by Anthony Breznican
Let’s take a trip into the dark side of the galaxy in The Last Jedi.
Perhaps the only thing more unsettling than meeting your enemy is coming face-to-face with your hero.
That’s where the Star Wars saga left us at the end of The Force Awakens, with Daisy Ridley’s Rey standing atop a craggy, windswept island, holding out Luke Skywalker’s long-lost family lightsaber to the man she knew only as a legend. But in The Last Jedi, she actually has much further to go to find the warrior who inspired all those old stories.
This isn’t the Luke she’s heard about. It’s not the one we know either.
This is a broken man. One who would have preferred to stay lost. And he feels the same way about that lightsaber.
“The fact that Luke says, ‘I only know one truth. It’s time for the Jedi to end…’ I mean, that’s a pretty amazing statement for someone who was the symbol of hope and optimism in the original films,” Mark Hamill tells EW.
“When I first read it, my jaw dropped,” the actor says. “What would make someone that alienated from his original convictions? That’s not something that you can just make up in an afternoon, and I really struggled with this thing.”
Luke definitely does not give Rey the warm welcome he received when he went in search of Alec Guinness’ Ben Kenobi in 1977’s original Star Wars. She is warned. She is given an explanation. Nevertheless …
“She’s so hopeful to everything,” Ridley says. “And obviously there’s a hint of, ‘What the hell?’”
This rejection hits Rey’s abandonment issues. Hard.
Chewbacca
There is darkness surrounding the Wookiee in this film.
Chewbacca (played by Joona Suotamo, fully taking over the role from original actor Peter Mayhew) is mourning his best friend, Han Solo, and that grief is not easy to articulate despite his proficiency with roars and groans.
We aren’t going to see a depressed Chewie, but we might encounter one who is a little more volatile than usual.
“Chewie’s doing all right. It’s tough. It was obviously a big loss for him, but, you know, he’s Chewie. He’s resilient,” Johnson says. “He’s got broad Wookiee shoulders, and he also has a new mission. He’s got Rey, and she’s someone that Han, to a certain extent, handed the keys to. So I think that that helps.”
It could be worse.
“If Chewie was just unemployed and sitting at home, things might be a little rougher, but he’s got a task to focus on,” Johnson adds.
Also, he’s got some new friends.
But they get everywhere.
we see Chewbacca at the helm of the Millennium Falcon with one such interloper.
These penguin-like wide-eyed creatures are native to the planet of Ahch-To, site of the first Jedi temple.
The porgs are so ubiquitous, they even leaked out ahead of time, sneaking past Lucasfilm security to bounce around the internet. In real life, they were puppets created through Neal Scanlan’s creature shop, with wide black eyes and furry, flapping wings.
Writer-director Rian Johnson said that although Luke Skywalker retreated to Ahch-To, he didn’t want the Jedi to be alone. Inspiration for the porgs came during a visit to the Irish island of Skellig Michael, where the final scenes of The Force Awakens were shot.
The Caretakers
“They’re kind of these sort of fish-bird type aliens who live on the island,” Johnson says. “They’ve been there for thousands of years, and they essentially keep up the structures on the island.”
The Caretakers are slightly more anthropomorphic than the porgs. They’re animated with a person inside (Daisy Ridley said a friend played one of them) and they wear clothes and speak in an alien tongue.
“They’re all female, and I wanted them to feel like a remote sort of little nunnery,” Johnson says. “Neal Scanlan’s crew designed them, and costume designer Michael Kaplan made these working clothes that also reflected sort of a nun-like, spartan sort of existence.”
They can communicate with Luke through what Johnson describes as “a blubbery sort of Scottish fish talk” but they’re not thrilled to have him hanging around. Johnson says they “tolerate” his presence.
The Force is connected with life. Yoda’s world of Dagobah was a swamp, teeming with flora and fauna, and so this ocean world would naturally evolve beings who are drawn to this sacred place. Johnson said they’re amphibious and may have risen up from the seas to tend to the buildings on this craggy archipelago eons ago.
“You get the sense they did at some point or maybe they occasionally do [return to the sea,] but when we see them, they’re land creatures,” Johnson says. “They’re these big matronly creatures, but they have these little skinny little bird feet. They were really fun to work with on set.”
Her battle continues in The Last Jedi.
Leia remains in charge of the scattershot Resistance movement, cut off from the Republic, whose leadership and capitol was annihilated in The Force Awakens.
Anyone who expected the Resistance to fill that void and maintain order would be mistaken. “No, no, no. Not at all,” Johnson says. “They’re a small band that’s now cut off, on its own, and hunted when the Republic is shattered. When the First Order did that hit, the Resistance is isolated, and they’re very, very vulnerable. That’s where we pick them up.”
