#and then i saw force awakens and i saw daisy ridley in the trailers

[willieowinsbury]

i have no idea who boba fett is and i think that's very sexy of me

[kylorenisadorkable]

How TROS Failed Rey

These are just my opinions and from my personal perspective, if these things worked for you in the movie then cool, but this is why it was never going to work for me.

A Feminine Power Fantasy

Growing up in the 90s there wasn't a ton of media that had female lead characters. I grew up with strong female characters but they were often relegated to being the token girl of the group (see the Smurfette principle), the story was never centered around them and we never got to experience things from their point of view or really get to know their story. It felt like I was being asked to relate to male characters but boys were never asked or expected to relate to female characters.

Just as young boys see themselves as Luke, leading the adventure I also wanted to see myself as the main character. I wanted to have my own adventures.

When I first saw TFA, I went in knowing nothing about the movie. I had seen the OT and the Prequels as a kid and I had thought they were ok but I wasn't a huge Star Wars fan and in hindsight I really think this was due to the lack of female representation, Leia and Padme are great but I never really felt like I really got to know them as people. Not to mention that these characters are 2 women out of a cast that's predominantly male, it just seemed like the message LF was sending was that Star Wars is for boys, yeah girls can watch it if they want to but this isn't a series that is meant for you. So as you could guess I wasn't really expecting much from these new Star Wars movies, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I fell in love with Rey's character during those first 3 minutes of her introduction. During this brilliant example of “show don't tell,” story telling they were really able to convey so much about Rey's character and personality, I really began to care for her and felt like I understood her, as I could relate to her loneliness and isolation in my own way. And I was excited to see a story from a major fantasy/adventure franchise told from a feminine perspective. It felt like I was finally getting the representation I wanted to see.

So what happened? How did we go from Luke's line “And I will not be the Last Jedi” which is essentially him “passing the torch” to Rey, the next generation, to “One day I will earn your brother's saber?” 

As if the saber didn't already choose her in the Force Awakens? Why did they decide that all of a sudden Rey was unworthy? Didn't Yoda say “that library held nothing that the girl Rey didn't already posses?” which yes was a clever way of saying that Rey already took the jedi texts with her but was also implying that she already had everything she needed within herself to be a jedi (courage, humility, compassion etc...). Why did they take a step backwards in the last movie in the franchise? Insisting that Rey needed to train, that she suddenly wasn't good enough?

I can't say for sure what happened to lead up to this point. Was it just that the creative team gave in to the pressuring of a loud minority of alt-right youtubers and bots. Were they relying on Reddit and Twitter for public opinion rather than doing actual marketing research?  While I think that this was definitely a big factor I think there was just a general misunderstanding of the characters on Terrio's and JJ's part to begin with.

What Does Rey Want/Need?

To know where they went wrong, we have to ask ourselves who is Rey? All characters have a story goal, or the thing they want. By the end of the story the character will either get what they want after some struggles of course or learn that the thing that they want isn't what they need. So what does Rey want?  To understand what she wants we have to first understand her wound or past experience that caused emotional pain and interferes with the character's life. Rey's wound stems from her  abandonment. Along with the wound, comes the concept of the false lie. What is a lie that the character believes about themselves that we as the audience knows is untrue? Rey's lie is first, that her family is going to come back for her. 

The other lie she tells herself is the belief that she is worthless because she was abandoned, as she tells everyone she meets “I'm no one“ or “I'm just a scavenger.”

When Daisy Ridley was asked in an interview why Rey says she's “No One.” Ridley says it's because our relationships to people define so much of who we are and without relationships then who are we?  This makes sense considering that our parents are major influences in our development and in how we think about ourselves through much of our lives.

Rey seeks out parental figures, thinking that through them she'll figure out where she belongs. “Whoever you're waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could. The Belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.” 

Rey initially believes that Maz is referring to Luke and when she later sets off to find him. She believe that he is going to be able to give her answers, and provide her with the belonging that she longs for, but Luke ultimately ends up disappointing her but finds comfort in her relationship with Ben.

This goes back to the idea that what Rey thinks she wants, Isn't necessarily what she needs. As JJ stated in the directors commentary of The Force Awakens, “So there was a very powerful idea that what she desperately wanted was belonging, which she’ll get, but just not how she expects.”

JJ and Terrio try to fullfill Rey's need through “found family” the family she finds with her friends and the resistance, but I think there is more to Rey's desire of wanting family that can't be satisfied by this alone. Finn, Poe, Leia are definitely a part of her journey in finding belonging but they're not the final piece to the puzzle. Otherwise she would have felt completely fulfilled by the end of The Last Jedi when she is on the Falcon surrounded by her friends.

I think part of Rey's desire for family, is also the desire to be understood, to be “seen.”  Rey even tells Finn in TROS that “People keep telling me they know me. No one does.” We hear Ben's response in the trailer “But I do...” (which was cut from the movie)

Ben has always been shown to be the person who truly “sees” Rey. He sees even the aspects of herself that she doesn't like to acknowledge. Recognizing that her holding on to her parents is affecting her negatively and that if she really wants to “find herself” she needs to let go.

Which is why when Ben says “You have no place in this story. You're nothing. But not to me.” What is really being expressed is “I don't care about where you come from and I see you for who you are.”  

This is why I believe that Ben was always suppose to be the final piece to the belonging Rey is searching for. As their narratives are intertwined. They both satisfy each others needs as characters, Rey's need to be seen for who she is and Ben's need for reconciliation and healing within his family.

Rey Palpatine

Rian Johnson said that when he began working on The Last Jedi, he wrote out all the character's names and next to them wrote what would be the hardest thing for that character to face. For Rey, this was that she needs to stand on her own two feet and define who she is for herself but JJ and Terrio seemed to have misunderstood this as Terrio states that,

“We also thought that Rey’s arc cannot be finished after Episode VIII. You can leave Episode VIII and say, “Well, now, Rey is content. She’s discovered her parents aren’t Skywalkers, or whatever, and that’s fine.” But so much of her personal story was about where she came from, what kept her on Jakku all those years and the trauma that shaped her. We see quite strongly in Episode VII that something mysterious and troubling happened to her. Although she did get some answers in Episode VIII, we didn’t feel that that story was over. We felt that there were still more questions in Rey’s head about where she came from and where she was going. So, that was the other big idea that we had to address in this film. Rian’s answer to, “What’s the worst news that Rey could receive?” was that she comes from junk traders, and that’s true. She does come from junk traders; we didn’t contradict that.”

Rey's conflict wasn't that she came from junk traders. Rey didn't care about “legacy.” Her conflict stemmed from her abandonment. Rey thinks she's “a nobody” not because of her parent's occupation or lineage but because she feels that she must be worthless because why else would her parents give her up? Rey learning that her parents sold her off for drinking money, that they didn't want her, was already a difficult and traumatic truth to overcome. Star Wars is a coming of age story, in the OT Luke grows from being a boy longing for adventure to discovering what it truly means to be a Jedi (following your principles and having a compassionate heart). Rey's journey is about letting go of childhood trauma and discovering her own independence.

It's also strange seeing as JJ had previously stated during The Force Awakens press tour that “I really feel that the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline. It's not that I don't believe that as part of the canon, I'm just saying that at 11 years old that wasn't where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.”

And there was still conflict for her to overcome. The one person who she felt truly understood her is now the supreme leader of the first order, will the resistance discover their connection? Will they see her as a traitor? All of this had the potential for great external and internal character conflict, but for some reason they didn't see this as conflict enough to sustain a whole movie?

Instead they gave Luke's character arc in the OT of having a dark side relative to Rey. “Discovering that you actually descended from your adoptive family’s greatest enemy, the same enemy who corrupted Anakin Skywalker and is responsible for the destruction of the Skywalker family in the first place, felt most devastating to us.” This doesn't make any sense to me as it feel like they just gave Rey Luke's internal conflict of being afraid of his dark side, I don't think this was ever a problem for Rey. In fact, in The Last Jedi  she leapt into the dark side cave to face her darkness (her abandonment). Luke even says “You went straight to the dark and you didn't even try to stop yourself.” 

The dark side cave in The Last Jedi was symbolic of Rey coming to terms with her darkness (the parts of herself she wants to hide).  It relates back to Jungian psychology (which much of Star Wars is based on) that people can only become whole through understanding both the light and shadow aspects of their personality. So it doesn't make sense for Rey to be afraid of who she is in the final movie when she just finished a journey where she learned to accept who she was?

Rey Skywalker

Terrio says that the decision to have Rey take on the name “Skywalker” was a way to show that “you can choose your ancestry.” Which is not true and also a strange thing to say considering the trilogy started with this:

But even if this was just awkward phrasing and what Terrio meant to say was that she considers the Skywalkers her family. Does this make sense considering that she didn't have a great relationship with Luke to begin with?

 I've seen it argued that she took the name as a way of honoring Leia but Leia never took the name or considered herself a Skywalker. Also this is another step backwards for Rey's character as The Last Jedi was trying to assert that Rey does not need to keep looking for parental figures to define herself.

So why  must she be a Palpatine, a Skywalker and “all the jedi” anyways? I think this was done for two reasons, the first was because by killing Ben they were going to kill the last of the Skywalker family and they wanted to keep the name tied to the franchise, in case they need the characters for future projects down the line, so they just pushed it onto Rey. The second reason is that I think they were trying to appease the misogynists' who spent the last 4 years calling Rey a “Mary Sue” so they explained her power away through powerful male lineage. It just feels so weird to me, like the creators are saying that we should like Rey not because of who she is as a character but because of who she is in relation to all these other characters we know you like (Luke, Leia, all the jedi that use her as a vessel etc...)

Daisy Ridley has even expressed her frustration with the Rey's lineage debate multiple times, “I love that Rey is such a great character, they’re like: ‘No, no, she has to be… she has to be-’She’s her own person! Let her be her guys, let her live.

Yet even at the end of the final film poor Rey can't seem to catch a break as she's once again asked for her last name. She once again has to justify herself for just existing. Why are surnames suddenly so important in Star Wars now anyways? Shouldn't the correct answer be “just Rey,” now that she's come to accept who she is and where she's come from and shouldn't that be good enough? What happened to the message of anyone can be a hero? That you don't have to come from or align yourself with a powerful family legacy. That we all have the power to make a difference?

TROS seems to be constantly asking Rey to prove herself. And weirdly enough it reminds me in a strange meta way of my own experience being a woman in the fandom and being constantly asked to prove that I'm a “True fan” (whatever the f@#% that means...) to prove that I'm worthy of consuming and participating in this content that male fans feel belongs solely to them.

In Conclusion

So what did our heroine gain in the end? Did she find family and belonging? No. So what does she have in the end? A yellow lightsaber (for merchandising purposes) and a surname of a dead family?  I guess she finally has an answer to give all the nosey nellies, obsessed with ones pedigree that have suddenly popped up all over the galaxy.

It's not a satisfying ending for her, as she's basically right back where she started. Alone, in a desolate desert, once again staring face to face at an old woman (an old woman which at the start of the Force Awakens symbolized her fear of growing old and wasting away her life on Jakku).

Terrio states that  this is not meant to indicate that Rey plans to stay here, “The very last thing Rey would do after all that is to go and live alone in a desert.”  but when that is the last shot you chose to end the movie on then what is the audience suppose to think? The bigger issue however, is that Rey's ending holds no significance to her or her journey. Terrio says that “In our thinking, Rey goes back to Tatooine as a pilgrimage in honor of her two Skywalker masters. Leia’s childhood home, Alderaan, no longer exists, but Luke’s childhood home, Tatooine, does. Rey brings the sabers there to honor the Skywalker twins by laying them to rest — together, finally — where it all began.” Tatooine, the Lars homestead and the twin suns, don't mean anything to Rey.  You know who did mean something to Rey? Who was the one person who understood her, who she had an intimate relationship with, who she explicitly states she wanted to be with? Ben. But he's gone too. But clearly a light saber and surname are more important. Again this all comes from a lack of caring for what Rey wants.

I just wish that the Sequel Trilogy had stayed Rey's trilogy, that she got to be a heroine in her own right not because she was a skywalker, or a palpatine or from some other powerful family. I will always love Rey but I will always hate what they did to her and I'm tired of people invalidating my feelings and telling me that it was a good ending or that it was empowering. I just want heroines to be taken as seriously and to have all the same privileges as male heroes. Let them stand on their own without connecting them back to every male hero in the franchise, let them be their own character, and finally just let them be human, let them fall in love and have relationships if they want to. Male heroes are never considered to be less of a hero for having a love interest, so why are female heroes? Basically what I got out of the Rise of Skywalker, was that it was created by a couple of guys that loved Luke and the OT and could care less about Rey and that's truly heart breaking.

[son-of-alderaan]

J.J. Abrams is racing.

The director has been tasked with bringing four decades of the most popular and longest-running sci-fi franchise of all time to an epic conclusion. And nowadays he’s feeling a bit like Luke Skywalker flying his X-wing down the Death Star trench in A New Hope as TIE fighters closed in — under a bit of pressure, in other words, with the fate of the entire Star Wars universe depending on him.

“We always knew we were going to have three fewer months to postproduction this film,” says Abrams, who took over co-writing and directing duties on the movie two years ago after successfully rebooting the franchise with 2015’s blockbuster The Force Awakens. “So much is still being worked on. It’s literally a practical race to get it finished.”

If that admission sounds worrisome, hold your fire on those tweets.

Despite a deadline crunch to make the film’s Dec. 20 worldwide launch (EW’s interview was conducted in late October), Abrams says he’s feeling “infinitely better” at this very late stage about The Rise of Skywalker than he was about The Force Awakens.

“We had more reshoots on Episode VII than this one,” Abrams says. “We had more story adjustments on VII than this one. We didn’t know if these characters would work, if the actors would be able to carry a Star Wars movie. There were a lot of things we didn’t know. On this, we knew who and what worked, and everyone is doing the best work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But the ambition of this movie is far greater than Force Awakens. What we set out to do was far more challenging. Everything is exponentially larger on this.” 

For example: Disney has released three trailers for The Rise of Skywalker. Some of the shots are stunning and seemingly revealing: desert scavenger–turned–Jedi apprentice Rey (Daisy Ridley) and First Order leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) clashing with lightsabers on the half-submerged wreckage of the second Death Star, which was blown up in Return of the Jedi; Rey facing off against a somehow resurrected Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid); the Millennium Falcon flying into a massive armada of Star Destroyers. Plus, those bewildering teases of Rey turning to the Dark Side and teaming up with Kylo.

Yet Abrams says fans still don’t really know anything. “The [trailers] that have come out are scratching the surface of what the movie is,” the famously spoiler-averse director says.

Asked if there are major action sequences we’ve yet to see any footage from, Abrams replies with a firm “Yes” and then, naturally, goes silent.

John Boyega, who plays stormtrooper–turned–Resistance fighter Finn, says his first reaction to the script penned by Abrams and Chris Terrio was he had to “read the script six more times because there was so much information in there.”

Here’s what we know about how Episode IX begins: It’s been more than a year since the events of 2017’s The Last Jedi. The First Order has decimated the Resistance. Rey has been training to use the Force. Finn and hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) have been sent by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to find allies throughout the galaxy, but so far haven’t had any luck. “They’re trying to put bandaids on this leaking ship of the Resistance,” Isaac says.

Their mission leads Finn, Poe, and Rey to work together, which has, oddly, never happened before in the trilogy. And since there’s a time jump, the characters have all grown and changed since we last saw them. “We’re not just a ragtag group of people who have been thrown together,” Isaac says. “We’ve actually had time to train. There are some really great sequences with the three of us in infiltrating spaces.”

Both Isaac and Boyega say they had their character wishes granted for the final film. Isaac wanted Poe to get “out the cockpit and into the group,” while Boyega wanted Finn to become a more capable solider (and not, as the actor candidly puts it, just a “comedic goofy dude who never gets stuff done”).

“I definitely wanted more after Episode VIII,” Boyega says. “[Rise of Skywalker] makes Finn’s Episode VIII arc make more sense. We got to bring out a side of Finn we haven’t seen.”

To help spark the trio’s on-screen chemistry, Abrams told his cast to feel free to improvise dialogue, and many scenes were shot using long, continuous takes to keep their flow going. “J.J. came back with a new energy and new vibe,” Boegya says. “He wanted dialogue to be messy and natural, and that got all of us really excited.”

“I think it really captures the spirit of the original trilogy,” Isaac adds. “On top of that there’s fact that Rey has…“

The actor stops, catching himself before revealing too much.

Rey has… what?

“Rey is driving her own thing,” Ridley says. “She’s not doing what other people are telling her to do.”

We last saw Rey mourning the death of her mentor Luke Skywalker (who returns in the film, presumably in Force ghost form, played once again by Mark Hamill) and shutting the door to Kylo’s power-mad seduction attempt. The heroine has since made progress in her Jedi training. “I have skills that have developed, but ‘confident’ isn’t a word I’d use to describe it,” Ridley says. “She’s definitely more in control of everything and can do new fun stuff, but she’s vulnerable and a little insecure about at all.”

Yet Rey will use more than her Force powers in the new film. As Abrams hints: “The scavenger who is desperate and haggling for portions and trying to survive [in Force Awakens] — those special skills and that special experience ends up being something that is essential to saving the galaxy.”

Ridley trained in kickboxing for the final chapter as well, but says the emotional toll of Rey’s journey was more difficult than any combat scenes. “It’s a heavy story for Rey,” Ridley says. “There were days where I was literally like, ‘I can’t do this, I’m so tired, I don’t know if I can like reach that emotion again.’”

Part of Rey’s journey involves solving the mystery of her identity. Well, again. Kylo revealed in The Last Jedi that Rey’s parents are deceased nobodies, “filthy junk traders [who] sold you off for drinking money.” The line embraced the idea that a hero doesn’t need to come from somebody special in order to be somebody special. Yet many fans called foul as the trilogy has teased Rey’s identity as being crucial information from the start (“Classified?” Rey echoed back to BB-8 during her debut sequence. “Me too. Big secret”).

“The parents thing is not satisfied — for her and for the audience,” Ridley says. “That’s something she’s still trying to figure out — where does she come from?”

It’s unclear if Abrams has made a course correction to Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson’s plan or there was always more to say about Rey’s parentage. Either way, wasn’t the Episode VIII scene supposed to be sincere?

“It’s not that she doesn’t believe it,” Ridley says carefully, “but she feels there’s more to the story. And she needs to figure out what’s come before so she can figure out what to do next…”

An even bigger cliffhanger is the resolution of Rey’s complex relationship with the First Order’s ruthless leader, who, okay, sure, also looks hot shirtless in high-waisted pants (but what if he didn’t?). Kylo has grown beyond being a “petulant teenager,” and Driver says Kylo’s killing of Supreme Leader Snoke was “kind of a birth moment for him.”

“He had all of these pseudo father figures that he had to either live up to or literally kill to become his own person for the first time,” the actor says.

Naturally, Kylo’s destiny will lead to at least one lightsaber clash with Rey. Abrams sees the duo as “two sides of the same coin,” noting, “even when they’re not together they still haunt each other in a way — they know they are each other’s unresolved business.”

For his part, Driver rejects any labels for the Rey-Kylo relationship. “I don’t think it’s all one thing,” he says. “Part of the fun of playing it is the boundaries of it keep changing. At times it’s more intimate, sometimes less intimate. Sometimes it’s codependent. And then it’s, obviously, adversarial.”

That Rey and Kylo end up battling on the wreckage of the second Death Star continues Abrams’ penchant for showcasing ruined relics of the original trilogy — like Rey spelunking in a wrecked Star Destroyer and living in an AT-AT walker on Jakku in Force Awakens. “It felt like going into the haunted house, the place that you have to go to,” Abrams says of bringing back the iconic space station. “This is a story of people having to grapple with the burden the prior generation dumps on those that follow. So literally returning to this wreck of the past and having to fight it out felt like an obvious metaphor, but also felt incredibly cinematic.”

