Cover Story: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview. I. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1. Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, 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 2. 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 ’1. 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. New Hope. Daisy Ridley’s Rey hones her lightsaber skills—and channels her inner Force. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, . 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 6. Rey- Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 1. 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. 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, . 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). Driver’s Seat. Daisy Ridley as Rey, at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, with Joonas Suotamo as co- pilot Chewbacca. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. 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 . And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks. Freedom Fighters. The official site for Star Wars, featuring the latest on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Star Wars Rebels. Cast and crew information, synopsis, and comments. Carrie Fisher, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Kelly Marie Tran as the rebels General Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rose Tico, with droid BB- 8. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. II. A Long Way from Tosche Station. Rian Johnson, a sandy- haired, baby- faced 4. Californian heretofore best known among cin. 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. 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. Rumors are circulating about what's in the next Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer, but Lucasfilm likely won't release the preview for a long time. It's time for the Jedi to end. Disney + Lucasfilm have debuted the first official teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 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. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1. 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. 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. Night Creatures. Neal Scanlan (seated), creative supervisor of the Star Wars creature shop, and guests at the Canto Bight casino. Watch the full length reveal trailer for Star Wars Discover more: https://www.ea.com/games/starwars. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. 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. 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. 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 3. Driver is 3. 3, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid- 2. Luke Skywalker. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”Star Wars celebrates its 4. Watch the video below to find out six things we wouldn’t have without the franchise. 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.
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