While the galaxy teeters on takeover by the First Order, Leia is also dealing with personal grief, mourning the death of Han Solo – murdered at the hands of their son, Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren. The young man once known as Ben Solo has now fully fallen to the Dark Side, just as Darth Vader, Leia’s father, did a generation before.
“She’s suffered quite a bit,” Johnson adds.
Despite the hardship, Leia always finds the hope in any given situation. This time, her story is entwined with Poe Dameron, the hotshot X-wing pilot played by Oscar Isaac. Their relationship is not just general and warrior. They’re family.
And in Star Wars, the notion of family goes far beyond blood relations.
In The Last Jedi, a torch is being passed. It’s about the peril of meeting your heroes, facing down disappointment, and rising to fight nonetheless. Just as Luke Skywalker – reluctantly – may be passing on his knowledge of the Force to Rey, Leia is guiding Poe, encouraging him to look beyond the crosshairs in his cockpit. There are other ways to fight, other ways to lead.
Last Jedi reveals Poe Dameron & Leia's moving backstory
by Justin Harp
The Force Awakens planted some seeds for a deep backstory between the Resistance general and her top X-wing pilot, but it turns out that their relationship is far more significant than just leader and subordinate.
Following her own son Ben's turn to the Dark Side to become Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and the self-imposed exile of her brother Luke (Mark Hamill), it has been Poe (Oscar Isaac) who's become family to Leia.
"Poe is in some ways a surrogate son for Leia," Oscar Isaac explained to Entertainment Weekly. "But also I think she sees in him the potential for a truly great leader of the Resistance and beyond."
He continued: "Poe's arc is one of evolving from a heroic soldier to a seasoned leader, to see beyond the single-mindedness of winning the battle to the larger picture of the future of the galaxy.
"I think Leia knows she won't be around forever and she, with tough love, wants to push Poe to be more than the bad-ass pilot, to temper his heroic impulses with wisdom and clarity."
Kylo Ren
The aspiring Sith let his last bit of light slip away when he drove his janky, handmade lightsaber into the heart of his father, Han Solo. But there was no victory for Kylo Ren as he sank into the abyss.
Instead, he was humiliated. By a scavenger girl, of all things.
“He’s definitely been knocked off base,” says The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson says. “The defeat that he had at the end of The Force Awakens, but even bigger than that, his huge defining act which, spoiler alert, is the murder of his father… that’s the more interesting thing to dive into. How has he dealt with that in his head? Where is he at in terms of that act and what does that mean for him?”
Johnson said Ben Solo’s shift to darkness is symbolic of “the treacherous road through adolescence” that Star Wars often explores.
“Kylo represents kind of the rebellious anger that you feel during that period. Honestly, sometimes it’s a healthy desire to push away from the place that you know, from the things that you came from. But he obviously does it in an extreme that’s not healthy at all.”
He said Kylo and Rey are “two halves of the dark and the light.”
TIE Silencer
Among their shared interests: She is an expert pilot, and in this film well see him maneuvering his own starship, the TIE Silencer, which is a variation on his grandfather, Darth Vader’s old ship.
Captain Phasma
Gwendoline Christie’s merciless First Order officer Captain Phasma has a more significant role in The Last Jedi.
Johnson says. “That character is just so damn cool looking. Like, okay, let’s see what we can do with her. Let’s put her in action and see what happens.”
Captain Phasma was only briefly explored in the seventh installment of the Star Wars franchise. However, the chrome-plated Stormtrooper is expected to get more screen time in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, with rumors swirling that the character played by Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, will even be unmasked.
Praetorian Guard
Supreme Leader Snoke only appeared in The Force Awakens via hologram, the towering character (performed via motion-capture by Andy Serkis) will finally emerge from hiding.
These will be his protectors – the Praetorian Guard, a variation on the crimson-cloaked Imperial guards who flanked the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.
“The Emperor’s guards were very formal, and you always got the sense that they could fight, but they didn’t,” writer-director Rian Johnson tells EW.
“They looked like they were more ceremonial, and you never really saw them in action. The Praetorians, my brief to [costume designer] Michael Kaplan was that those guys have to be more like samurai. They have to be built to move, and you have to believe that they could step forward and engage if they have to. They have to seem dangerous.”
Since we’re seeing the galactic Praetorians up close, that means Adam Driver’s aspiring Sith will also bring us face-to-what’s-left-of-his-face with his Dark Side mentor.
“They’re his personal guards,” Johnson says. “They stick with [Snoke]. So they’re essentially bodyguards.”
“Similar to Rey’s parentage, Snoke is here to serve a function in the story. And a story is not a Wikipedia page,” the filmmaker says. “
In The Last Jedi, Johnson says, “we’ll learn exactly as much about Snoke as we need to.”
No comments:
Post a Comment