Of course, there’s another original trilogy fallen icon in the film too. Fisher died after filming The Last Jedi. Figuring out how to utilize Fisher’s previously deleted scenes in the new movie was one of Abrams’ biggest challenges. “Saying Leia had passed away, or that she was off somewhere else, felt like a cheat,” Abrams says. “Then I remembered we had these scenes that we hadn’t used from Episode VII. It was like finding this impossible answer to this impossible question. Suddenly we had classic Carrie in these amazing moments. So when you see in the movie, it’s her, she’s there. It’s not like there’s some crazy digital trickery. She’s just in the movie.”

A couple of other original trilogy characters are likewise integral. Billy Dee Williams is back as that ol’ pirate Lando Calrissian for the first time in live action since Return of the Jedi. Williams says he’s excited to return to the character despite enduring fans coming up to him for decades accusing him of betraying Han Solo. “The whole Star Wars experience feels like it never goes away; It’s always there,” Williams says. “There are all of these things that have happened in Lando’s life that he’s got to resolve.”

There’s also paranoid android C-3PO, who in the latest Skywalker trailer ominously says he’s taking a “last look” at his friends. Threepio is essential to a movie’s plot for the first time since A New Hope (Ridley points out Rey might spend more time with Threepio than any character in the film).

“In previous recent movies Threepio has just been kind of window dressing, something on the mantlepiece, you polish it and dust it o when guests are coming,” says Anthony Daniels, who has played the golden droid’s body and voice in every Skywalker Saga movie. “J.J. and Chris came up with this aspect of Threepio we had not seen before that’s remarkably clever. They go down deep into ancient Star Wars and came up with something refreshingly new.”

Joining Threepio in the metal headgear club is newcomer to the saga Keri Russell. Despite having worked with Abrams for years on Felicity, the actress found herself escorted to a small room where she could only read the Skywalker script under watchful guard. Her character is Zorii Bliss, who’s “involved in some intimate, sketchy stuff” and wears a large brass-and-crimson Daft Punk-like helmet.

“For a shy person this is my ultimate dream job — I get to be in Star Wars and my face is covered,” Russell marvels. “I can see everyone and no one can see me. Though I now have giant throbbing neck muscles like Mr. T.”

There’s also newcomer Naomi Ackie portraying Jannah, a bow-and-arrow-wielding warrior who rides a horse-like creature called an Orbak. Real animals were used on set, and until you’ve ridden a horse dressed up like exotic alien across the surface of the Death Star you haven’t really lived. “I was just gobsmacked,” Ackie says of the experience. “Every day you’re grappling with the fact that every choice you make in a small moment is going to be broadcast to the entire world.”

While the film is introducing new characters, Abrams insists Rise of Skywalker won’t set up a future story. He’s not leaving loose threads for Disney to hang another trilogy directly onto the back of this one. Lucas’ original dream of an intergalactic tale about a farm boy from Tatooine is at last about to set — just like those dreamy twin suns collapsing into the desert. “It’s a very good ending, and a good ending feels right,” Daniels says simply.

And yet, in another way, the final Skywalker Saga film is very much about the future of the franchise. Star Wars will continue to exist in an omniscient Force-like fashion, in everything from toys to TV shows to videogames to theme parks, but new movies have always been the brand’s creative core. Since buying Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney’s movies in a galaxy far, far away peaked early at the box office with Force Awakens and sunk to their lowest level with the most recent entry, 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.

At one point during our interview, Abrams declares, “the stakes are all or nothing with this film.” He was referring to its high-stakes story line, but the same could also be said about the franchise. Even if we never see Rey, Finn and Poe on screen again, Rise of Skywalker’s popularity will likely make an impact on Disney’s next studio moves — guiding like a fallen Jedi or Sith’s unseen hand.

Speaking of: There’s at least one key player we haven’t discussed. Palpatine’s return may be the most closely guarded story line in the film. How is the Emperor, who Vader tossed into the Death Star’s reactor core, back in a seemingly corporeal form?

“This has been a very long chess match that’s been played between the Jedi and the Sith — all the way back to the very beginning,” Issac teases. “It’s an amazing thing to see that really come to the forefront.”

The Rise of Skywalker might very well turn out to be a full-fledged reunion special of Force ghosts. And what are the rules that govern the Jedi and Sith spirit realm anyway? Obi-Wan Kenobi said in Empire Strikes Back that he “cannot interfere” with Luke’s fight with Vader. But in The Last Jedi, Yoda suddenly called down a lightning strike. What can Force ghosts do — and not do — in our world?

Abrams’ reply to that key question is pretty much what you’d expect.

“That’s probably best answered,” the director says, “by not answering it.”

[talesofafangirlwithadvr]

MAY PICKS!

WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER MONTH OF TV/MOVIE WATCHING! 

Does it feel like it was just April or that it can’t even be May and yet it is coming to an end? I get it. Quarantine is doing weird things to my head and I can’t believe how far in the year it’s been. Looking back on my picks for this month I noticed that I have seemed to escape the world through historical period shows or movies. But that isn’t the entire bulk of the month (just half of it). Without further ado, here we go!

As always..spoilers....

THE HALF OF IT

This Netflix original movie was an early watch for me during this month and it came at the right time. I was looking for a movie, rather than a TV show, and something that was contemporary and not overly serious (although, there are serious themes in this film). As it repeatedly says, “it’s not a romance” yet it has that YA/teen romance feel. (Yes, I used YA/teen in the same description.) I really loved the Elle Chu and Paul Munsky friendship. While watching the trailer, I could tell this film would be highlighting a healthy friendship as its focal point and how your other half doesn’t have to be a romantic soulmate. A lot of times, these kinds of stories can seem very repetitive, but with the new plot of Elle and Paul in love with the same girl we encounter a new kind of obstacle. I think the resolution was pretty solid for both plot lines and I liked the train scene at the end. Certain shots felt long at times. There were lots of pauses, which I didn’t 100% like. Also, the awkwardness could feel pretty cringey. Overall, it is definitely worth the watch. I liked it and would watch it again. Paul might be one of my heartthrobs of 2020. I’m always a sucker for a sweet jock with a heart of gold. 

THE OFFICE LADIES

Yes, I know I’m late to the show as this podcast started last year, but better late than never and what better time than quarantine. Plus, I don’t have to wait each week for a new episode (even though know I’m catching up, so eventually...) At first, I was worried when I would have time because of not spending as much time in the car for commuting, but I found it’s really soothing to listen to as I’m cleaning. It feels like I’m in the room with Angela and Jenna and we’re all BFFs. I love how they’re best friends in real life and how close they are. They give the trivia you really can only get from two people who were on the show. They also have several guest stars from actors on the show to writers, directors and producers. One of my most recent listens had Creed Bratton in the studio with them and they talked about the Halloween episode. It was great. Listening to their podcast is really making me want to rewatch the series for the 100th time. As an uber fan, I already get all of their references, but with the new Easter eggs I can’t wait to go back and see them.   

STAR WARS RISE OF SKYWALKER

Not just in honor of May the 4th, but to finish up the Star Wars watch through that I was taking with my sister. I hadn’t seen it yet and while not a die heart fan, I still wanted to see the conclusion. I liked the Force Awakens a lot, but felt eh about Last Jedi. In ways this one kind of felt like a stand alone. It had a different vibe compared to the previous two. After watching I heard there was a different director for all three movies, so that makes sense-I guess. (It’s weird they wouldn’t have kept at least one to do two of them.) It also had a kind of fan fiction feel. SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! Bringing Palpatine back reminded me of Lord Voldemort having a kid in Cursed Child. BACK FROM SPOILERS! I’m happy that Rey’s parentage/lineage was revealed because it was such a major point in this series. I loved the Rey/Finn/Poe relationship. It was great to see them in the same story line and reminded me of the original three: Luke/Han/Leia. Leia :( It was so sad, but I always knew it had to happen, due to Carrie Fischer. It didn’t make it any easier to watch. MORE SPOILERSSSSS! I knew Kylo would turn back. It was nice to see that his mom was able to spark that. I did like his fight scene. I just didn’t love the connection him and Rey have/had. LOVED the ending. I’m cool with her taking the Skywalker name and the suns shot with the force them at the end had me screaming. 

OPHELIA

From one Daisy Ridley film to another. This movie just recently got added to my list when I was channel surfing. I vaguely remembered it being advertised, but it felt like a while ago. I’m a sucker for a re-telling, so I was immediately intrigued to watch it. This film was adapted from a novel by the same name. It follows Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and gives her more of a story and character development. If you are familiar with the original, you know that Ophelia is only briefly mentioned and her character’s motives are really driven by her love for Hamlet. Even her famous death scene is very ambiguous. When this film begins, a voice-over narration by Ridley immediately brings us to her death scene and tells the audience “that there is more to the story than we think we know.” I really loved the twist and re-invention of this story through her point of view. I think Daisy Ridley was fantastic in the role. I haven’t seen her in a lot of other things, so it was great to see her here in a completely different role from Star Wars. The re-telling is very creative and very feminist. You get to see how Hamlet and Ophelia meet and then see him off to school. With this addition you can really get behind this relationship and see the mutual attraction and feelings between them. When relating back to the original, I like how they cut out scenes that Ophelia was not physically apart of and instead rely the events that happened. (Specifically with Polonius’ death.) I also enjoyed the new perspective of scenes. You really can tell that Ophelia is not mad, but it is the mask she must put on to survive. The ‘get thee to a nunnery’ scene takes on a whole different meaning now. There’s also a lot echoes to other Shakespearean plays and tropes which were fun to explore. Whether you’re a Shakespeare/Hamlet fan or not, I would definitely check this one out if you’re a fan of the time period, re-tellings or a strong female lead.   

MEDICI THE MAGNIFICENT SEASON 3

I literally just finished this show this afternoon and I couldn’t wait to write about it. (Sorry if this post is pretty long, but that just shows you that you need to watch it.) I was very excited for the third and final season of Medici because I enjoyed season 2, so much. While this one might have taken me a little longer to watch, it was still a good time and I’m sad it’s over. 

Watching this season I was super impressed by Daniel Sharman’s acting. He has great range as he goes from a young Lorenzo in season 2 to an adult and father and then an elderly man. I think he was convincing throughout each stage and I’m happy they kept the same actor. His make-up to help him age looked a lot more natural, compared to Richard Madden’s, in my opinion. I feel on shows like this it’s often hard seeing a jump in time (it helps with seeing the kids grow up), so when Lorenzo starts to get sick/age I at first, was like whoa, but then it was further explained (by inheriting his father’s illness, etc.) 

Compared to season 2, I definitely liked the previous more. I not only enjoyed watching the more idealistic Lorenzo, but also plot-wise. In season 2 the Pazzi are the main antagonist/objective. Here in season 3 there were several obstacles/antagonists: The Pope, Riario, and Savonarola. Every time we thought there was a moment of peace...nope. Now, I get this is based on history and we need drama so you can only change so much, but I missed the Medici being at the top and being respected. I also know we covered A LOT of time. (I guess that shows you how connected I felt with them and the show.) 

All of the history Easter Eggs were cool. Obviously, the Renaissance was extremely relevant, but it was cool seeing the big names like Botticelli (especially with his painting at the end, which I recognized), Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. I can’t get over how many of these famous painters were recognized by the Medici family. It just shows you how important and influential they were. Also, when Nico revealed his last name as Machiavelli. JAW DROP! This show has continually brought me back to researching (and mainly using Wikipedia). The writing at the end was accurate to what I found. Wish we had another season with the legacy to see it continue. I’m surprised I got teary eyed at the end. 

WORLD ON FIRE

It may be listed last once again, this month, but it is definitely not least. The show may have finished its season a few weeks ago, but I still have two episodes left on my DVR. The last one I watched was when they were in Dunkirk and that was an intense time. I knew it was going to be, but it still didn’t prepare me. In this episode, we see many characters FINALLY meet up and join each other’s plot lines. I think that was one of my favorite parts of the episode/series. Some already knew each other, while others were meeting for the first time. While I am excited to see how it all turns out, I’m also not ready to say good-bye. Right now, I saw a potential for a season 2, but not sure if that was a fan made article or not. I’m hoping all of my favorite characters survive and get what can be considered a happier ending than what they are currently experiencing. I also hope we don’t end on too much of a cliffhanger. Either way, I’m happy I checked this show out. 

RE-WATCHING

iZOMBIE

Currently I’m in the beginning of the second season. Sometime last month I felt the pull to start re-watching this show. It’s one that I have tried once or twice to watch again from the beginning, but now that it’s been finished for almost a year, it felt like time. It was a great decision, although right now there’s some character plots that are frustrating me and that I forgot about. But there’s some great brains that Liv has experienced and it was great seeing Lowell again (for as short-lived as it was). I’m excited to continue re-watching. 

I DIDN’T DO IT

The re-watch for I Didn’t Do It basically began when it hit Disney Plus a few months ago. I just recently made it to season 2, which I remember enjoying more than season 1. One reason for this was because they get rid of the flashback format for each episode. I’m really early on, like episode 4, so I still have many more to go. Once I finish it I don’t know if I’ll explore a new Disney Plus show or watch another that I’ve seen before. 

I also have a few things on DVR that I’m still finishing up. I haven’t watched the finale of Batwoman yet and I know it’s going to be weird now that Ruby Rose has left the show. I just finished the Flash and felt blah about the whole season, so I’m unsure if I’ll watch next season. But I am enjoying Stargirl. You can find my thoughts on the first episode here. I’m excited to see the rest of the season. 

[wits-writing]

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Movie Review SPOILERS)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, directed by J.J. Abrams with a screenplay by Abrams and Chris Terrio, has the most fun being a capital-A Adventure movie of any Star Wars movie in a while. The majority of the movie’s first two acts is comprised of a treasure hunt for a Sith artifact. The main trio, Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) are in a race against time before Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and the First Order launch their final strike, with the artifact being the one thing that could help the Resistance strike first. That part of the story, on a pure visuals and spectacle level, has some of the best action beats in all of Star Wars, including a speeder chase to rival the classic one from Return of the Jedi.

Enhanced by Dan Mindel’s cinematography and John Williams’s expectedly excellent score, if that quest was all there was to the movie, I’d be more than happy to call this a satisfying movie and conclusion to the story that preceded it in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. However, that’s not all there is to it and what else there is takes away from what does work in favor of a more convoluted narrative. One that I find more frustrating the more I’ve thought about it, even as I tried to enjoy what I could from it as it played out. To explain why, I’ll need to go into some spoilers, but I’ll save the big one for the end of the review.

[Full Review and SPOILERS Under the Cut]

The Rise of Skywalker had two possible directions for how it could close out the story that was set into motion back in 2015:

Focus on being a finale to the Sequel Trilogy itself

Focus on being a finale to “The Skywalker Saga” as a whole

While doing a bit of both was unavoidable in a situation like this, TROS defaults to the Door Number 2. It gets in the way of closing out the narrative of characters that aren’t as directly connected to the Jedi/Sith conflict that drives the “Skywalker” narrative. It’s a problem that goes back to this movie’s central hook, a move I’ve been skeptical of since the first trailer dropped; the return of Emperor Palpatine.

One smart thing about Sheevy-boy’s presence in this movie is that they don’t treat it like a twist. In fact, it’s the first thing seen in TROS’s title crawl. Everything that comes after that is where things start to come apart at the seams in irrevocable ways. He doesn’t have a real dynamic with any of the new characters, to the point they retcon in connections. McDiarmid doesn’t seem particularly awake, he’s been brought back to serve as a glorified lore-delivery service and to artificially escalate a conflict that didn’t need it. He shows up, gives Kylo Ren the “Join me and we can rule… etc.” spiel and exposits the previously mentioned retcons about how he’s been the true puppet master all along. If you’re framing this story as the end to the nine “Episode” movies, the Emperor who started this whole thing by pulling strings from the shadows coming back to reveal he was still doing that in these new movies makes a little sense. Taking this only as an extension of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, two films I feel work as wonderful companion pieces, it’s clumsy and reductive.

When it comes to the journeys of the characters that have been here for the previous movies, it’s a mixed bag. Poe’s been going through a sort of crisis of faith since the last time we saw him. Watching the First Order overtake the galaxy between movies, he’s lost his belief that the Resistance was ever worth being a part of if no one’s willing to stand up alongside them. He goes through this doubt as the story takes the audience into a look at his background. We meet an old friend of his, Zorii (Keri Russell), who resents him for ever joining the Resistance in the first place. Her scenes with Poe put his internal conflict of what he thinks versus what he wants to believe in place. The way this internal conflict gets to resolve makes Poe’s story feel the most complete of the main trio in this movie.

On the other side of the spectrum, Finn’s story feels emblematic of the movie’s problems, similarly split between two focuses. One of them is a barely present arc about his connection with Rey. There are multiple points in the movie where he says he “needs to tell her” something and it never resolves. Between those moments the only scenes between Rey and Finn are her rebuking his offers to talk about her problems. It’s a disappointing display for two characters whose friendship has been a motivating factor for both since The Force Awakens. The other side of Finn’s story comes late into TROS’s runtime, the discovery of other Storm Trooper deserters. Getting to not feel alone about what he did anymore would have been a great starting point for his story in this movie, but it’s introduced so late in the game that it feels tacked on to introduce the, admittedly cool, leader of the deserters, Jannah (Naomi Ackie). Nothing about Finn gets to coalesce by the end of this movie, he’s left with two loose threads and nothing tied up.

The good stuff from Poe and Finn’s arcs gets sidelined throughout the movie to focus on new wrinkles added to the story between Rey and Kylo Ren. A lot of my problems with Palpatine’s involvement in this plot most heavily effect this part of the story. After taking his place as a Supreme Leader, de facto head villain of this trilogy, by the end of the last movie, Kylo’s arc goes backwards and he’s someone else’s attack dog again. Promises from Palpatine to rule over a “Final Order” if he’s able to deliver Rey to the Emperor drive him. We replace a villain like Kylo, who’s been choosing the Dark every step of the way despite “the call to the Light”, with a mustache twirler. All of this to serve the start of a redemption for him and a retcon to Rey’s backstory that feels more in service of the “Skywalker Saga” than her personal narrative.

[Major SPOILER after this point]

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Rey begins the movie in the middle of Force training based on the books she found in The Last Jedi, frustrated with her inability to connect with the full legacy of the Jedi. It’s all framed under this idea that she’s somehow “afraid of who she is” and that’s before the full retcon… er, reveal.

[Final SPOILER warning, for real!]

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Rey is revealed to have been Palpatine’s granddaughter the entire time. This decision from Terrio, Abrams and everyone else credited with the story for this movie shifts the focus of her story. She’s no longer uncertain of her place yet ready to forge it for herself, but instead she gets to be conflicted about the potential for falling to the Dark being in her blood. I was willing to give this a chance, like everything in this movie, but there’s nothing more there beyond the same temptations to the Dark Side we’ve seen in the Star Wars movies before. The final fight between Rey and Palpatine works overtime to add dramatic heft and make it feel like a culmination of nine movies, while utterly failing to be the culmination of this trilogy or just The Rise of Skywalker.

I’m frustrated while writing this, because I can acknowledge strong points to The Rise of Skywalker, some scenes on their own are the best put together in the history of this series. But I keep coming back to how what got shoehorned in for this final entry in the Sequel Trilogy left me feeling empty.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

[starwarshyperdrive]

Predictions after seeing the D23 footage and reading too many stupid fan theories..again.

