Love him or hate him, Rian Johnson is a student of film, an expert of film history, and a lover of storytelling. He loves big movies, he loves little movies. He loves blockbusters, he loves weird arthouse flicks. His creative and eccentric filmography is a reflection of his own wide-ranging passions, someone who genre hops all over the place spanning from hard-boiled noirs, to con-man movies, to sci-fi westerns, to franchise space operas, to Agatha Christie-styled murder mysteries. He merges old school Hollywood classics with modern subversive styles, upending his audience’s expectations at every turn. He’s made a career out of taking well-worn genres and updating the tropes for a modern era, though he claims he’s not subversive at all and is simply honoring the past by playing “genre karaoke.” 

“One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads,” he explained. “The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.” His cleverness is a little too self-satisfied at times, but he’s one of the most promising filmmakers to emerge in recent decades. Best of all, he gave us THE LAST JEDI, my favorite Star Wars film. A story that dares to kill off our idols, questions our uncritical worship of heroes, tells us there’s a lot we can learn from failure, and reminds us that profoundly ordinary nobodies can be heroic somebodies. We don’t need to be related to famous people to be important. Heroes can spring anytime, anywhere, in any obscure part of the galaxy.