like.” More than that, movies help us to understand ourselves and the wider world around us.

I was about to write this essay, but kept getting stuck and couldn’t make it work. Then I watched Call Me By Your Name. That was already in 2018, but I’m still counting it as a 2017 film. It’s a terrific film, with a luxurious pace to let you soak in the deeply felt performances from the entire cast, and the lead actors in particular. And Sufjan Stevens’ song contributions, of course. But the entire movie, and my personal world, only clicked into place when Michael Stuhlbarg delivers one of cinema’s great monologues.

“How you live your life is your business, just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.”

It speaks to the emotional, human experiences I value above all else, and the moments of pure beauty I’m always searching for. All I can hope is that this perfect moment isn’t just a lingering ghost of 2017, but a shining light for the experiences to come.

END