So now that the ‘special look’ has been out for a while and there are some alleged plot leaks on reddit, I think it’s time for to go over my predictions. Mostly to be able to say ‘I knew it’ and ‘I told you’ later on, because there is no chance in hell that Rey is just one many clones from Lukes hand or the emperor or any of the other wild theories that spread across the internet. And without pointing fingers or mentioning names, if you can’t even get minor (hint) details right and have a horrible track record, how do people still listen to you? Because you have a lot of subscribers on Youtube? Welcome to the Internet..

This might contain spoilers so be warned:

- Finn is not Landos son and Jannah is not his sister, because there are more than 3 black people in the galaxy you know. Star Wars might be about family, but not everyone is related. Palpatine was a bit ginger, that doesn’t make him Hux’ grandfather either.. Will we learn about Finns family. What for? What is there to gain story-wise. That’s something everyone coming upon with wild theories needs to ask themselves. 

- is Jannah (Naomi Ackie) Landos daugher? See above. Looking at the little evidence we have so far she has always been seen on a grassy planet, whereas Lando is known to have filmed Millennium Falcon and Pasaana scenes at a sound stage.  There are theories that the planets won’t be one biosphere, breaking with Star Wars tradition, so it’s still possible however unlikely that they are related. 

Just look at the pilots gloves and helmet. This isn’t the Millennium Falcon 

-  C-3POs red eyes. There are conflicting rumors about the cause, one being spiritual and the other being.. technical. I think it’s more likely that his eyes change color due to operational rather than ‘esoteric’ reasons. Also in relation to him being shown holding a bowcaster and Anthony Daniels telling Vanity Fair that ‘C-3PO does something in this movie that surprises everybody’.

- Red laser destroying snow planet. I assume that’s Kijimi where Zorri Bliss is located and where according to some plot leaks some altercation takes place. Looks like the First Order doesn’t fuck around.

- Rey training in the forest throwing her lightsaber is most likely connected to Leia standing in the same environment dropping some Jedi knowledge she got from Luke. I’m wondering what the red ribbon is about. I’m gonna get crazy and say it might be a blindfold. There is also a Jedi training droid present, so why wouldn’t she training ‘blind’ with it just like Luke did.  I’m gonna go out on a limb and propose something with a 5% likelihood of being true, but.. as is looks a bit as the red ribbon is also wrapped around the double bladed light saber ‘dark Rey’ is holding later on, so what if.. it’s something related to her parents and her ‘holding onto it’ is a dark side trait she needs to conquer. Star Wars is filled with symbolism and philosophical motifs like that. ‘Let go’ of your need to belong. Don’t dwell in the past. Even Maz told her ‘The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.’. Could be that or just a regular rag. Probably the latter, but it’s sure fun to theorize. #theorizeresponsibly

- Rey and Kylo fighting on what looks like the Death Star remains. I think a lot of people now tend to believe that JJ Abrams is bypassing The Last Jedi and continue his initial story, not ignoring the movie but positioning it as a detour for the characters to find themselves. And for once I agree what seems to be the consensus amongst Star Wars theorists. I think what we see here is not unlike the force flashes Rey had when she first touched the lightsaber. I can imagine them changing environment with every stroke of their lightsabers. That allows for a ‘best of Star Wars’ highlight reel, so desperately needed to reunite fans after the The Last Jedi backlash, that would combine all the previous movies. And that’s what they promised. 

- voiceover ‘your journey nears its end’. Is it just me or does it not sound like the emperor. I mean it sounds like Ian McDiarmid alright, but I’m missing the uber-evil timbre of his voice. Who is he talking to and will the emperor appear in this movie? First of all.. when we talk about tying together all the movies, we must not ignore the so called ‘tone poems’ used for The Phantom Menace. Based on that I’d say he isn't necessarily talking to anyone. Or even more recently, in The Force Awakens trailer they used Lukes ‘the force is strong in my family..’. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a distraction or to set the mood. My guess is that the emperors ‘spirit’ looms above everything and had the power to influence other people, just like depicted on the poster. There had been speculation about Snoke being some sort of Wizard of Oz early on. What if the wizard behind the wizard is actually worse. Wouldn’t that be wizard?

- Dark Rey. I will say one thing, I was happy to see that most fans immediately were like ‘dark side vision!’. If you read my earlier posts you will know how much I LOVE new lightsaber designs in every movie. Not. Especially when they are pointless. When I said I want a saber staff this is not what I mean. The only thing that makes me a bit skeptical is that Daisy Ridley said she was surprised that they’d show that scene in trailer. If it’s just a vision like the one Luke had, what’s the big deal? Then again, they also claimed that everyone will absolutely love the movie and especially the end. Enter wild fan theories from ‘she saw multiple reflections of herself in the cave. Clone Rey confirmed!!!11!!’ to ‘She must be Palpatines granddaughter’. I said it before and I’ll happily say it again. That would be SHIT STORYTELLING. After all the impatient smart-asses calling Rey a ‘Mary Sue’ not knowing anything about her origins, how would the public react to good old Palpatine having a granddaughter? That’s Robot Chicken level stupid. Now.. considering that an early draft of Revenge of the Sith had Palpatine telling Anakin that he ‘is his father’ for manipulating the midichlorians to create life, from a certain point of view that would make him Reys father IF he tried again. And it would fit much better into the established story structure of Star Wars. Every story that requires knowledge of the extended universe outside of movies or lengthy exposition will lead to casual fans and ordinary moviegoers to be like WTF?! It might be the last movie for a while but they still want people to go and not be appalled from early reviews about the movie being a convoluted clusterfuck. I also think the ‘clone’ idea is a cop out. Whenever you’re stuck because you can’t explain the origin of a character or don’t know how to deal with the death of a character - BAMM! Clone! Problem solved. That's just lazy. So to sum it up. Dark Rey? Vision of what she was supposed to be or should be because it backfired? ‘Darkness rises, and light to meet it. I warned my young apprentice that as he grew stronger, his equal in the light would rise.’ (Snoke)

- Sith Fleet / Sith Troopers ..those following the new canon even just a bit are already aware of the importance of the ‘Unknown Regions’. Its hard to miss references to it these days, from Galaxys Edge to Rebels. So how are they gonna explain this in the movie? From a storytelling point it makes sense. The empire was defeated and its remnants were hiding and regrouping. Hang on. This sounds like a job for OPENING CRAWL. OK, so there is a massive fleet. Maybe unrelated to the First Order, but looking pretty similar. Based on the state of the Resistance after the Last Jedi one might assume it’s not really needed. Does that mean we’re dealing with an internal struggle of sorts.There are persisting rumors of a high ranking First Order member leaking details to the Resistance, which doesn’t come as a surprise given Kylo Rens personality. Reminds be a bit of Operation Valkyrie. 

I’m delving deep into leaks and rumors but as things are now I have no idea how this pans out and what the relationship between Sith Trooper and First Order will be. Apparently you need a certain navigational device to be able to make it to the Unknown Regions, so my guess is Kylo is looking for more knowledge/power there just like Palpatine did, the rest is pure speculation so I will leave it for another time when more details surface. Same goes for stuff that’s not directly related to the ‘D23 Special View’ such as ‘who is Zorri Bliss?’.

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Movie Reviews: Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (Spoilers)

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review a few days after the movie first drops in the U.K, so if you haven’t yet seen the movie don’t read on.

Fan-Service:

Alright so before jumping into the character analysis, which I probably should just do because I have a lot to say, I want to quickly talk about a major problem with this movie, and yes I will be saying that a lot, and that is the fan-service.

There is a heeping load of fan-service moments and things just thrown in to either make fans nostalgic of what has come before or just to say they did it and I at large am pissed off because every bit of fan-service here I personally did not ask for and nothing I wanted as a fan was there.

For instance, Lando. I love Lando and will talk about him in his own section further down but I did not see the point of him in this movie. Billy Dee Williams still looks good in the role, but the man did nothing to contribute to the progression of the movie or the mission other than go off and get reinforcements which anyone else already in this trilogy could have done, like Maz Kanata...what did she contribute also?

Also Ewoks, I’m sorry I know the last part of this movie was on Endor because said system is around the place the Death Star fell and Palpatine still resides, but my freakin’ god seeing a split second shot of two Ewoks, who again I loved in Episode VI, but also to get Warwick Davies back to play Wicket (I think that’s the same one anyway)...what was the freakin’ point?

My final rant point is on the quite blatant fan service of LGBT representation. This particular topic is personal to me as a gay man and someone whose academic venture over the last three years has been about LGBT representation.

When you have quite a clear fanbase or sub fandom that are screaming for certain shipping couples, but then refuse to deliiver on the gay male ship in favour of the predictable hetero ship, to the point where this movie gives both Finn and Poe female love interests and makes Finn look slightly like a tool for having two other love interests but still wanting Rey...all of this I can forgive because it is kind of like the “Stucky” ship in the MCU.

However, to then, out of nowhere, have a lesbian kiss between two Resistance members at the end of the film during celebrations, one of whom was apparently the harbinger of doom because she delivered all the bad news and the other was a pilot, who I know was also Rosa Parks in Doctor Who so happy she has a role like this, but again it just felt forced, out of nowhere, with characters no one cares about and honestly I would have been happier seeing Poe and Finn kiss.

Characters:

Rey:

As I said in my non-spoiler review, Rey truly comes into her own as a Jedi in this movie. I do think The Last Jedi only really serviced her and moved her piece forward on the development chessboard.

However, while it is great to see Leia mentoring Rey at the start of the movie and doing a serviceable job, the fact Luke is still mentoring her from beyond the grave and his teachings are being upheld and honoured by Rey is really great to see.

This does not however justify the end of this movie, which is where we begin with Rey’s character.

One of the biggest mysteries of this trilogy has been discovering who Rey is and where she fits in with Star Wars lore. We know that Finn was a Stormtrooper and Poe fulfills that Han Solo role, but while Rey fills the Jedi quota for the trilogy, fans have long-suspected that she is somehow related to either Luke, Leia, Han or even Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I don’t think anyone was expecting her to actually be revealed as the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine...and to be honest I don’t think anyone actually wanted it.

It’s a losing battle comparing any movie to Avengers: Endgame, but during Avengers: Endgame when big character and plot moments hit, the audience erupted in either shock or cheers. I get the feeling that the reveal of Rey being a Palpatine was supposed to ignite that type of response. I had a moderately full audience and there was no reaction from them.

However, not only does this service Rey as a character for the second half of the movie because her character motivation is not only about battling her inner demons and heritage, but also discovering who she is in her own right...something she has been searching for since we first met the character on Jakku in The Force Awakens

This leads to the last scene of the movie which is a culmination of not just the last three movies but also her confrontation with Palpatine. On Tatooine just outside the Lars Homestead, Rey buries both Luke and Leia’s lightsabers. She then surprisingly pulls out her own lightsaber which happens to be yellow...or gold (if it’s meant to be grey or white the lighting did it no favours) and with her sidekick BB-8 heads off into the twin sunsets, but not before some random old woman asks who she is, she responds with “Rey” but when she asks “Rey who?” she looks to the left and sees the Force Ghosts of Luke and Leia and turns back to the woman answering with, “Rey Skywalker”.

This is what is meant by the title “The Rise of Skywalker” as the name will now live-on in Rey, who has adopted the name only. She is not actually a Skywalker and if you think about the fact Rey and Kylo kissed a few scenes prior to this, it is kind of disturbing that she sees both Luke as a father figure and Leia as a mother figure.

I am not happy with this development for two reasons 1) It’s a cheat, not only is it a cheat of promise in the title but it’s a cheat in practise because Rey wasn’t revealed to be a secret Skywalker she merely decided to use the name as a surname because I guess “Rey Palpatine” would not serve her well.

I also don’t like the idea of a surname being used as a mantle, we now have seen six “Skywalkers” either officially or unofficially so in the movie canon and out of the six, five either are or were Jedi or at least “ones with the force” because both Leia and Ben (Kylo Ren) have never been Jedi at least in the movies but while Ben was a Sith, Leia was an apprentice and both had access to the force.

Shmi I believe (Anakin’s mother) is the only named “Skywalker” to not have any attachment or affiliations with the force. Now I don’t know if Skywalker is her maiden name or married name but aside from her, as I said, everyone with the Skywalker bloodline has at least had a “force sense” so to make Rey the last of the Jedi, that we know of, and also now giving her the name of Skywalker just to honour Luke and Leia and not actually be related does seem a tad cheap to me.

It’s not like when Han and Leia named their son Ben after Ben Kenobi, Obi-Wan’s hermit name, because that was honouring a fallen friend. I get Rey officially has no living family, particularly after killing her grandfather, and choosing to adopt the Skywalker name is both a way for the name to live on in her and to honour both her mentors, but this is supposed to be the end of the Skywalker era and with Rey newly being a Skywalker at the end of the movie and also once again seemingly being on her own (with BB-8) on her adventures at the end it just seems like there is more to come from her and I really don’t think there should be.

I am not saying Daisy Ridley can never come back as Rey in any future Star Wars movies but I’m thinking more in a Harrison Ford/Billy Dee Williams way not a Mark Hamill/Carrie Fisher way, at least not for now.

Also, I mentioned in my non-spoiler that a lot was promised leading up to this movie and something the trailers teased heavily was “Dark Rey”. The two biggest theories surrounding this reveal of Rey as a Sith with collapsible double-edged red lightsaber were that 1) Rey would legitimately turn to the dark side and Ben Solo would be the one to bring her back to the light or that 2) The Dark Rey we saw would be some sort of vision, hallucination or dream akin to when Luke believed he was fighting Vader during his training with Yoda on Dagobah and in fact it was an illusion used as a metaphor for him fighting his inner darkness.

It turned out, of course, to be the latter theory but the movie at least had the reveal of Rey being a Palpatine to explain why the 30 second scene we see this vision in exists...no lie it’s about the same amount of time as Luke battled himself for in Episode V.

Basically when Rey was filled with rage over Kylo Ren while trying to save Chewie from being taken by the First/Final Order, she succumbed to her anger and rather than using the force in the traditional sense she was discovered to have the ability to produce force lightning, as only Sith Lords have been able to do.

While Dark Rey did look cool, I’m glad she wasn’t actually Rey and we actually had to spend a chunk of the movie with her as a Sith, particularly not with that lightsaber.

I’ll be talking about him again when I talk about Palpatine but the only master of the double-edged lightsaber for me is Darth Maul. That’s his thing in my opinion aside from his looks and he owns it.

On the positives of Rey, I do like the fact that they have set her up as the feminist hero in the same sense that Moana and Belle are feminist Disney princesses. I think obviously making Rey the focus of the trilogy meant that more young girls would look up to her as opposed to Leia or Padmé before her and so making her the strong and tenacious Jedi Knight that she is was one of the best things about this trilogy, when done right.

I did also like how she interacted with Finn and Poe, I’m not entirely sure why they have the type of banter they had due to the lack of the trio interacting in this trilogy but I enjoyed the sparring between Rey and Poe over the Falcon damage and BB-8 damage and even when it seemed Finn was about to profess his love for Rey before dying but then not dying and so going quiet about it and Rey effectively calling him out for it.

However, what did Rey wrong throughout this trilogy is just how easy everything seemed to come for her. As I said before she was often off on her own mission without Poe and Finn with only BB-8 and sometimes Chewie for company. The fact we never saw her properly train with a lightsaber or the force before being revealed as an expert with both still annoys me and here, the fact she goes to give up after Leia’s death but is stopped by Luke, a Force Ghost, who then reveals that she is in fact not stranded after burning her ship because Luke has his old X-Wing summoned from the depths of the sea was just stupid.

Also, where did Rey get her new lightsaber from? Because unless Leia left it for her or R2 created it for her we don’t know where it came from or why it is distinctly different to Luke and Leia’s.

Finn:

Finn I feel revealed himself as my favourite character of the new trilogy during this movie, meaning originating in this trilogy, because I haven’t really had one up until now due to the lack of any likeable development throughout.

However, John Boyega really does Finn justice here not only making the character more likeable but also giving him a potentially great character development arc that could see him come full circle from when we first met him during The Force Awakens.

The only problem is, from what we see, this story abruptly goes completely nowhere.

The development comes when the trio arrive on Kef Bir where the Death Star remains are and come across a tribe of freedom fighters led by Naomi Acke’s waste of a character Jannah.

It’s revealed that Jannah and her tribe were once in fact Stormtroopers but, like Finn, decided to rebel against their Sith overlords and vowed to aide the resistance to thwart them.

This could have been how Finn’s story ended had he made the decision to join the freedom fighters by the end of the movie, now granted with no Sith or First Order there’s no need for freedom fighters but just for Finn to have found his people and his place to belong would have been a fitting ending for him.

Also to any shippers out there hoping for a Finn/Poe romance, I think the writers made it quite clear in this movie that both guys have eyes for the ladies with Finn apparently interested in Rose, Rey and Jannah.

The Finn-Poe bromance is in full bloom here though, finally, and it is filled with both the banter that I so hate in laddish behaviour but still enjoy here and also the fact that they can both be real with each other even when it’s something the other may not want to hear.

I am annoyed they never really wrapped anything up for Finn, aside from him finding his tribe but not actually sticking with them. The movie kept throwing out curve balls to do with his story and character but never had them either caught or thrown back, so his story is still all over the place.

Would I want to see John Boyega return? I guess yes if he does return with Jannah and maybe even Lando, I have a theory on where that will go, because at least it is a newer direction for the character.

Kylo Ren:

I never liked Kylo Ren or Adam Driver, I have never really seen the appeal in either of them and believe Kylo is simply Darth Vader-lite. I’ve always hated that mask and even now it has notable cracks I still don’t like it. I just feel as though the mask was always Vader’s thing and Kylo’s is the fact that he has that lightsaber sword.

That being said, once again the most notable plot point in this movie is the relationship between Kylo and Rey. The chemistry is quite easily there, I do see these two as a couple in another reality and Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver do sell that rather well.

I did come to enjoy their shared force communication in this movie particularly as it was noted to have some interesting side-effects, most notably the ability to take something from the other’s location. I audibally gasped when Kylo snatched that necklace from Rey and that’s how he knew where she was, similarly how when Rey accidentally destroyed that plinth with Vader’s helmet on and it fell at Kylo’s feet he knew she was in his quarters.

My favourite example of this go was at the very end when Rey was facing off against Palpatine and Ben (Kylo reformed) was facing off against the Knights of Ren and Rey was able to psychically transport her lightsaber to him. I can’t remember if it was Luke or Leia’s she gave to him but I do hope it was Leia’s because him fighting with his mother’s lightsaber would have been so awesome.

Speaking of his reform, I found that to be the sloppiest moment in the movie. I really did not understand the quickness in which he went from wanting to turn Rey to the dark side to denouncing the Sith altogether. Now yes, your mother dying is going to be a turmoil for any individual and seeing the ghost of your father, because yes Han Solo returns in this movie, is going to throw you...but there was no real internal struggle and it just seemed again very rushed and the almost as if the writers were saying “Well the audience know this is where we were always going to take the character so there’s no need for the internal struggle to be shown”.

Also, I understand that he didn’t exactly have time for a costume change and merely took off his Kylo Ren armour, but then he merely looked like he was wearing pyjamas in that final battle. I wasn’t expecting an Elsa level transformation or anything but something a bit more...more.

Then when it did come to Ben joining Rey in battling Palpatine and Palpatine, quite strategically in my opinion, sent him flying down that pit, the fact that he anticlimactically climbed up the pit I originally thought was the movie saying “See a Skywalker rose” similarly to how The Dark Knight Rises had Batman climbing up that cliff-face. But no, apparently the “Rise of Skywalker” was nothing to do with an actual Skywalker.

The most confusing part of this movie though is what exactly happened at the very end of the movie when Ben died and Leia faded away at the same time. Leia’s “last great act” was to stop Ben from battling Rey, this seemingly caused her to die. However, when Ben died, Leia faded. So are we presuming that somehow Leia enthralled her son to be good? If so, was his redemption a fake? Also if so, did Rey technically kiss Leia not Ben?

Yes, this kiss was the biggest anti-climax in the entire trilogy. Everyone has been pushing for a “Reylo” coupling and it finally happens only for Ben to die immediately after, it was pure and simple fan service.

Poe Dameron:

I have never really cared for Poe, nothing particularly against him or Oscar Isaac but I just felt as if the character was always trying too hard to be Han Solo and failing every time.

This movie not only emphasised how much of a waste Poe had been, but also why you should always be careful what you wish for because it may happen and it may transpire that you are not as attuned to it as you thought you were.

I am talking about Poe now being the General of the Resistance after Leia’s death and effectively leading the Resistance to their doom. I remember when Han was made a general during Return of the Jedi and while he was also slightly incompetent he at least learned from mistakes whereas Poe...got so many people killed he should have been court-marshalled.

Every action he made in this movie seemed to be wrong and he was continuously pulled up on it by everyone, Finn, Rey, Chewie, even 3PO. I quite liked the concept of doing that lightspeed jumping that apparently you’re not supposed to do because it reminded me of Guardians 2, but they weren’t supposed to do it there either and that wasn’t at the consequence of damaging the Millennium Falcon!

Also, they made a blatant reference that Poe had a previous lover in Kari Mitchell’s character, but the only problem with this is we’ve never heard anything about Poe’s history prior to the events of this trilogy so we are supposed to care about it now? When the trilogy is about to end?

Had we heard from episode 1 about hints of Poe’s history and maybe a lost or abandoned lover then seeing their reunion here may have held some weight...but with what we got it didn’t work.

I don’t even know where we left Poe aside from obviously being a war hero for being the leader of the Resistance. But unlike Rey who has gone off to do her own thing and Finn who has the potential to be going off with Jannah and her tribe, Poe doesn’t really have a place.

Even BB-8, who seems to be Poe’s main concern throughout this movie, goes off with Rey, so where does that leave him?

General Leia:

As I said in my non-spoiler review, it is such a shame that this is the lasting impression fans will have of General Leia. I am not saying they should have altered Episode VIII to include Leia’s death but there was something so disjointed about her involvement in this movie.

That being said, I did enjoy some of her lines to Rey at the start of the movie and they did try very hard to make it flow with the story despite clearly being lines meant for another situation. I liked all her pearls of wisdom to her about trusting droids and being comfortable with who you are.

However, this movie’s greatest insult is definitely showing a flashback to Luke and Leia training as Luke was clearly Leia’s Jedi Master at some point after Episode VI.

Now yes, we were shown a de-aged Luke and Leia so they looked slightly like how they did during Episode VI, and it was dark enough a setting that they didn’t look as bad as Leia did at the end of Rogue One, but that one scene sparks a great controversy with this whole trilogy.

Why the heck haven’t we ever had a follow-up movie to Episode VI that simply focuses on Luke, Leia and Han? A movie that shows Leia being trained as a Jedi would have not only satisfied a lot of movie-centric fans curiosities but also would have set up this trilogy slightly better with maybe showing Leia pregnant with Ben and why Luke chose to isolate himself, why Leia and Han’s marriage broke down. Something just to give fans of the original trilogy closure and then introduce these new characters rather than having the original trilogy and new trilogy all try to co-exist and wrap up at the same time.

Also, I swear in this one scene we saw Luke’s lightsaber was green so why were both his and Leia’s lightsabers blue when Rey had them?

Then also with her actual death, as I said with Kylo felt rather anti-climactic and weird. I understand fully that Carrie Fisher’s passing was a complete shock for everyone and so they had to work with what they had, but not only does it simply feel like Leia getting into bed and then death, you have Maz expositioning it before it happens...is that why Maz is back? To be the exposition of the movie?

Again I love Lupita and understand why she was cast in Episode VII because she was the hot ticket to have back then, but she doesn’t do anything in these movies.

I did appreciate her line of “Goodbye princess”, that did spark some emotion that wasn’t annoyance or rage and was sadness for both Leia and Carrie Fisher so the movie got me there.

Lando Calrissian:

Billy Dee Williams as Lando was one of my favourite things about the original trilogy. I loved how similar he was to Han but while Harrison Ford had an almost smouldering rogue quality about him, Lando was suave and cool with this real jazzy vibe about him.

Even seeing him back it was a bright spot in this movie, however, I don’t think he was utilised as well as he could have been. After Leia died and Poe was gathering the Resistance for a mission debrief, Lando looked like that old war veteran that was simply there to lend advice, when in actuality he was the one with the most experience, who fought the Empire once before and won so why wasn’t he saying what was what?

Then at the very end when everyone is celebrating the victory, Lando randomly comes across Jannah who asks where he’s from and he responds “Gold System” while she responds with not knowing where she is from and so he says “Let’s find out”. I don’t know if they’re trying to go down the route that Lando is Jannah’s father maybe but they are definitely pushing for either a spin-off or some form of continuation to this particular story.

Now again, I liked Jannah here, and feel a movie focusing on Lando, Jannah and even Finn would work. But it was so randomly placed at the very end of the movie that it just seemed like the writers had no idea what to do with either character.

Also I did not like the fact Lando never had a scene with Leia in the movie, just simply one scene where the two reminisce about old times or talk about Han would have been good but instead we had another Star Wars alum return and not interact with anyone else from the alumni cast.

The Resistance:

I mentioned the Resistance a bit with most characters but here is my problem with them as an organization, they are not organised! The Resistance was formed in Episode IV to thwart the Empire, they destroyed two Death Stars and seemingly saw the death of the Emperor...when in actuality the Emperor survived and simply rebranded the Empire into the First Order so they failed on their main mission.

Then for the last three movies what exactly have they achieved? Because I cannot point out one successful thing this organisation has managed to achieve on their own. Rey was the one to kill the Emperor which saw the end of the First/Final Order, all the Resistance did was provide cannon fodder.

Also, when Lando finally arrived with the cavelry, I don’t know if they were trying to imply that some of the voices you heard were cameos from the shows but again, I don’t watch the shows. I know I saw both John Williams and Lin Minuel Miranda in cameo roles during the big air battle which I felt were both good and bad elements because they were so random but all in all, I have never been a fan of the Resistance.

Also Greg Grunberg, I like the actor, I liked him on Heroes, I know he is friends with JJ Abrams...but there is doing your friend a solid, and then there is making your movie more pointless then it needs to be. He was unnecessary and I’m glad he died.

Villains:

Okay so I have labelled this section “Villains” because I don’t think even they know what they’re calling themselves anymore. They were originally the First Order, then they changed their name to the Final Order, this got laughs from my audience because it was so stupid. Then Palpatine tried creating his new Empire which lasted all of 5 minutes...there was no order to this First, Final or Any Order.

As for Palpatine himself, his return was very abrupt as it was right at the start of the movie. I did enjoy the atmosphere they set up around the villain with the lightning and the desolate wasteland but what was with that fecking crane? I get he has no legs but the result was him looking more like a Dementor than the all-powerful formidable Emperor Palpatine.

Also, he mentioned how “The dark side of the force grants powers unthinkable”...which still doesn’t explain how he is still alive or reborn after being thrown down that tunnel in Episode VI.

Again, the reveal of him having Rey as a granddaughter came out of nowhere because we never knew Palpatine had a family, despite the fact Palpatine is one of few characters we have seen throughout the first two trilogies.

I did appreciate them establishing Ben and Rey’s bond as a type off life force energy which Palpatine utilised to rejuvenate himself. Although why he didn’t rejuvinate himself back to human form rather than the wrinkled old man is beyond me.

In regards to the First Order, the reveal that General Hux was in fact a spy giving secrets to the Resistance was again laughable, just him revealing “I’m the spy!” was enough to make me laugh.

Again Domnhall Gleeson is a good actor but this role has been so extreme and overdramatic that it has become a cartoon rather than a legitimate threat.

As for Richard E. Grant, people are really quick to insult Idris Elba for Cats but I think the actor who needs a word with his agent is Richard because, as much as he loves this franchise, he wasn’t quite enthralled in the world and rather seemingly playing the part of someone who is lucky enough to be on the movie.

My final point is on the fact that Palpatine claimed he is the culmination of all the Sith, meaning he has all the souls of all the past Sith in him. This is quite reminiscent to me of the Dark Swan arc in Once Upon a Time where Emma, and later Hook, became the Dark One and was able to summon all the past Dark Ones.

However, unlike Rey who was able to hear the voices of all the past Jedi, we only heard two past Sith Lords voices in Vader and Snoke. I know it wouldn’t be right to provide new voice clips for most of them because Christopher Lee, who portrayed Dooku, is sadly dead, but just to hear Darth Maul, Dooku and even General Grievous along with Vader and Snoke would have been a nice touch.

Meanwhile on the Jedi side you apparently had the voices of Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan both young and old, Mace Windu, Luke Skywalker, Yoda...and then you have a bunch of others who I don’t know because I don’t watch Clone Wars or Rebels so I didn’t recognise any of them.

Future:

Alright so where does the future of this franchise leave us...well we know that Disney+ is currently making waves with The Mandalorian and will soon to be hopefully making more waves with the Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi shows, however in terms of movies I am not sure where they go from here.

I do feel the most logical step is to focus on rebuilding during the hiatus and then coming back stronger.

Overall I rate the movie a 5/10, this movie was a complete hot mess. There were no solid great moments and aside from some great lightsaber battles between Reylo as well as some okay space battles towards the end of the movie, but the story was practically non-existence and there was no finality that the end of an era requires.

So that’s my spoiler review for Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Movie Reviews as well as other posts.

[sleemo]

Stardust

[ Translated from Spanish to English by @sleemo and @nightblossoms-and-spinebarrels ]

Two years after ‘The Force Awakens’, the Imperial March plays again. The galactic saga returns to the big screen with ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’, a movie that promises to be quite unique. Director Rian Johnson and his protagonists tell us what this new stellar adventure will have for us, at least as far as Kathleen Kennedy allows them.

— Cinemanía | December 2017 - Janire Zurbano

“I don’t want Disney princesses, I want Leia,” said the little Rey in costume who was standing in front of me in one of the booths for Funko Pop figures in D23. Now that the success of the saga is measured in mind-blowing figures, the Disney convention has become a coming and going of Gamoras, Méridas and Thors, carrying bags full of Funkos. 

“Before, the fans used to tell me how they met their wives because of Star Wars and now they show me the toys they’ve bought for their children,” Mark Hamill tells us. We met with the director and part of the cast of Star Wars: The Last Jedi after the hangover of D23. “I appreciate all this as I never would have been able to at 20. People ask me: ‘Doesn’t it bother you to be remembered for a single movie role?’ I never expected to be remembered for anything. And now someone has a doll with my face!”, adds the actor.

In all honesty, the merchandise for Star Wars: The Last Jedi has given us more clues about the future of the saga than any trailer or official photo of this new release. In February, a toy box made all the galactic alarms go off by showing an image of Rey with what looked like a padawan’s hairstyle. She just needed to say: “I am your Jedi apprentice”. “I cannot talk about that,” laughs Daisy Ridley.

Everything is kept under wraps in the mysterious universe commanded by Kathleen Kennedy, as the cast well knows. “At the beginning of rehearsals, we didn’t know the plot. I remember being with Mark, making conjectures all the time,” says Ridley. “We could not take the script outside Pinewood Studios,” recalls John Boyega. The newcomers also did not get any special treatment. “That room in Pinewood was like a cave,” says Kelly Marie Tran, to which Benicio del Toro adds with laughter: “I read the script with a timer.” It is not surprising that the Puerto Rican actor speaks cautiously about the film: “Star Wars was the first science fiction film that I felt was mine. I don’t want to be the first to ruin something for the fans.” Without Funkos to dissect and now that Kennedy can’t hear us, let's put them to the test.

New King of the Galaxy

It’s been two years since J. J. Abrams expanded the universe created by George Lucas, this time for Disney. The Force Awakens revived the essence of the original trilogy, far from that attempt to renew the prequels. Many specifically criticized that it was a copy of A New Hope. However, what struck Mark Hamill was something else: “Twice a week, for 50 weeks, I was tortured. They called it physical training. I even did a diet of ‘If it tastes good, don’t eat it’. I lost 20 kilos! Then I discovered that I only appeared for a few seconds at the end looking like a grumpy neighbor.”

Now, to Hamill's good fortune, Abrams has handed over the controls of the Millennium Falcon to Rian Johnson. “I remember asking J.J. if it felt like when, in a divorce, your children go to live with the new cool guy. He told me that it was fine with him but I know he thought: ‘I’m going to miss them,’” says Boyega. The creator of Lost will return to lead Episode IX, but before that Johnson will have to prove if The Last Jedi, which promises shocking revelations, is as “unique” as the cast assures. For now, it will be the longest film in the series, with two and a half hours. But will it be up to the much acclaimed The Empire Strikes Back?

“No comparisons,” Hamill says: “This movie is different from the others in Star Wars thanks to Rian. If it had not been for him, I would have dreaded coming back... I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of the new trilogy. I thought Harrison Ford wouldn’t come back, he was my savior. But then he accepted and I felt trapped. Since I was the only one who wasn’t here, I would’ve been the most hated.”

The Return of the Jedi

“The Last Jedi starts right where we left The Force Awakens,” Ridley tells us, something unheard of in the saga. We will reunite with Rey the scavenger delivering the lightsaber to Luke Skywalker in Ach-To, after having spent the previous film on his trail. “I don’t remember what Luke says when he takes the saber, but he should have said, ‘That came with one hand, did you bring it too?’, jokes Hamill. 

“Rey must accept that she has power and begin to show her potential,” explains Johnson. She and Darth Vader's son will be the focus of the film, although for now nobody dares to say whether the last Jedi master will train the young woman in the art of the Force. It is as if every time a journalist mentioned the word “Jedi”, a fairy died. “Jedi training? That remains to be seen,” says Ridley sounding mysterious, and adds: “In The Force Awakens, Rey was out of control, but now she will learn from Luke and from herself. She will experience growth.”

Her friend, John Boyega, insists on the novelty of the project: “Rian has done something very different. We wanted Finn to have an identity, like Han Solo or Leia. He supported Rey and the Resistance in Episode VII, but now he must decide if he is willing to fight a battle that is not his. His relationship with Rey and now with Rose Tico [Kelly Marie Tran] will push him into action.” The stormtrooper who deserted the First Order will thus find a new ally in this Resistance mechanic. According to Tran, she is “a nobody” that will star in “several fun moments” with Finn.

And what awaits us in the Dark Side? “Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is as important as Rey in this new film,” says Johnson. After killing dad Han Solo, the pupil of Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) will threaten the Galaxy again, with a new ship like that of his grandfather Anakin. Another who will be back, to Finn's disgrace, will be his former superior in the First Order, Captain Phasma. “I cannot confirm if her face will be seen, but we will learn more about her and she will leave an impression,” says Gwendoline Christie.

DJ, the hacker who Benicio del Toro gives life to, is one of the great mysteries of the film. Will he brandish a lightsaber? “No”, says Del Toro. And does he look like some other character in the saga? “He has elements of Boba Fett, maybe Jabba the Hutt,” the actor replies. According to Boyega (official spokesperson of the Galaxy), DJ resides in the casino planet of Canto Bight, where Finn and Rose Tico will go looking for him because “they need a codebreaker and he is the best”. 

“The interesting thing was being able to propose things to Rian and that he was open to my suggestions, even if they changed the story,” Del Toro assures us. Another fundamental issue for the Puerto Rican is the diversity that exists in the saga: “I saw that Oscar Isaac joined Episode VII, and that Diego Luna appeared in Rogue One, and I thought: ‘They already have two Latinos, I don’t think they need three’, but they called me. It's also great that there are women in leading roles.”

The Girls Are Warriors

And speaking of women... Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), princess-turned-general, marked a before and after between the heroines of the cinema of the 70s, a legacy that the saga has continued to reinforce. “They told me that a child wanted to run like Rey because, apparently, she is running the way she should,” Ridley recalls, adding: “The reaction of many parents made me realize what Rey means to them. They told me: ‘My daughter has something to wear now that isn’t sexualized.’” The actress is aware of how much Star Wars does for the empowerment of women, although she believes that “as long as we keep talking about it, there will be work to be done. If there was equality, we wouldn’t be repeating that Wonder Woman is starring and directed by women.”

For Gwendoline Christie, this "feminist” aspect of the saga is fundamental: “We live in a patriarchal society, so being able to play the leader of an army is a luxury. Kathleen Kennedy showed me the results that appear when you google ‘female heroines’: many women with barely any clothes.” 

The actress still remembers the impact Princess Leia had on her: “I was six years old and seeing that Leia was smart, funny and did not look like other female characters made me question how women are portrayed in movies. I hope Captain Phasma will also help change the concept of femininity.” In addition to Rey, Captain Phasma and Rose Tico, Episode VIII will feature Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern), Vice Admiral of the Resistance.

Goodbye Princess Goodbye

Among all the star warriors of Star Wars, General Leia continues to shine more than any other. Outside of the screens, with no Skywalker brawls involved, the cast makes for much closer family: “Mark is the father. Adam is the serious one, but he has a great sense of humor. Oscar is the charmer, John is the fun one, Carrie is the hilarious one, Benicio the cool, and I'm the one who always sings,” sums up Ridley. 

Therefore, the premiere of this film is a bittersweet experience after the death of Fisher in December 2017. For the British actress, “it is strange to be together again without her”. Little did Johnson imagine that he would direct Carrie Fisher’s last film: “We have a beautiful and very powerful performance from her. We have not changed it.”

The one who gets most excited when talking about the actress is her ‘brother’ Mark Hamill: “I keep missing her. I keep talking about her in the present. Selfishly, I’m so angry. She should be here to share Episode VIII and shoot Episode IX.” The Last Jedi is the farewell to an actress who, 40 years later, continues to make us want to be Leia princesses, not ‘Disney princesses’. The Galaxy will not shine the same without her.

[hyenabutter]

I don't think anybody really reads this thing much anymore if at all, and if they do I doubt they're all that fired up to hear my hot take on The Last Jedi, a movie that came out nearly five months ago--a fact that kind of amazes me: I thought this thing was at least like a year old--but Here We Go Anyway:

I'm gonna start by saying that between the ages of maybe five and ten Star Wars was with the possible exception of Indiana Jones my favorite thing in the world. But as often happens with things we love as children we get a little older and our tastes get a bit more refined and we move on. Sometimes they hang on, though, and you can revisit these things as adults and still see what we saw as children: more often, I think, what people proclaim as love is really just nostalgia. And nostalgia at its base is nothing more than a refusal to change or grow up, which doesn't really bode well for us as a culture when you look at the staggering amount of remakes and sequels that are churned out at a rate that I honestly find kind of frightening. I wonder if I saw them for the first time now I would find anything particularly charming or interesting about the original Star Wars trilogy. I kind of doubt it. 

I was born almost exactly between the releases of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which means I grew up in that brief period where Star Wars was sort of culturally dormant: there were no toys or movies or TV shows. They still made the books, I guess, and there were the Dark Horse comics, but those were fairly niche markets. The first new Star Wars stories that everyone was into were the Prequels, which came out when I was about eighteen and I had absolutely no interest in them. I eventually saw The Phantom Menace and was about as horrified as I could be, and passed on even bothering with the second installment. I got dragged to the third one, and while I admitted it was better than The Phantom Menace, that was an incredibly low hurdle to jump. I would see clips online of how Lucas was continually fucking with and ruining the older ones, so I was denied the comfort of trying to discover what I loved about the original trilogy, and I put Star Wars in the rearview.

But I saw the trailers for The Force Awakens, and I got that little tickle, the thing that whispered Maybe, and eventually I saw it, and even though it was basically a remake of A New Hope, I was okay with that. It didn't reignite the love I had for the series when I was a kid, but neither did it snuff it out forever. 

So I finally got around to The Last Jedi. 

God what a mess it is. It's also the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back...which technically is not that great an achievement, but so be it. I suppose I should say that I didn't actually sit and watch the thing with the kind of attention I probably should have: it was on while I was doing other things, which meant I was able to almost completely tune out the stuff I found boring and unnecesary and concentrate on its strengths. 

My basic criticism of the movie is that basically half of it is completely useless and uninteresting. The portions of the movie that deal with the Resistance are a convoluted mess and feel like they're only there to pad the story out, to give the characters something to do. It reminds me a lot of Return of the Jedi, where the part you care about is the confrontation between Luke and Vader, and then there's a whole other half of the movie where everybody is fucking around in the woods. The portions of the movie that feature Poe and Finn and Rose are where The Last Jedi fails, at least in terms of plot. 

Where it succeeds is the same place The Force Awakens succeeds: when it concentrates on Rey and Kylo Ren, both of whom are pretty easily the best characters in this new series as well as the best performances, courtesy of Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver. Both of them are incredibly conflicted characters, something that can be kind of a lame trope in the wrong hands, but Ridley and Driver make these conflicts seem real and not the childish machinations of a scriptwriter trying to inject some fake depth to what are basically cartoon characters.

But where The Last Jedi really gets it right--and wrong--is that the movie is itself a fairly damning criticism of Star Wars in general. I loved that it eliminated the Snoke character so easily, which no doubt enraged the legions of nerds who have spent the last two years coming up with elaborate theories about Who He Really Is. This goes double for the fact that Rey is revealed as being Just Some Person, not the child or relation of one of the previous films' stars, pounding another nail into what I'm sure were dozens of fan theories. The Last Jedi also does away with the whole light/dark binary the other movies in the series have labored under, suggesting a kind of philosophical nuance that has never been something Star Wars has engaged in: Kylo Ren asks Rey to join him in tearing down all that the previous movies have built, and to move forward, to change.

And this is where The Last Jedi gets it wrong: by wanting to burn it all and start over, to move past the constant warfare between the Empire/Order and Rebels/Resistance, a conflict that's been going on now for generations, Kylo Ren is still considered the villain. The story dances right up to the brink of something new and different, and interesting, then gets cold feet and backs away in favor of the same old comforts. Ren’s offer is refused, and Rey escapes back to the Resistance, and Ren's standoff with Luke Skywalker, where Skywalker tells him "the Rebellion is reborn today...the war has just begun..." feels like nothing so much as a promise to the fans that Star Wars will never end, that things will never change, that there will be so many new toys for you to buy, and you’ll never have to do anything as brave as grow up.

Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story hits theaters May 25th.

[uomo-accattivante]

On 21 August 2017, the Great American Eclipse caused a diagonal swathe of darkness to fall across the United States from Charleston, South Carolina on the East Coast to Lincoln City, Oregon on the West. In Manhattan, which was several hundred miles outside the path of totality, a gentle gloom fell over the city. Yet still office workers emptied out onto the pavements, wearing special paper glasses if they had been organised; holding up their phones and blinking nervously if they hadn’t. Despite promises that it was to be lit up for the occasion, there was no discernible twinkle from the Empire State Building; on Fifth Avenue, the darkened glass façade of Trump Tower grew a little dimmer. In Central Park Zoo, where children and tourists brandished pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, Betty, a grizzly bear, seized the opportunity to take an unscrutinised dip.

Across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Oscar Isaac, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-American actor and one of the profession’s most talented, dynamic and versatile recent prospects, was, like Betty, feeling too much in the sun. It was his day off from playing Hamlet in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater in Manhattan and he was at home on vocal rest. He kept a vague eye on the sky from the balcony of the one-bedroom apartment he shares — until their imminent move to a leafier part of Brooklyn — with his wife, the Danish documentary film-maker Elvira Lind, their Boston Terrier French Bulldog-cross Moby (also called a “Frenchton”, though not by him), and more recently, and to Moby’s initial consternation, their four-month-old son, Eugene.

Plus, he’s seen this kind of thing before. “I was in Guatemala in 1992 when there was a full solar eclipse,” he says the next day, sitting at a table in the restaurant of a fashionably austere hotel near his Williamsburg apartment, dressed in dark T-shirt and jeans and looking — amazingly, given his current theatrical and parental commitments — decidedly fresh. “The animals went crazy; across the whole city you could hear the dogs howling.” Isaac happened to be in Central America, he’ll mention later, because Hurricane Andrew had ripped the roof off the family home in Miami, Florida, while he and his mother, uncle, siblings and cousins huddled inside under couches and cushions. So yes, within the spectrum of Oscar Isaac’s experiences, the Great American Eclipse is no biggie.

Yet there is another upcoming celestial event that will have a reasonably significant impact on Isaac’s life. On 15 December, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released in cinemas, which, if you bought a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and helped it gross more than $2bn worldwide — you’ll know is a pretty big deal. You’ll also know that Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a hunky, wise-cracking X-wing fighter pilot for the Resistance who became one of the most popular characters of writer-director JJ Abram’s reboot of the franchise thanks to Isaac’s charismatic performance and deadpan delivery (see his “Who talks first?” exchange with Vader-lite baddie Kylo Ren: one of the film’s only comedic beats).

And if you did see Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’ll know that, due to some major father-son conflict, there’s now an opening for a loveable, rogueish, leather-jacket-wearing hero… “Heeeeeh!” says Isaac, Fonzie-style, when I say as much. “Well, there could be, but I think what [The Last Jedi director] Rian [Johnson] did was make it less about filling a slot and more about what the story needs. The fact is now that the Resistance has been whittled to just a handful of people, they’re running for their lives, and Leia is grooming me — him — to be a leader of the Resistance, as opposed to a dashing, rogue hero.”

While he says he has “not that much more, but a little more to do” in this film, he can at least be assured he survives it; he starts filming Episode IX early next year.

If Poe seems like one of the new Star Wars firmament now — alongside John Boyega’s Finn, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Poe’s spherical robot sidekick BB-8 — it’s only because Isaac willed it. Abrams had originally planned to kill Poe off, but when he met Isaac to discuss him taking the part, Isaac expressed some reservations. “I said that I wasn’t sure because I had already done that role in other movies where you kind of set it up for the main people and then you die spectacularly,” he remembers. “What’s funny is that [producer] Kathleen Kennedy was in the room and she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in Bourne!’” (Sure enough, in 2012’s Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, steps out of an Alaskan log cabin while Isaac’s character, Outcome Agent 3, stays inside; a few seconds later the cabin is obliterated by a missile fired from a passing drone.)

This ability to back himself — judiciously and, one can imagine after meeting him, with no small amount of steely charm — seems to have served Isaac well so far. It’s what also saw him through the casting process for his breakthrough role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2014 film Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk singer in Sixties New York, partly based on the memoir of nearly-was musician Dave Van Ronk. Isaac, an accomplished musician himself, got wind that the Coens were casting and pestered his agent and manager to send over a tape, eventually landing himself an audition.

“I knew it was based on Dave Van Ronk and I looked nothing like him,” says Isaac. “He was a 6ft 5in, 300lb Swede and I was coming in there like… ‘Oh man.’” But then he noticed that the casting execs had with them a picture of the singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. “Suddenly, I got some confidence because he’s small and dark so I said to the casting director, ‘Oh cool, is that a reference?’ And they were like, 'No, he just came in here and he killed it.’” Isaac throws his head back and laughs. “They literally said, 'He killed it.’ It was so good!”

In the end it was Isaac who killed it in Inside Llewyn Davis, with a performance that was funny, sad, cantankerous and moving. The film was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes, one of them for Isaac in the category of: “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — comedy or musical” (he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). No cigar that time, but in 2016 he won a Golden Globe for his turn as a doomed mayor in David Simon’s HBO drama, Show Me a Hero. This year, and with peculiar hillbilly affectation, Vanity Fair proclaimed Isaac “the best dang actor of his generation”. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that, some day very soon, Isaac may become the first Oscar since Hammerstein to win the award whose name he shares. Certainly, the stars seem ready to align.

Of course, life stories do not run as neatly as all that and Isaac’s could have gone quite differently. He was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala City, to which his father, Óscar, now a pulmonologist, had moved from Washington DC in order to attend medical school (having escaped to the States from Cuba just before the revolution) and where he met Isaac’s mother, Eugenia. Five months after Isaac was born, the family — also including an older sister, Nicole, and later joined by a younger brother, Michael — moved to America in order for Óscar Senior to complete his residencies: first to Baltimore, then New Orleans, eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six.

Miami didn’t sit entirely right with him. “The Latin culture is so strong which was really nice,” he says, “but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.” Still it was there, aged 11, that he took to the stage for the first time. The Christian middle school he attended put on performances in which the kids would mime to songs telling loosely biblical stories, including one in which Jesus and the Devil take part in a boxing match in heaven (note the word “loosely”). For that one, Isaac played the Devil. In another, he played Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave. “So yeah,” he laughs, “I’ve got the full range!’

He enjoyed the mixture of the attention and the “extreme nature of putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of people”, plus it gave him some release from stresses at home: his parents were separating and his mother became ill. His school failed to see these as sufficiently mitigating factors for Isaac’s subsequent wayward behaviour and, following an incident with a fire extinguisher, he was expelled. “It wasn’t that bad. They wanted me out of there. I was very happy to go.”

Following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Palm Beach, Florida, where he enrolled at a public high school. “It was glorious, I loved it,” says Isaac. “I loved it so much. I could walk to the beach every day, and go to this wild school where I became friends with so many different kinds of people. I met these guys who lived in the trailer parks in Boynton Beach and started a band, and my mom and my little brother would come and spy on me to see if I was doing drugs or anything, and I never was.”

Never?

“No, because I didn’t drink till I was, like, 24. Even though I stopped being religious, I liked the individuality of being the guy who didn’t do that stuff. Maybe it was the observer part of me… I liked being a little bit detached, and I wasn’t interested in doing something that was going to make me lose control.”

When he was 14, Isaac and his band-mates played at a talent show. They chose to perform 'Rape Me’ by Nirvana. “I remember singing to the parents, 'Rape meeee!’” Isaac laughs so hard he gives a little snort. “Yeah,” he says, composing himself again, “we didn’t win.” But something stuck and Isaac ended up being in a series of ska-punk outfits, first Paperface, then The Worms and later The Blinking Underdogs who, legend has it, would go on to support Green Day. “Supported… Ha! It was a festival…” says Isaac. “But hey, we played the same day, at the same festival, within a few hours of each other.” (On YouTube you can find a clip from 2001 of The Blinking Underdogs performing in a battle of the bands contest at somewhere called Spanky’s. Isaac is wearing a 'New York City’ T-shirt and brandishing a wine-coloured Flying V electric guitar.)

Still, Isaac’s path was uncertain. At one point he thought about joining the Marines. “The sax player in my band had grown up in a military family so we were like, 'Hey, let’s work out and get all ripped and be badasses!’” he says. “I was like, 'Yeah, I’ll do combat photography!’ My dad was really against it. He said, 'Clinton’s just going to make up a war for you guys to go to,’ so I had to have the recruiters come all the way down to Miami where my dad was living and they convinced him to let me join. I did the exam, I took the oath, but then we had gotten the money together to record an album with The Worms. I decided I’d join the Reserves instead. I said I wanted to do combat photography. They said, 'We don’t do that in the Reserves, but we can give you anti-tank?’ Ha! I was like, 'it’s a liiiiiittle different to what I was thinking…’”

Even when he started doing a few professional theatre gigs in Miami he was still toying with the idea of a music career, until one day, while in New York playing a young Fidel Castro in an off-Broadway production of Rogelio Martinez’s play, When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, he happened to pass by renowned performing arts school Juilliard. On a whim, he asked for an audition. He was told the deadline had passed. He insisted. They gave him a form. He filled it in and brought it back the next day. They post-dated it. He got in. And the rest is history. Only it wasn’t.

“In the second year they would do cuts,” Isaac says. “If you don’t do better they kick you out. All the acting teachers wanted me on probation, because they didn’t think I was trying hard enough.” Not for the first or last time, he held his ground. “It was just to spur me to do better I think, but I definitely argued.”

He stayed for the full course at Juilliard, though it was a challenge, not only because he’d relaxed his own non-drinking rule but also because he was maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Florida. “For me, the twenties were the more difficult part of life. Four years is just… masochistic. We were a particularly close group but still, it’s really intense.” (Among his fellow students at the time were the actress Jessica Chastain, with whom he starred in the 2014 mob drama A Most Violent Year, and Sam Gold, his director in Hamlet.) He says he broadly kept it together: “I was never a mess, I just had a lot of confusion.” He got himself an agent in the graduation scrum, and soon started picking up work: a Law & Order here, a Shakespeare in the Park there; even, in 2006, a biblical story to rival his early efforts, playing Joseph in The Nativity Story (the first film to hold its premiere at the Vatican, no less).

By the time he enrolled at Juilliard he had already dropped “Hernández” and started going by Oscar Isaac, his two first given names. And for good reason. “When I was in Miami, there were a couple of other Oscar Hernándezes I would see at auditions. All [casting directors] would see me for was 'the gangster’ or whatever, so I was like, 'Well, let me see if this helps.’ I remember there was a casting director down there because [Men in Black director] Barry Sonnenfeld was doing a movie; she said, 'Let’s bring in this Oscar Isaac,’ and he was like, 'No no no! I just want Cubans!’ I saw Barry Sonnenfeld a couple of years ago and I told him that story — 'I don’t want a Jew, I want a Cuban!’”

Perhaps it’s a sad indictment of the entertainment industry that a Latino actor can’t expect a fair run at parts without erasing some of the ethnic signifiers in his own name, but on a personal basis at least, Isaac’s diverse role roster speaks to the canniness of his decision. He has played an English king in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood(2010), a Russian security guard in Madonna’s Edward-and-Mrs-Simpson drama W.E. (2011), an Armenian medical student in Terry George’s The Promise (2017) and — yes, Barry — a small, dark American Jew channelling a large blond Swede.

But then, of course, there are roles he’s played where ethnicity was all but irrelevant and talent was everything. Carey Mulligan’s ex-con husband Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in 2011 (another contender for his “spectacular deaths” series); mysterious technocrat Nathan Bateman in the beautifully poised sci-fi Ex Machina (2014) written and directed by Alex Garland (with whom he has also shot Annihilation — dashing between different sound stages at Pinewood while shooting The Last Jedi — which is due out next year). Or this month’s Suburbicon, a neat black comedy directed by George Clooney from an ancient Coen brothers script, in which Isaac cameos as a claims investigator looking into some dodgy paperwork filed by Julianne Moore and Matt Damon, and lights up every one of his brief scenes.

Isaac is a very modern kind of actor: one who shows range and versatility without being bland; who is handsome with his dark, intense eyes, heavy brows and thick curls, but not so freakishly handsome that it is distracting; who shows a casual disregard for the significance of celebrity and keeps his family, including his father, who remarried and had another son and daughter, close. It’s a testament to his skill that when he takes on a character, be it English royal or Greenwich Village pauper, it feels like — with the possible exception of Ray LaMontagne — it could never have been anyone else.

Today, though, he’s a Danish prince. To say that Isaac’s turn in Hamlet has caused a frenzy in New York would be something of an understatement. Certainly, it’s a sell-out. The Sunday before we meet, Al Pacino had been in. So scarce are tickets that Isaac’s own publicist says she’s unlikely to be able to get me one, and as soon as our interview is over I hightail it to the Public Theater to queue up to be put on the waiting list for returns for tonight’s performance. (I am seventh in line, and in my shameless desperation I tell the woman in front of me that I’ve flown over from London just to interview Isaac in the hope that she might let me jump the queue. She ponders it for a nanosecond, before another woman behind me starts talking about how her day job involves painting pictures of chimpanzees, and I lose the crowd.)

Clearly, Hamlet is occupying a great deal of Isaac’s available brain space right now, and not just the fact that he’s had to memorise approximately 1,500 lines. “Even tonight it’s different, what the play means to me,” he says. “It’s almost like a religious text, because it has the ambiguity of the Bible where you can look at one line and it can mean so many different things depending on how you meditate on it. Even when I have a night where I feel not particularly connected emotionally, it can still teach me. I’ll say a line and I’ll say, 'Ah, that’s good advice, Shakespeare, thank you.’”

Hamlet resonates with Isaac for reasons that he would never have foreseen or have wished for. While playing a young man mourning the untimely death of his father, Isaac was himself a young man mourning the untimely death of his mother, who died in February after an illness. Doing the play became a way to process his loss.

“It’s almost like this is the only framework where you can give expression to such intense emotions. Otherwise anywhere else is pretty inappropriate, unless you’re just in a room screaming to yourself,” he says. “This play is a beautiful morality tale about how to get through grief; to experience it every night for the last four months has definitely been cathartic but also educational; it has given structure to something that felt so overwhelming.”

In March, a month after Eugenia died, Isaac and Lind married, and then in April Eugene, named in remembrance of his late grandmother, was born. I ask Isaac about the shift in perspective that happens when you become a parent; whether he felt his own focus switch from being a son to being a father.

“It happened in a very dramatic way,” he says. “In a matter of three months my mother passed and my son was born, so that transition was very alive, to the point where I was telling my mom, 'I think you’re going to see him on the way out, tell him to listen to me as much as he can…’” He gives another laugh, but flat this time. “It was really tough because for me she was the only true example of unconditional love. It’s painful to know that that won’t exist for me anymore, other than me giving it to him. So now this isn’t happening” — he raises his arms towards the ceiling, gesturing a flow coming down towards him — “but now it goes this way” — he brings his arms down, making the same gesture, but flowing from him to the floor.

Does performing Hamlet, however pertinent its themes, ever feel like a way of refracting his own experiences, rather than feeling them in their rawest form?

“Yeah it is,” he says, “I’m sure when it’s over I don’t know how those things will live.” He pauses. “I’m a little bit… I don’t know if 'concerned’ is the right word, but as there’s only two weeks left of doing it, I’m curious to see what’s on the other end, when there’s no place to put it all.”

It’s a thoughtful, honest answer; one that doesn’t shy away from the emotional complexities of what he’s experiencing and is still to face, but admits to his own ignorance of what comes next. Because, although Isaac is clearly dedicated to his current lot, he has also suffered enough slings and arrows to know where self-determination has its limits.

What he does know is happening on the other end of Hamlet is “disconnection”, also known as a holiday, and he plans to travel with Lind to Maine where her documentary, Bobbi Jene, is screening at a film festival. Then he will fly to Buenos Aires for a couple of months filming Operation Finale, a drama about the 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann which Isaac is producing and in which he also stars as Mossad agent Peter Malkin, with Eichmann played by Sir Ben Kingsley. At some point after that he will get sucked into the vortex of promotion for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, of which today’s interview is an early glimmer.

But before that, he will unlock the immaculate black bicycle that he had chained up outside the hotel and disappear back into Brooklyn. Later, he will take the subway to Manhattan an hour-and-a-half or so before curtain. To get himself ready, and if the mood takes him, he will listen to Venezuelan musician Arca’s self-titled album or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, light a candle, and look at a picture of his mother that he keeps in his dressing room.

Then, just before seven o'clock, he will make his way to the stage where, for the next four hours, he will make the packed house believe he is thinking Hamlet’s thoughts for the very first time, and strut around in his underpants feigning madness, and — for reasons that make a lot more sense if you’re there which, thanks to a last-minute phone-call from the office of someone whose name I never did catch, I was — stab a lasagna. And then at the end of Act V, when Hamlet lies dead, and as lightning staggers across the night sky outside the theatre, finally bringing the promised drama to the Manhattan skyline, the audience, as one, will rise.

Fashion by Allan Kennedy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on 15 December. The December issue of Esquire is out now.

###

[the-film-librarian]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi-Review

I’m planning to write up some essays about the film, but wanted to get my initial thoughts out before I see it for the third time, and really start to dive in.

WARNING: SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

First things first, I liked the film when I saw it the first time, but absolutely loved it the second time. When I was watching it the first time, I had this nagging feeling that it wasn’t Star Wars-y enough. There was so much humor; Luke was such a wise ass and didn’t seem to be as serious as I thought he should; the weird relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey; the seemingly meaningless casino subplot. Then I started thinking about why it was bothering me, and I think it’s because we, as fans, have this idea that Star Wars films must follow a certain structure, must conform to this idea of what we’re expecting to happen, and when it doesn’t, it’s uncomfortable. Hell, part of why I loved The Force Awakens, and why I watch it every time I feel down is because it conforms to the expectations we have for a Star Wars film and having it be similar in structure to A New Hope makes it feel so comfortable. It’s like the macaroni and cheese of Star Wars films--it makes us feel all warm and gives us the characters we love but also has that extra spice of something new. With The Last Jedi, it’s like I was expecting macaroni and cheese, but when I looked at my plate, the waiter brought me fettuccini alfredo instead--the ingredients are basically the same but it’s also much different in flavor and feeling; it tastes delicious, but it takes a bite or two, after accepting that it’s not what I expected, and then realizing how much I enjoy it.

So before seeing it the second time, I started picking apart the discomfort I had with it:

What does being Star Wars-y even mean?

Isn’t Luke still, at his core, a smart ass farm boy? Why is it so shocking that he’s still a smart ass?

The relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey--what is it that bothers me? It is because they’re male/female? Is it something else?

Am I mad about the casino subplot because they fail and if heroes are doing something, we expect them to succeed?

Once I started thinking about these things, and why I was uncomfortable, I realized that’s kind of the point. The trailer laid out the point for us: “This is not going to go the way that you think.”

Johnson’s visual style is so unique, which is part of why I love him as a director. I also love the subtle nods to his own work-the image of the light on the detonator immediately made me think of the “Fly” episode he directed of Breaking Bad

And the work of others including:

The tracking shot in the casino referencing Wings

The B/SF-17s being modeled after the B-17 and the opening sequence drawing from Twelve O’Clock High

Being on the run from the First Order who is tracking them through Light Speed, similar to the “33″ episode of Battlestar Galactica

The fight with Kylo Ren, Rey, and Snoke’s guard modeled after samurai movies like Three Outlaw Samurai

I know there are plenty more, and I’m planning to write one of my essays looking at the cinematic influences and their significance, but I wanted to add these here too.

I also have been thinking a lot about the subtle use of language to reveal the true insidiousness of Kylo Ren--primarily, utilizing the language of abusers, e.g. telling Rey she is nothing and worthless to everyone...except him. Kylo Ren and Rey’s have a lot of chemistry together (which, shout out to Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver for some really fantastic acting, especially considering that, for the majority of their scenes, they weren’t even in the same room), but, at it’s core, their relationship is abusive. It’s not a healthy relationship, and I wish I could impart to people how important it is to not idealize their relationship. I’m planning to hone in on this point in another essay as well, and delving into the idea of learned behaviors and how those who have been abused often abuse others in the same way, but there’s a lot to unpack there--more than I can get to here. There’s another a fantastic article out on Den of Geek about the impact of toxic masculinity on both the heroes and the villains of The Last Jedi, and I think it would be interesting to analyze the film within the framework of feminist film criticism. I would be remiss without also mentioning that @infinitybuttons pointed out to me that “A lot of the same ideas are at play in Looper, too. Possessive, selfish men making decisions that affect & hurt everyone around them until one has the courage to put someone else's needs ahead of his own,” which also ties into my next point...

As far as the casino scene, this is the thing I’ve heard the most complaints about, and it felt odd to me at first too, but the point, to me, is twofold. The first is that this is the first time our protagonists have truly failed, and seeing the “heroes” fail isn’t comfortable. I think a huge failing of a lot of movies is that we feel like no matter what, the heroes are going to succeed, which gets boring after a while. Having this plan where that doesn’t work out, where the heroes fail, is a good thing, not just for something different, but to have some sort of reality, and some sort of stakes. This subplot is also inherently political, and demonstrates something that we don’t see often in science fiction--that is, whenever there is war, there is someone profiting from that war, and that there are people who are exploited, regardless of who is in charge. One of the best reviews I’ve read so far was on /Film, and I love this quote:

Rian Johnson is unabashedly political and unafraid to slaughter the sacred cows. The First Order isn’t just a group of guys whose costumes provide cool cosplay opportunities – they are fascists, evil and cold and frightening. The Resistance isn’t a team of plucky heroes – they are a band of fighters who are specifically cast with diverse men and women to reflect the fears and frustrations of millennials who feel trapped and afraid in a world where resistance often feels futile (and who really wouldn’t mind tearing apart a casino city operated by the 1%). The Force isn’t just a cool excuse for heroes to lift rocks – it is something mystical and mysterious that cannot be easily explained and comprehended, something that even Luke Skywalker has a complex relationship with at this point.

I really loved that this movie wasn’t focused on the Skywalkers, at least in the traditional sense. It’s about the main characters overcoming their greatest weaknesses: Rey not letting herself be defined by her past and letting go; Finn no longer running away; Poe learning to become a leader instead of a hot-shot fly boy. While I think the repetition of “Destroy the past” is a little on the nose, I think balancing it with the “Nothing’s ever really gone” is at the core of the movie. Letting go of the past is necessary for growth--you shouldn’t cling to it so tightly but letting go doesn’t mean it’s completely pointless. The old Star Wars films that we all love aren’t going anywhere--but in order to grow as a franchise, to continue, it has to grow away from the past, to focus on more than the Jedi lineage, to recognize that The Force isn’t something the Jedi and Sith have exclusive access to, but is something that binds together this universe, and that encompasses the galaxy.

And that’s really the point to me--that loving Star Wars, being a fan of Star Wars, isn’t something that only “purists” have a right to. Star Wars is for everyone, and I believe The Last Jedi seeks to break down a lot the gatekeeping that goes on within the Star Wars fandom, and, really, geek culture in general. To me, Star Wars isn’t about the Skywalkers, and never has been. It’s about the choices we make.  

The Force doesn’t belong to a certain bloodline. It belongs to all of us--whether we’re a farm boy on Tattooine, the child of drunks who sold us for beer money, or an enslaved stable boy hearing the tale of how Luke Skywalker single-handedly stared down the First Order.

[reelmatt]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Film #578

THE PLOT: Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, who is unsettled by the strength of her powers. Meanwhile, the Resistance prepares to do battle with the First Order.

THE REVIEW: First things first, while I will try my best to avoid any semblance of spoilers in this review, I can’t promise that what I write will not spoil you in any way. As with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I instituted Full Media Blackout for Star Wars: The Last Jedi once again to much success. Before seeing the film, I had only read news articles through mid-to-late 2016 and the first teaser trailer. Other than that, complete nothingness. Having now come out of the film, I must say I’m happy I continue the FMB practice for these films — while I can’t know for sure, I fully believe the experience was for the better.

My instinct would be to wait to write this review after I let the film sink in a bit and for a second viewing to take place. However, I do feel there’s value in writing initial reactions as they can serve insight later on, as this blog is intended to do. Right off the bat, my initial reaction was, “Wow.” Just wow. I’m speechless in the sense that this was a fantastic film but also in the sense that I’m not entirely sure how to process what I saw. Objectively, I know that this film just flew by. Despite the longest runtime in franchise history, clocking in at 152 minutes, it felt like I left the theater mere minutes after starting. It really felt like a thrill ride, one that despite it’s fast and slow moments never felt like you needed a minute. A lot happens, and most of what happens can be quite unexpected, but I constantly was processing while moving on to the next thing.

As I’ve said before, the original Star Wars is my favorite film of the trilogy and that has not changed. It’s equal parts adventure, tragedy, underdog story, and a tale of hope. It’s a story where it’s not really open to interpretation which side you’re supposed to root for. The Jedi and The Force are good while Darth Vader and the Empire is bad. Not a lot of nuance but an entirely new world that has endless paths and possibilities for one to explore.

The Last Jedi is not like that. In fact, it might be one of the least Star Wars-y films ever. The Last Jedi is darker. It’s more nuanced. It throws out old conventions. This is not the Star Wars you are used to.

And yet, it also has the heart and soul of the story in its DNA. You love it just as much as the original trilogy because it still evokes the same feelings despite being different. The sides are different, Jedi and Sith aren’t meaningless, but they no longer are the same things they once were. Good vs. evil takes a back seat to the characters. Rey (Daisy Ridley) vs. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Finn (John Boyega) rebelling against his entire past, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) being forced to deal with how exactly to make an impact in the fight against the First Order.

I thought coming out of The Force Awakens that Star Wars was back — a whole host of new questions, characters, and alliances friends could debate. Who are Rey’s parents, how is the Resistance different from the Rebel Alliance, and where in the world did Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) come from? The Last Jedi is very much the continuation of the mystery and the unknown. But director Rian Johnson is no J. J. Abrams. It’s not a direct continuation per se… No, it veers hard left and rolls the hard six. Again, it’s one of those things where I’m not sure if it is good or bad, if I like it or not. What I do know is that The Last Jedi is familiar but different; something I came out of the theater with an extremely positive reaction to knowing that I have a lot of thinking to do.

In a way, having instituted full media blackout makes processing my thoughts and writing this review much more difficult. I’m not exactly sure what to think rather than already having a basis for how to classify everything I just saw. For me it is a stark contrast to the rest of the media I consume and the age of streaming media where you can binge to your hearts desire. My media habits have changed considerably and it makes me long for “the good ‘ol days” when I did these reviews regularly. Everything really blurs together now and I don’t remember standout shows or films as readily as I used to.

THE TAKEAWAY: The Last Jedi does stand out though. While my reasons may have been semi-incoherent and not well-formed, I know this is an impactful film. For a lifetime Star Wars fan, this both reinforces the reasons I love this franchise so much while also changing core characteristics. The DNA is the same but it has evolved. Our old creature comforts are now gone and we’re left fending for ourselves in a whole new galaxy. Just as The Force Awakens had many callbacks to A New Hope, so does The Last Jedi to The Empire Strikes Back. It is nowhere near as note-for-note as The Force Awakens was, but some major similarities exist.

However, we know where things went from The Empire Strikes Back — Return of the Jedi felt very much in line with the original trilogy. Coming out of The Last Jedi though I’m less sure of where this franchise is going. J. J. Abrams, who is returning to direct Episode IX, may deliver a return to form; another nostalgia trip that tugs at our heartstrings and memories. But I for one would like to see Abrams continue the path Rian Johnson started us down. It is unknown and uncertain, but that is okay.

It is incredibly hard to rate a film like The Last Jedi so soon after watching it, because it just feels like a monumental film. Looking back at my review for The Force Awakens, I gave that 5 out of 5 stars and said, “I won’t go so far as to say it’s my new favorite (yet, at least), in large part due to the fact that it still has that new car smell to it… [but it] sets the baseline for this new trilogy and sets it pretty high, yet not insurmountable.” That seems a bit silly in retrospect now, and for similar reasons I’m only giving The Last Jedi four stars now. There are a lot of variables at play now that weren’t before. A lot of questions were raised in The Force Awakens but The Last Jedi throws the entire playbook out the window. In a similar vein, I also said, “I’m eagerly awaiting to see how things play out” with regards to the ending of The Force Awakens, which seems like child’s play now. We had a sense of the size of the ballpark previously, but in Episode IX all bets will be off. Full media blackout is going to reach an extreme difficulty level for that one, and I want to be as surprised as possible going into the finale.

THE RATING: 4 out of 5

[generouslynoisytragedy]

4, 12 & 28 for the movie thing?

ye! thank you for the ask!

4. Favorite movie soundtrack.

movie soundtracks that tend to come to mind are the ones that include FOB in them so... Big Hero 6 and Ghostbusters (2016)? I also liked some of the tunes in A Cure for Wellness, Us, and the horror cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit from The Gallows trailer, tho I never saw the movie proper.

12. Top 5 favorite female performances.

-Danai Gurira as Okoye in Black Panther. her expression work was great, especially during humorous moments. she also nailed her character’s complex feelings about the situation she found herself in and the way the crossroads and moral ambiguity of it left her floundering and hurt. -Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide/Red in Us. it’s been said that it’s amazing that she can act two distinct characters in the same movie and have them be totally distinct, and it is. Adelaide and Red have their own personalities but are also intrinsically entwined. their final fight, especially the split second where she asks “do you remember?” and responds “yes,” is incredible. =/// so she’s not only both characters but makes their time onscreen believable and heartwrenching. -Daisy Ridley as Rey in The Force Awakens (and nothing else from the trilogy). the most striking parts of her character, I think, were the opening scenes where she’s just a kid trying to survive on this inhospitable planet, eating her inflatable nutribread and fantasizing about a different life. I wish her character hadn’t been flushed down the toilet. -Viola Davis in Widows. her ability to play a complex character who can both be incredibly sympathetic and heartbroken and kind of a jerk was amazing. she had great synergy with Elizabeth Debicki, who played Alice. -Mink Stole as Peggy Gravel in Desperate Living. weird one, sure, but her ability to act totally batshit had me howling with laughter. Lu and I can quote a lot of her introductory scene by memory.

do TV shows count in this???? probably not but honorable mentions to Kristen Ritter as Jessica Jones, Simone Missick as Misty Knight in Luke Cage, Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing in Iron Fist (i.e. the highlight of the show which was otherwise a bit of a trashfire lmfao), and Amber Rose Revah in The Punisher. there’s just a lotta cool ladies in Marvel TV.

28. Best remake.

Punisher: War Zone (2008) and I will absolutely die on this hill.

anyway this answer turned into a HUGE ramble I’m so sorry.

[son-of-alderaan]

Jedi Confidential: Inside the Dark New 'Star Wars' Movie

The cast and director of 'The Last Jedi' on the story's secrets, a disaffected Skywalker and a death in the family

A long time ago, a grade-schooler got his hands on a spaceship. He followed the assembly instructions as best he could, snapping on the cannons, the landing gear, the tiny interstellar-chess table. Soon enough, Rian Johnson was holding his very own Millennium Falcon. "The first thing I did," he recalls, "was throw it across the room, to see how it would look flying." He grins. "And it broke." 

Johnson grew up, went to film school, made some good stuff, including the entertainingly twisted 2012 sci-fi drama Looper. He's nearly 44 now, though his cherub cheeks and gentle manner make it easy to picture the kid he was (too easy, maybe – he's trying to grow back a goatee he shaved); even his neatly pressed short-sleeve button-down has a picture-day feel. In late October, he's sitting in an office suite inside Disney's Burbank studios that he's called home for many months, where a whiteboard declares, "We're working on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (in case you forgot)." Johnson is the film's writer-director, which means he ended up with the world's finest collection of replacement toys, including a life-size Falcon set that nearly brought him to tears when he stepped onto it. He treated it all with what sounds like an intriguing mix of reverence and mischief – cast members keep saying nothing was quite what they expected. "I shook up the box a little bit," he says, with that same grin. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, everything is broken. In the months since the franchise stirred back to life in 2015's The Force Awakens, it has felt rather like some incautious child grabbed civilization itself and threw it across the room – and, midflight, many of us realized we were the evil Empire all along, complete with a new ruler that even latter-day George Lucas at his most CGI-addled would reject as too grotesque and implausible a character.  Weirdly, the saga saw it all coming – or maybe it's not so weird when you consider the Vietnam War commentary embedded in Lucas' original trilogy, or the warnings about democracy's fragility in his prequels. In the J.J. Abrams-directed The Force Awakens, a revanchist movement calling itself the First Order assembles in Triumph of the Will-style marches, showing the shocking strength of an ideology that was supposed to have been thoroughly defeated long ago. What's left of the government is collapsing and feckless, so the only hope in sight is a band of good guys known as the Resistance. Familiar, this all sounds.

"It's somewhat a reflection of society," acknowledges the saga's new star, Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, and who has gone from unknown London actress to full-blown movie star nearly as fast as her character went from desert scavenger to budding Jedi. "But also it is escapism, because there are creatures and there are people running around with fucking lasers and shit. So, I think, a wonderful mix of both."

And the worse the world gets, the more we need that far-off galaxy, says Gwendoline Christie, who plays stormtrooper honcho Captain Phasma (as well as Game of Thrones' Brienne of Tarth): "During testing times, there's nothing wrong with being transported by art. I think we all need it. Many of us are united in our love for this one thing." The Last Jedi, due December 15th, is the second episode of the current trilogy, and advance word has suggested that, as in the original middle film, The Empire Strikes Back, things get darker this time. But Johnson pushes back on that, though he does admit some influence from the morally ambiguous 2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica (which is funny, because Lucas considered the Seventies TV show a rip-off and urged a lawsuit – long since settled – against it). "That's one thing I hope people will be surprised about with the movie," Johnson says. "I think it's very funny. The trailers have been kind of dark – the movie has that, but I also made a real conscious effort for it to be a riot. I want it to have all the things tonally that I associate with Star Wars, which is not just the Wagner of it. It's also the Flash Gordon."

As of late October, almost no one has seen it yet, but Johnson seems eerily free of apprehension about its prospects. He exuded a similar calm on set, according to Adam Driver, who plays Han and Leia's Darth Vader-worshipping prodigal son, Kylo Ren. "If I had that job, I would be stressed out," he says. "To pick up where someone left off and carry it forward, but also introduce a vocabulary that hasn't been seen in a Star Wars movie before, is a tall order and really hard to get right. He's incredibly smart and doesn't feel the need to let everyone know it." ("It felt like we were playing the whole time," says Kelly Marie Tran, cast as the biggest new character, Rose Tico.) A few weeks after we talk, Lucasfilm announces that Johnson signed on to make three more Star Warsfilms in the coming decade, the first that step outside of the prevailing Skywalker saga, indicating that Disney and Lucasfilm matriarch Kathleen Kennedy are more than delighted with Last Jedi. And Kennedy's not easily delighted, having recently replaced the directors of a Han Solo spinoff midshoot and removed original Episode 9 director Colin Trevorrow in favor of Abrams' return. 

The Force Awakens' biggest triumph was the introduction of new characters worth caring about, led by Rey and Kylo Ren, plus the likes of John Boyega's stormtrooper-defector Finn, Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron and more. Kylo Ren (born Ben Solo) lightsaber-shanked Harrison Ford's Han, depriving Johnson of one coveted action figure – but the film left us with Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, now the general who leads the Resistance, and the climactic reveal of Mark Hamill's now-grizzled Luke Skywalker.

The Last Jedi will be Fisher's last Star Wars movie. In the waning days of the cruel year of 2016, she went into cardiac arrest on an airplane, dying four days later. Less than a month afterward, 500,000 or so people assembled in Washington, D.C., for that city's Women's March, and Leia was everywhere, in posters bearing her doughnut-haired image circa 1977, with accompanying slogans ("A Woman's Place Is in the Resistance" was, perhaps, the best).

Johnson had grown close with Fisher, and is glad to hear that I visited her psychedelically decorated Beverly Hills house a couple of years back, where she did almost an entire hilarious interview prone in bed. Afterward, she cheerily cracked jokes about drugs and mental illness in front of a visiting Disney publicist. "You got to experience a little bit of that magical sphere that she created," says Johnson, who went over the script with her in that same bedroom. "I'm happy I got to poke my head into that, briefly, and know her even a little bit."

He left her part in the film untouched. "We didn't end up changing a thing," says Johnson. "Luckily, we had a totally complete performance from her." So it is now Abrams who has to figure out how to grapple with Fisher and Leia's sudden absence. (He is characteristically gnomic on the matter: "It's a sad reality," he says. "In terms of going forward ... time will tell what ends up getting done.")

Overall, Johnson enjoyed what seems like an almost unfathomable level of autonomy in shaping The Last Jedi's story. He says no one dictated a single plot point, that he simply decided what happens next. And he's baffled by fans who are concerned by the idea that they're "making it up as we go along": "The truth is, stories are made up! Whether somebody made this whole thing up 10 years ago and put it on a whiteboard and we all have to stick to that, or whether we're organically finding it as we move forward, it doesn't mean that any less thought is being put into it."

Mark Hamill's single scene in The Force Awakens lasts all of one minute, and he doesn't say a thing. But it's an indelible piece of screen acting with real gravitas, from an underrated performer who had become better known for Broadway and voice-over work – he's been the definitive animated Joker since the early Nineties. ("With voice-over," Hamill says, "I thought, 'This is great! I can let myself go to hell physically! I don't have to memorize lines!'") As Rey approaches him on the lonely mountaintop where's he's presumably spent years studying the Jedi equivalent of the Talmud, Luke Skywalker's bearded face cycles through grief, terror and longing.

"I didn't look at that as 'Oh, this is going to be my big chance,'" says Hamill, who has just shown up at Johnson's offices and plopped down next to him, carrying a large thermos of coffee in the right hand that Darth Vader once chopped off. He has a trimmed-down version of his elder-Jedi beard, which he's grown to appreciate: "I shaved, and I thought, 'You know what, the beard does cover up the jowl.'"

Hamill is a charming, jittery chatterbox – turns out that even at his youngest and prettiest, he was a geek trapped in the body of a golden boy. He is excitable and wild-eyed enough to give the vague sense that, like Luke, he actually might have spent a few solitary years on a distant planet, and is still readjusting to Earth life, or at least movie stardom.

He admits to having had "frustrations over being over-associated" with Star Wars over the years – his Skywalking cost him a chance at even auditioning to reprise his stage role as Mozart in the film of Amadeus – "but nothing that caused me any deep anguish." He still spent the decades since Return of the Jediacting and raising a family with Marilou, his wife of 39 years. And as for his current return to the role of Luke? "It's a culmination of my career," he says. "If I focused on how enormous it really is, I don't think I could function. I told Rian that. I said, as absurd as it sounds, 'I'm going to have to pretend this is an art-house film that no one is going to see.' "

For his Force Awakens scene, he says, "I didn't know – and I don't think J.J. really knew – specifically what had happened in those 30 years. Honestly, what I did was try and give J.J. a range of options. Neutral, suspicion, doubt … taking advantage of the fact that it's all thoughts. I love watching silent films. Think of how effective they could be without dialogue."

Abrams had some trepidation over the idea of handing Hamill a script with such a tiny role. "The last thing I wanted to do was insult a childhood hero," he says, "but I also knew it was potentially one of the great drumrolls of all time." In fact, Hamill's first reaction was, "What a rip-off, I don't get to run around the Death Star bumping heads with Carrie and Harrison anymore!"

But he came to agree with Abrams, especially after he counted the number of times Luke was mentioned in the screenplay – he thinks it was more than 50: "I don't want to say, 'That's the greatest entrance in cinematic history' . . . but certainly the greatest entrance of my career."

Johnson turns to Hamill. "Did I ever tell you that early on when I was trying to figure out the story for this," he says, "I had a brief idea I was chasing where I was like, 'What if Luke is blind? What if he's, like, the blind samurai?' But we didn't do it. You're welcome. Didn't stick." (He adds that this was before a blind Force-using character showed up in 2016's side film Rogue One.)

Hamill laughs, briefly contemplating how tough that twist would've been: "Luke, not too close to the cliff!" He had a hard enough time with the storyline Johnson actually created for Luke, who is now what the actor calls a "disillusioned" Jedi. "This is not a joyful story to tell," Hamill says, "my portion of it." Johnson confirms that Hamill flat-out told him at the start that he disagreed with the direction Luke's character was taking. "We then started a conversation," says Johnson. "We went back and forth, and after having to explain my version, I adjusted it. And I had to justify it to myself, and that ended up being incredibly useful. I felt very close to Mark by the end. Those early days of butting heads and then coming together, that process always brings you closer."

Hamill pushed himself to imagine how Luke could've gotten to his place of alienation. A rock fan who's buddies with the Kinks' Dave Davies, Hamill started thinking about shattered hippie dreams as he watched a Beatles documentary. "I was hearing Ringo talk about 'Well, in those days, it was peace and love.' And how it was a movement that largely didn't work. I thought about that. Back in the day, I thought, by the time we get into power, there will be no more wars. Pot will be legal." He smiles at that part. "I believed all that. I had to use that feeling of failure to relate to it." (We do already know that Luke was training a bunch of Jedi, and Kylo Ren turned on him.) Hamill's grief over the loss of Fisher is still fresh, especially since the two of them got to renew their bond, and their space-sibling squabbling, after fallow decades that had given them far fewer reasons to get together. "There was now a comfort level that she had with me," he says, "that I wasn't out to get anything or trying to hustle her in any way. I was the same person that I was when she knew me. ... I was sort of the square, stick-in-the-mud brother, and she was the wild, madcap Auntie Mame." Promoting the movie is bringing it all back for him. "I just can't stand it," he says. "She's wonderful in the movie. But it adds a layer of melancholy we don't deserve. I'd love the emotions to come from the story, not from real life."

I mention how hard Luke seems to have had it: never meeting his mom; finding the burnt corpses of the aunt and uncle who raised him; those well-known daddy issues; the later years of isolation. "It's the life of a hero, man," says Johnson. "That's what you've gotta do to be a hero. You've gotta watch people that you love burn to death!" Hamill notes that reality is not so great either. "Sometimes," he says, softer than usual, "you think, 'I'd rather have Luke's life than mine.'"

Adam Driver has a question for me. "What," he asks, "is emo?" Between training for the Marines and training at Juilliard to become one of his generation's most extraordinary actors, Driver missed some stuff, including entire music genres. But the rest of the world (including an amusing parody Twitter account) decided there's something distinctly emo about his character, with his luxuriant hair, black outfits and periodic temper tantrums. "You have someone who's being told that he's special his whole life," Driver says of his character, "and he can feel it. And he feels everything probably more intensely than the people around him, you know?"

As anyone who's seen Driver in practically anything, even Girls, could tell you, the actor himself seems to feel things more strongly than most. "I don't think of myself as a particularly intense person," he says, possibly not unaware that he is making intense eye contact, and that his right knee is bouncing up and down with excess energy. "I get obsessive about certain things and, like, enjoy the process of working on something." He's in a Brooklyn cafe, on a tree-lined street, that seems to be his go-to spot for interviews. He arrived early, fresh from shooting the new Spike Lee movie, wearing a dark-blue sweater over black jeans and high-top Adidas. Driver has a certainty to him, a steel core, that's a little intimidating, despite his obvious affability and big, near-constant laugh. It's not unlike talking to Harrison Ford, who played his dad. Until Driver's character murdered him.

Driver, raised by his mom and preacher stepdad after his parents divorced when he was seven, doesn't flinch when I suggest his own father issues might be at work. "I don't know that it's always that literal," he says. He mentions that Kylo Ren also murders Max Van Sydow's character, who was sort of a "distant uncle" to him. "No one asks me, 'So you have a distant-uncle problem?' "

John Boyega told me in 2015 that Driver stayed in character on set, but that seems to be not quite true. Driver just tries to keep focused on his character's emotions in the face of an environment he can't help but find ridiculous. "Watching Star Wars, it's an action-adventure," he says. "But shooting it, it's a straight comedy. Stormtroopers trying to find a bathroom. People dressed as trolls, like, running into doorways. It's hilarious." And when he wears his helmet, he can't see very well. "You're supposed to be very stealth, and a tree root takes you down."

He refuses to see his character as bratty. "There is a little bit of an elitist, royalty thing going on," he says, reminding us that the character's estranged mom is "the princess. I think he's aware of maybe the privilege." He does acknowledge playing Kylo Ren younger than his own age of 34: "I don't want to say how much younger, 'cause people will read into it. . . ." He flushes, and later says he regrets mentioning it at all. If it's a plot spoiler, it's unclear exactly how, unless it's related to his unexplained connection to Rey. The two apparently spend serious time together in this film. "The relationship between Kylo and Rey is awesome," says Ridley, whom Driver calls a "great scene partner," apparently one of his highest compliments.

At first, Driver wasn't totally sure he wanted to be in a Star Wars movie. I'm always skeptical of Hollywood movies because they're mostly just too broad," he says. But Abrams' pitch, emphasizing the uniqueness of Kylo Ren's character as a conflicted villain, made the sale. "Everything about him from the outside is designed to project the image that he's assured," he says. Only in private can he acknowledge "how un-figured-out he is … how weak."

Driver can make a passionate case for why Kylo Ren isn't actually a villain at all.

"It's not like people weren't living on the Death Star," he says, his brown eyes shifting from puppyish to fierce without warning. He seems almost in character now. "Isn't that also an act of terrorism against the hundreds of thousands of people who died there? Did they not have families? I see how people can point to examples that make themselves feel they're right. And when you feel in your bones that you're supported by a higher power on top of that, and you're morally right, there's no limit to what you'll do to make sure that you win. Both sides feel this way."

You're starting to talk me into joining the Empire, I say. He laughs and shifts his delivery one degree over the top. "So, the rebels are bad," he says, connecting his fist with the table. "I strongly believe this!"

On an extravagantly rainy Thursday evening in Montreal, I'm sitting at crowded, noisy Le Vin Papillon, a wine bar ranked as Canada's fourth-best restaurant, holding a seat for a Jedi. Ridley arrives right on time, in a fuzzy faux-fur coat and a jumper dress – "the dregs of my wardrobe," she says. Her shortish hair is in a Rey-ish topknot that makes her way too recognizable, but she doesn't care. "This is how I have always had my hair," says Ridley. "I am not going to change it." She's been in Montreal for three months, shooting a Doug Liman-directed sci-fi movie called Chaos Walking – which "is a little bit chaotic, in that we're writing as we go and everything," she says. "I've realized I don't work well with that."

She's on the second of two unexpected days off thanks to co-star Tom Holland (a.k.a the latest Spider-Man) suffering an impacted wisdom tooth, but she's still deeply exhausted. "I need a [vitamin] B shot in my ass," she muses, in the kind of upscale British accent that makes curses sound elegant. It seems already clear that typecasting won't pose the kind of problem for her that it did for the likes of Hamill and Fisher. Instead, she's just busy in a way that only a freshly minted 25-year-old movie star could be – and she still managed to fulfill a pre-fame plan to go back to college for a semester last year. "I have no control in my life at all," she says. She has four movies on the way, not even counting the Liman one. "So there is a lot going on, and I have never had to deal with that before. I don't think my brain can really keep up with what is going on." She has full-blown night terrors: "I wake up and scream."

Rey had an epochal moment in the last movie, claiming her lightsaber from the snowy ground, and with it, her power, her destiny, her place at the center of the narrative. Her turn. Ridley is still absorbing what that moment, and that character, mean to women and little girls. But she definitely felt more pressure this time around, especially because last time, "it was all so insane, it felt like a dream," she says. "I remember saying to Rian, 'I am so fucking neurotic on this one.' I was like, 'I am going to fuck this up. All these people think this thing. How do I do that thing?' "

Part of the problem may have been Ridley's tendency to downplay what she pulled off in the first movie. Her heart-tugging solo scenes in the first act, especially the moment where she eats her sad little "one half portion" of green space bread, created enormous goodwill, in seconds, for a character no one had seen before. She mentions Harrison Ford's effusive praise for that eating scene, to the point where he was "getting emotional." "I don't know," she says with a shrug, ultimately giving credit for the impact to Abrams and the movie's cinematographer, Dan Mindel. "I was just eating!"

But in other ways, Rey has given her confidence. On her current film, she says, she was offered a stunt double for a scene where a door would swing open and knock her back. She took Liman aside and said, "'Doug, I don't need a stunt double to do that.' And I thought, 'I don't know if this would've happened if it was Tom Holland.'"

Unlike almost everyone else in the world, Ridley has known for years who Rey's parents are, since Abrams told her on the set of The Force Awakens. Ridley believes that nothing ever changed: "I thought what I was told in the beginning is what it is." Which is odd, because Johnson insists he had free rein to come up with any answer he wanted to the question. "I wasn't given any directive as to what that had to be," he says. "I was never given the information that she is this or she is that."

The idea that Johnson and Abrams somehow landed on the same answer does seem to suggest that Rey's parents aren't some random, never-before-seen characters. All that said, Abrams cryptically hints there may have been more coordination between him and Johnson than the latter director has let on, so who knows what's going on here – they may be messing with us to preserve one of Abrams' precious mystery boxes. In any case, Ridley loves the speculation: Her favorite fan theories involve immaculate conception and time travel. It seems more likely that she's either Luke's daughter or his niece, but again, who knows.

Back in 2015, Ridley told me she was fine with the idea of being seen as Rey forever, the way Fisher was always Leia. Now she's changed her mind. "There are literally no similarities with Carrie's story and mine," she says, adding that while Fisher ultimately embraced writing over acting, she plans on continuing to "inhabit" as many characters as possible. On the other hand, "a lot of Rey is me," she says, "but that is not me being Rey. That is parts of me being a character as Rey, because how could it not? So in that sense, I understand it, because so much of Leia is Carrie."

This trilogy will end with Abrams' Last Jedi sequel, and after that, it sounds like the main thrust of the franchise will move into Johnson's mysterious new movies, which look to be unconnected to the previous saga. As far as Abrams is concerned, that will be the end of the Skywalker story. "I do see it that way," he says. "But the future is in flux."

As far as Ridley is concerned, the future of Rey is pretty much set. She doesn't want to play the character after the next movie. "No," she says flatly. "For me, I didn't really know what I was signing on to. I hadn't read the script, but from what I could tell, it was really nice people involved, so I was just like, 'Awesome.' Now I think I am even luckier than I knew then, to be part of something that feels so like coming home now."

But, um, doesn't that sort of sound like a yes? "No," she says again, smiling a little. "No, no, no. I am really, really excited to do the third thing and round it out, because ultimately, what I was signing on to was three films. So in my head, it's three films. I think it will feel like the right time to round it out." And how about coming back in 30 years, as her predecessors did? She considers this soberly, between bites of Brussels sprouts roasted on the stalk. (We split the dish, which means she got ... one half portion.) "Who knows? I honestly feel like the world may end in the next 30 years, so, if in 30 years we are not living underground in a series of interconnected cells ... then sure. Maybe. But again, it's like, who knows. Because the thing I thought was so amazing, was people really wanted it. And it was done by people who really love it." She thinks even harder about it, this new Star Wars trilogy that we've made up on the spot. "How old will I be?" she asks, before doing the math. "55." She looks very young for a moment, as she tries to picture herself as a middle-aged Jedi. Then she gives up. It's time to go, anyway; she has a 5:25 a.m. pickup tomorrow for her new movie. "Fuck," Ridley says. "I can't think that far ahead." (x)

[filmbuddy]

The Rise of Skywalker Predictions

Palpatine

We know that both Palpatine and Matt S(m)ith are in this movie in some capacity. My guess is they both inhabit the same form. In the EU there is a history of Palpatine being cloned and reborn into his younger form and taking Luke Skywalker on as his apprentice. While Luke is seemingly dead, it makes sense to me that they keep the clone angle.

Each movie tends to add a new force power, and it’s my guess that Palpatine has moved his consciousness via the force into one of these clones of himself. He was the man behind the clone army in the prequels, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to find out he made a deal with the Kaminoans to make a few insurance clones of himself just in case.

Rey’s Parentage

The title of episode 9 seems to be blatantly telling us that Rey is the Skywalker who will be rising, which makes me suspicious. This trilogy has run itself into a tricky spot in that episode 8 told us you can be hero no matter who you are or where you came from. Making Rey a Skywalker would walk that back a bit in an awkward way (more on that later).

On the other hand, these 9 films are supposed to be about the Skywalkers. Right now all of the people who go by that name are dead. It makes narrative sense that Rey would be the Skywalker who finally rises above the destructive cycle of that family causing way more problems than they are actually solving.

On the other, other hand, there is just no way that this is Daisy Ridley’s last Star Wars film. If she appears in other films that would technically be continuing the Skywalker saga which makes me think she probably won’t be Luke’s daughter after all.

However, if we were to keep it in the family, Rey could be the daughter of Matt Smith’s Palpatine. Luke Skywalker training the daughter of the galaxy’s most dangerous and manipulative villain ultimately leading to said villain’s own destruction could be a fitting end to the Skywalker story. If Palpatine created the midichlorians that bore Anakin, maybe he did the same thing for Rey.

Rey does not have a last name yet, which is odd for a Star Wars character. By the end of the movie she almost certainly will. Even if she was a Palpatine, she could decide to take the last name of the closest father figure she’s ever had: Skywalker. If they made more movies with her in the future, they could say it technically wasn’t a Skywalker saga film. From a certain point of view.

As far as her mother goes, it’s definitely whoever Keri Russell is playing.

The Knights of Ren

Ben Solo’s character has been firmly established by this point. He’s a dark, angsty, edgy loser. He is a tantrum throwing baby man. The reason he is so compelling is that Adam Driver has portrayed him in such a way that you believe that he believes he has been severely wronged. And you almost feel for the guy. His entire family has been the most powerful and famous people in the galaxy for two generations. He had a lot of pressure on him and he cracked. He found the easiest route and he took it.

So it would only make sense that he would surround himself with like minded people. A stuck up man child in a state of teenage arrested development is only going to surround himself with yes men. Luke mentioned that Kylo left his ruined Jedi Temple with a handful of students. It seems probable that these will be the Knights of Ren. The Force Awakens made it seem like they would be like the Nazgûl, but after The Last Jedi I suspect they’ll be more like the weird goth kids that went to your high school.

Original Trilogy Planets

If this is really the last episode of this particular saga, you have to think Tatooine shows up at some point, if even just for one scene. In the trailer we see them on a desert planet which could easily be Jakku, however we have yet to see a planet from any of the previous trilogies show up in the sequel trilogy. Tatooine has played a large part throughout the series and it would be odd if we never revisited it.

We do see what appears to be a Death Star poking out of a large body of water. It makes the most sense if it’s the second Death Star since that was last place we saw the emperor sequentially in the movies. The leading theory is that they’re on Endor, but Endor was a forest moon. My guess is that it’s on whatever planet Endor orbits.

Force Ghosts

We already know Mark Hamill is in the movie so we are going to at least get a Luke Skywalker force ghost. What we don’t know is who else is going to show up. Hayden Christensen’s presence at the past couple Star Wars Celebrations leads me to believe we are going to get an Anakin force ghost. But I don’t think he’ll be the only force ghost we’ll see. I think Ewan McGregor is going to show up as well since he has already spoken to her through the Force. Who knows. Maybe everyone will show up. Qui-Gon. Mace. Kit. All the OGs.

Kylo Ren

I think we’re going to see Ben Solo turn back to the light. Adam Driver is too interesting of an actor for Disney to let go. After The Force Awakens I wondered if JJ Abrams was setting us up to see a reversal of the prequel’s version of Anakin. A version where we saw someone’s slow fall from the dark side to the light (and they don’t die immediately after switching sides like in the original trilogy).

It looks like Disney has its next three Star Wars movies lined up after Episode 9 starting in December 2021 (likely to be Rian Johnson’s trilogy of unrelated films) so it will be a while before we probably see any of these characters again, but I don’t think this movie will be the last time we see them. This may very well be the end of the Skywalker trilogy (again, from a certain point of view), but I would bet big money on there being episodes 10 through 12 way down the line.

Lightsaber Fights

I touched on this earlier, but I believe the final lightsaber fight will be Rey versus Palpatine. Kylo versus Rey is just too predictable at this point so I don’t think it will happen.

I don’t think we’re going to see the Knights of Ren with lightsabers either. Disney seems like they don’t want to go crazy with lightsabers (yet). Outside of a blue and red lightsaber we briefly saw Luke’s green lightsaber in The Last Jedi flashbacks, but even Luke inexplicably used a blue one when he faced Kylo on Crait. It was explained to me Luke used a blue one as a way to frustrate Kylo, but I sort of think using the green lightsaber he thought you were going to murder him with would have done the trick better. Anyways, I digress.

I still think we’re finally going to see our first blue double bladed lightsaber in this movie. Rey has been swinging that staff around with ease for the past two movies, and we see Finn carrying it around in the trailer for this new one. The staff itself might even be a double bladed lightsaber. The ends of it look very similar to the shape of Maul’s lightsaber.

Another thing to keep in mind is we know that the new Disney Star Wars park is a planet that’s featured in The Rise of Skywalker. One of the places you can visit is Savi’s Scrapyard, a secret shop with an intricate backstory connected to Lor San Tekka and keeping the knowledge of building lightsabers alive. Now this could just be a Disney park cash grab, (and/)OR it could be somewhere in the movie Rey actually goes to get an upgrade. Daisy Ridley confirmed the Skywalker lightsaber is back. She could have fixed it herself, or she could have sought out this Savi person (alien?). Disney really likes their synergy, so I put money on it being in the movie somehow.

Closing Thoughts

Obviously, we don’t know really anything about this movie except for a few small details. There’s been speculation that JJ Abrams is going to all but ignore Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, but that really seems unlikely. Disney loved what Johnson did so much they gave him three additional movies to make and there is no way they are going to let this third film undermine a director they are heavily invested in.

My predictions are solely based on where I can see the story having a consistent and satisfying conclusion, a little bit of wish fulfillment, and the couple of minutes we saw in the trailer. I am almost certainly wrong about everything, but half the fun of Star Wars is speculating about where this crazy and incredible story could possibly go in a galaxy full of possibilities.

I cannot wait until December.

[gloriousgwendolinechristie]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview

VANITY FAIR – Star Wars devotees who can’t wait for December need look no further. With exclusive access to writer-director Rian Johnson, plus interviews with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and others, V.F. presents the ultimate sneak peek at The Last Jedi—and Carrie Fisher’s lasting legacy.

  I. “We’re Going Back?”

  The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour-long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, standing opposite Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling-text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long-ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2014 and presented in theaters in 2015, is already etched in cinematic history.

  The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi. Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’14, recording some dialogue between Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re-stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later.

  “When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, ‘Oh my God, we’re going back?’ Because I said I was never going back,” Hamill told me when I sat down with him recently at his home in Malibu. He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 65 but a sexagenarian nevertheless; whereas the fit young members of the crew were given 45 minutes to get up to the now iconic Rey-Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 10, 15 minutes to rest.”

  None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on-screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet-and-exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. (Harrison Ford was under less obligation, having retained his leading-man shape because he never stopped being a leading man.) Over a spartan snack plate of carrot sticks and hummus, the man behind Luke held forth at length on this subject.

  “You just cut out all the things you love,” he said. “Something as basic as bread and butter, which I used to start every meal with. Sugar. No more candy bars. No more stops at In-N-Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but oh, here’s a box of Wheat Thins,’ and you don’t put the Wheat Thins in the same category as Lay’s potato chips, and yet I would sort of idly, absentmindedly eat these things while watching Turner Classic Movies, and ‘Oh, I ate the whole box!’ ”

  Hamill had been dieting and training for 50 weeks before he learned, via the Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that. On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed-gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark-side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega).

“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”

  Still, Hamill recognizes that the popular response to The Force Awakens—its stirring ending in particular—was overwhelmingly positive, his misgivings be damned. “As I said to J.J.,” he recalled, “I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.”

  Besides, holding back Luke in VII means that Hamill gets a lot more screen time in VIII. And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks.

  II. A Long Way from Tosche Station

  Rian Johnson, a sandy-haired, baby-faced 43-year-old Californian heretofore best known among cinéastes for his time-bending 2012 science-fiction film, Looper, is not only the director of Episode VIII but also its sole credited screenwriter. (Episode VII was written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt.) Earlier this spring, in a screening room in the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey-centered trilogy. “J.J. and Larry and Michael set everybody up in a really evocative way in VII and started them on a trajectory. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said.

  As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”

  Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action.

  But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. “I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”

  At the top of Johnson’s list: Luke Skywalker. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un-Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine.

  You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa-Solos and their little boy, Ben. But no. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard-Cohen-at-Mount-Baldy variety.

  So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. “People that knew him best,” Han says of Luke, “think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”

  That part of Luke’s legend, Johnson confirmed, is accurate. The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch-To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive-shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.” Luke, it transpires, has been living in this village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”

  That Luke is so changed a person presented Johnson with rich narrative opportunities. The Last Jedi is to a large extent about the relationship between Luke and Rey, but Johnson cautions against any “one-to-one correlation” between, say, Yoda’s tutelage of young Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and old Luke’s tutelage of Rey. “There’s a training element to it,” he said, “but it’s not exactly what you would expect.” This being the spoiler-averse world of Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars movies, that’s about as specific as the director is willing to get. (No, he won’t tell you if Luke is related to Rey, or, for that matter, what species the super-villain Supreme Leader Snoke happens to be, or which character the title The Last Jedi refers to.)

  But Johnson was happy to talk about Hamill’s performance, which, he said, “shows a very different side of the Luke character.” In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke was the de facto straight man, playing off Ford’s rascally Han and Fisher’s tart, poised Leia, not to mention the droid comedy tandem of C-3PO and R2-D2. Hamill? He was cast for his sincere mien and Bicentennial-era dreamboat looks—part Peter Cetera, part Osmond brother. He still catches grief, he noted, for one particularly clunky line reading in the first movie, when Luke responds to his Uncle Owen’s order to polish up their newly purchased droids by complaining, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” Though his approach to the line was, he swears, deliberate—“I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve got to make this as whiny and juvenile as I can,” he said—Hamill admitted that his greenness as an actor left him with “somewhere to go later, where I wouldn’t make those kinds of choices.”

  In his years out of the spotlight, Hamill has flourished as a voice actor, most notably playing the Joker in a series of animated Batman TV shows, films, and video games. He performs the part with a demented brio and an arsenal of evil laughs ranging from Richard Widmark manic to Vincent Price broad—a far cry from the gee-whiz wholesomeness for which he is best remembered.

  Oscar Isaac, at 38 the senior member of the core cast’s “new kids” (Driver is 33, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid-20s), is old enough to remember as a child revering Luke Skywalker. “So to be there, and to watch Mark revisit Luke, particularly in these scenes we were shooting towards the end of the film, was bizarre and jaw-dropping,” he told me. “It’s like when you see an old band re-unite and go on the road, and they don’t quite hit those high notes anymore—though in this situation it’s completely the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”

  III. Significant New Figures

  On the Disney campus, I sat in on a postproduction meeting in which Johnson was reviewing some scenes from The Last Jedi. Teams from Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s visual-effects division, were videoconferencing in from London, San Francisco, and Vancouver. On a big screen, Poe Dameron, Isaac’s heroic X-wing fighter pilot, was back in action, coaching a gunner named Paige, a new character played by a Vietnamese actress named Veronica Ngo. Another scene featured General Hux, the nefarious First Order commander played with spittle-flecked relish by Domhnall Gleeson.

  Johnson loved what he was seeing but noted the presence of some “schmutz”—smudges around the edges—on the starcraft window that Hux was looking out of. “I don’t know, does the First Order not keep its windows clean?” he asked. “Did you guys play it that way before?”

  He raised the question more deferentially than critically (and Ben Morris, the movie’s London-based VFX supervisor, said it would be no problem to de-schmutzify the pane). Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million. But the director betrayed no sign of being overwhelmed. He is a gifted filmmaker whose previous movies, especially Brick (his 2005 debut) and Looper, are visually distinctive and intricately plotted, the assured work of a cinema-drunk U.S.C. film-school grad who, in preparation for Episode VIII, steeped himself in World War II movies like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and “funky 60s samurai stuff” like Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! and Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai.

  The anointment of Johnson as Episode VIII’s overseer is emblematic of the direction in which Kathleen Kennedy has taken Lucasfilm since she assumed the presidency of the company, in 2012, the same year that George Lucas, who had personally recruited her to take his place, sold the company to Disney. Though she reached out to Abrams, a proven wrangler of blockbuster series (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek), to initiate the current Star Wars trilogy, Kennedy has since picked filmmakers whose résumés are less important than whether or not she is a fan of their work.

  Kennedy cut her teeth as a Steven Spielberg protégée—in the early 80s, when she was not yet out of her 20s, he entrusted her with producing E.T.—and now she, too, is keen on giving relative unknowns their big chance. Johnson was someone she’d had her eye on for years, she told me, admiring “how deliberate he is in his storytelling and the way he moves the camera.” The final film of the trilogy, due in 2019 and for the moment assigned the simple working title Episode IX, will be directed by Colin Trevorrow, who did not yet have the big-budget feature Jurassic World under his belt when he crossed Kennedy’s radar; he came to her attention via his first feature, the 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, and a recommendation from her friend Brad Bird, the Pixar auteur.

  Part of what makes Lucasfilm’s new system work is that Kennedy has set up a formidable support structure for her filmmakers. Upon her arrival, she put together a story department at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters, overseen by Kiri Hart, a development executive and former screenwriter she has long worked with. The story group, which numbers 11 people, maintains the narrative continuity and integrity of all the Star Wars properties that exist across various platforms: animation, video games, novels, comic books, and, most important, movies. “The whole team reads each draft of the screenplay as it evolves,” Hart explained to me, “and we try, as much as we can, to smooth out anything that isn’t connecting.”

  What the story group does not do, Hart said, is impose plot-point mandates on the filmmakers. Johnson told me he was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action of Episode VIII from scratch. “The pre-set was Episode VII, and that was kind of it,” he said. If anything, Johnson wanted more give-and-take with the Lucasfilm team, so he moved up to San Francisco for about six weeks during his writing process, taking an office two doors down from Hart’s and meeting with the full group twice a week.

  Among Johnson’s inventions for The Last Jedi are three significant new figures: a “shady character” of unclear allegiances, played by Benicio Del Toro, who goes unnamed in the film but is called DJ by the filmmakers (“You’ll see—there’s a reason why we call him DJ,” Johnson said); a prominent officer in the Resistance named Vice Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern; and a maintenance worker for the Resistance named Rose Tico, who is played by a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran (and who is the sister of Paige, the character I witnessed in the scene with Poe Dameron). Tran’s is the largest new part, and her plotline involves a mission behind enemy lines with Boyega’s Finn, the stormtrooper turned Resistance warrior.

  Rose and Finn’s adventure takes them to, among other places, another Johnson innovation: a glittering casino city called Canto Bight, “a Star Wars Monte Carlo–type environment, a little James Bond–ish, a little To Catch a Thief,” the director said. “It was an interesting challenge, portraying luxury and wealth in this universe.” So much of the Star Wars aesthetic is rooted in sandy desolation and scrapyard blight; it appealed to Johnson to carve out a corner of the galaxy that is the complete opposite. “I was thinking, O.K., let’s go ultra-glamour. Let’s create a playground, basically, for rich assholes,” he said.

  Canto Bight is also where viewers will get their multi-species fix of gnarled aliens and other grotesque creatures, a comic-relief staple of Star Wars movies since Luke Skywalker first met Han Solo amid the cankerous and snouty inhabitants of the Mos Eisley cantina. The Last Jedi is dark enough as it is, so Johnson has made a point of infusing the movie with levity. “I didn’t want this to be a dirge, a heavy-osity movie,” he said. “So one thing I’ve tried really hard to do is keep the humor in there, to maintain the feeling, amid all the heavy operatic moments, that you’re on a fun ride.”

  IV. Sister Carrie

  Daisy Ridley has her own tale to tell of Skellig Michael. Part of the reason she looks so convincingly weary at the conclusion of Episode VII is, she said, “that I had just vomited. I had adrenal exhaustion, and I was very, very sick.”

  The second time up the cliff, she was in good health and pleased to be re-united with Hamill. But the overall making of Episode VIII proved more psychologically fraught. “When I was doing Episode VII, I was kind of being washed along in a torrent of excitement and unexpectedness,” she said. “When we came around to do the next one, it was a bit more scary, because I knew the expectations, and I understood more what Star Wars means to people. It felt like more of a responsibility.”

  The conflation of real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill.

  Fortunately for Ridley, she had become acquainted with a woman who knew a thing or two about such issues. There was no human being on earth better equipped to shepherd Ridley through what she was experiencing, as both the star of a movie franchise and a feminist model to young girls, than Carrie Fisher. “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing for anything, which is something I’m still learning,” Ridley said. “ ‘Embarrassed’ is the wrong word, but there were times through it all when I felt like I was … shrinking. And she told me never to shrink away from it—that it should be enjoyed.”

  This is a common refrain among the new generation of Star Wars actors: that Fisher was the one who taught them how to deal. Boyega recalled that when there was a backlash against his appearance in the first Force Awakens teaser trailer, released in November 2014—the sight of a black man in stormtrooper armor drew ire from racists and doctrinaire Star Wars traditionalists—Fisher counseled him not to take it to heart. “I remember—and forgive me, I’m going to drop the f-bomb, but that’s just Carrie—she said, ‘Ah, boohoo, who fuckin’ cares? You just do you,’ ” he said. “Words like that give you strength. I bore witness in a million ways to her sharing her wisdom with Daisy too.”

  Fisher had a bigger role to play in The Last Jedi—General Leia Organa logs significantly more screen time in Episode VIII than she did in VII. Isaac, who filmed several scenes with Fisher, said that, like Hamill, she delivered a rich performance, giving her all as an actor, rather than treating Leia’s part as an exercise in feel-good sentimentalism. “We did this scene where Carrie has to slap me,” he said. “I think we did 27 takes in all, and Carrie leaned into it every time, man. She loved hitting me. Rian found such a wonderful way of working with her, and I think she really relished it.”

  For his part, Johnson quickly formed a deep bond with Fisher as a fellow writer, spending long hours with her at the eccentric compound she shared with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. “After I had a draft, I would sit down with her when I was working on re-writing,” he said. “Sitting with her on her bed, in her insane bedroom with all this crazy modern art around us, TCM on the TV, a constant stream of Coca-Cola, and Gary the dog slobbering at her feet.” (For visuals on this characteristic state of affairs chez Fisher, I highly recommend Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’s HBO documentary, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.)

  Fisher completed her part in Episode VIII late last summer, when principal photography on the film wrapped. “She was having a blast,” said Kennedy. “The minute she finished, she grabbed me and said, ‘I’d better be at the forefront of IX!’ Because Harrison was front and center on VII, and Mark is front and center on VIII. She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”

  When I was conducting the interviews for this story, the Star Wars family was still mourning Fisher’s unexpected death, which occurred on December 27, 2016, four days after she suffered a heart attack on a flight home to Los Angeles from London, and just a day before Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke. (The Star Wars “family” includes family in the literal sense: Fisher’s daughter, the actress Billie Lourd, appears as a Resistance lieutenant in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.) Fisher had celebrated her 60th birthday just two months earlier.

  “Out of everyone, Carrie was the one I really became friends with and expected to have in my life for years and years,” said Johnson. “I last saw her in November, at the birthday party that she threw at her house. In a way, it was the perfect final, encapsulating image of Carrie—receiving all her friends in the bedroom, with Debbie holding court in the living room.”

  Fisher’s death doesn’t change anything about The Last Jedi except make it more poignant: the film farewell of both the actress and the character. But it does change Episode IX, for which, as Fisher hoped, a central role for Leia had been planned. Kennedy, Trevorrow, and the Lucasfilm team have been compelled to swing from grieving into pragmatic mode, working out how to reconceive the next film in the saga, which is scheduled to start shooting in January.

  One option that is not on the table is to reanimate Fisher’s Leia via C.G.I., as was briefly done in Rogue One, last year’s stand-alone, non-trilogy Star Wars film, created when she was alive. More extensively in that film, Grand Moff Tarkin, a character played by the late Peter Cushing in the first Star Wars movie, was brought back to life using C.G.I. jiggery-pokery and motion-capture technology that involved the use of an actor who physically resembles Cushing. Plus, Lucasfilm had the Cushing family’s consent. However, said Kennedy, “we don’t have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.”

  V. A Disturbance in the Force

  Mark Hamill, for all of his agreeable loquaciousness, winced when I brought up Fisher’s death.

  “I can’t say that phrase, what you just said: Carrie’s name and then the d-word,” he said. “Because I think of her in the present tense. Maybe it’s a form of denial, but she’s so vibrant in my mind, and so vital a part of the family, that I can’t imagine it without her. It’s just so untimely, and I’m so angry.”

  Their 40-year relationship truly was sibling-like, Hamill said, rife with affection and squabbles, though their earliest time together mirrored, to some degree, Luke and Leia’s uncertain early dynamic in the movies. In The Empire Strikes Back, the film before the film in which they learn that they are twins, Leia plants a big smackeroo squarely on Luke’s lips—not far off, Hamill said, from their reality as young co-stars. Working on the first Star Wars movie, “we were really attracted to each other. We got to the point where we were having our make-out sessions—and then we pulled back,” Hamill said. “A great way to cool any amorous feelings is laughter, and Carrie had this sort of Auntie Mame desire to find humor in everything. We also realized that, if we did this, everything would fundamentally change. It’s the When Harry Met Sally plot—can we still be friends after intimacy? Wisely, we avoided that.” (Hamill has been married to his wife, Marilou, since 1978.)

  Ridley says, “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing.”

  Working together on the new trilogy gave Hamill and Fisher a chance to rekindle their benignly rancorous brother-sister dynamic. Both were staying in London, commuting distance from Pinewood Studios, where most of the non-location scenes of Star Wars movies are filmed. They held a competition to see who could get to a million Twitter followers first. (Hamill won; “I told Carrie, ‘Part of your problem is you write in these impenetrable emojis.’ Her tweets looked like rebus puzzles.”)

  And, being the ages they were, they discussed mortality. “We got to talking about one of our favorite scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is when Tom and Huck go to their own funeral, and they’re up in the balcony, hearing their own eulogies,” Hamill said. “So then I said, ‘Look, if I go first, just promise me you’ll heckle my funeral.’ And she went, ‘Absolutely, if you’ll do the same for me.’ ”

  The constant conflation of the Star Wars cast’s real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill, who inadvertently caused a kerfuffle last year during an appearance at the Oxford Union Society, when he described Daisy Ridley as “roughly my daughter’s age, and that’s how I relate to her.” As he knows from experience, sometimes the conflation is quite valid. Losing Fisher really has been like losing a sister.

  Which speaks to the emotional resonance that has powered the saga from the start. “When you look at the stories themselves, they’re about personal tragedies and losses and triumphs,” Hamill said. “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing.”

  Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline