Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 1

Written by:

Rian Johnson

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Directed by:

Rian Johnson

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Release Date:

2017

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Hey, they got the logo right. So far so good!

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first part of my review of the most divisive Star Wars movie: Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi. And it really is his movie as he was both director and writer (with a little help from Carrie Fisher). He brought his style to the Star Wars universe here in a way that a lot of fans... responded to.

If you organise all the Star Wars episodes by their user rating on sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, etc. there's always one movie that ends up right at the bottom, and that is... The Rise of Skywalker (except on Metacritic where TROS came second to The Phantom Menace). The Last Jedi is even higher up the rankings when you look at critic scores, and I've seen plenty of positivity from fans on podcasts and YouTube. But when people talk about "the movie that ruined Star Wars", it's usually this one they're referring to. There's so much hate for this film out there you'd think it was on the level of franchise killers like Batman & Robin, Jaws: The Revenge, or Alien: Resurrection.

Though to be honest, I actually liked Alien: Resurrection, and I enjoyed the The Last Jedi as well. At least I think I did... it's been a while. I don't know if this rewatch is going to turn me against the film, but I'll definitely see if I can pinpoint where other people's frustration is coming from. I'll be going through the movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS below for this and any of the Star Wars episodes up to this point.

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The Last Jedi is notorious for how it subverts expectations, but there's nothing subversive about its opening crawl. The camera even tilts downwards afterwards to reveal a spaceship, just like the seven episodes that preceded it... well, six really, as Attack of the Clones tilts upwards.

Also, the producers resisted the urge to give us a dubstep remix of the fanfare, though the opening theme is actually a little different. In fact, it's always a little different, as composer John Williams apparently recorded a new performance of the theme for every movie. This version's supposed to be slightly warmer, but I honestly can't tell the difference.

Oh, bad news, the FIRST ORDER reigns! The heroes blew up Starkiller Base in the last film, but that hasn't done a damn thing to stop Supreme Leader Snoke from seizing control of the galaxy overnight. When Palpatine took power he had a plan that took decades to come together, but Snoke's going with the 'have a fleet of a billion giant spaceships somehow' route to instant galactic domination.

World building really isn't the sequel trilogy's strength.

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi

It's kind of nice though that the galaxy enjoyed a good run of actual freedom before this all happened, so Return of the Jedi's happy ending wasn't immediately thrown into the bin. Well, except for the 'return of the Jedi' part, as we already know from the previous movie's opening crawl that Luke is now The Last Jedi. Maybe this means that Anakin was the Jedi that returned...

Anyway, RESISTANCE leader General Leia Organa is pretty sure that if they can get her brother Luke to come back, he can restore a spark of hope. Thought first they have to survive the incoming First Order fleet that's heading right to their base on D'Qar.

The opening shot is pretty, but kind of disappointing. For a moment it looked like the camera was going to keep flying between Resistance ships all the way down to the planet they're fleeing from, but it cuts fairly early.

Leia's Resistance is making a run for it because the First Order have found their hideout and their fleet isn't going to survive a direct confrontation. The Rebels were in a similar situation at the start of The Empire Strikes Back, but their base on Hoth was way better than this new base on D'Qar. Okay, the weather's nicer here and there are fewer yetis, but the Hoth base was hidden underground, it had a shield generator to protect them from orbital bombardment, and it had an ion cannon to disable the Star Destroyers blocking their escape route.

Speaking of Star Destroyers, General Hux shows up in one of those giant Resurgent-class models from The Force Awakens. The guy's looking different somehow, more overtly villainous. I guess the stress of being an evil military leader ages you. Holy crap, is that British comedy actor Adrian Edmonson next to him? I think it is! Damn, that is not the person I expected to show up in a Star Wars movie.

The First Order has also brought a new kind of ship with big nasty cannons on the underside, which Wookieepedia labels the Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought Fulminatrix (that's Latin for 'Lightning Bolt'). Hux orders the Fulminatrix's Captain Canady to basically obliterate everything, but he's confused by the arrival of a single X-Wing.

It's ace pilot Poe Dameron and his co-pilot BB-8!

Every Star Wars movie has a character saying "I've got a bad feeling about this," but The Last Jedi is the most sneaky about it. You never hear the words spoken in the film, but BB-8 does some untranslated beeping here and Poe doesn't appreciate his pessimism, so there you go.

Poe calls up the First Order fleet and immediately starts trolling General Hux, just like he did with Kylo Ren at the start of Force Awakens. The difference is that in the first movie it was a futile act of defiance against an enemy that didn't even dignify him with a response, while here Hux totally falls for it! Poe pretends not to hear the general's evil villain speech due to communication issues, making him look a fool. Plus he calls him General Hugs, which I didn't even notice the first time around.

This isn't exactly the first Star Wars film to feature jokes, but turning an established villain into comic relief doesn't feel great when he's the one commanding the enemy fleet. Rian Johnson wanted viewers to know right away that it's okay to laugh but in hindsight it might have been better to encourage them to suspend disbelief and take this fantasy world seriously.

Anyway it turns out that Poe was just stalling until he could activate his unique super-booster and fly straight at the Siege Dreadnought.

Then he gets straight to work doing exactly what he did with the Star Destroyer in the last movie: blowing up all of the capital ship's turrets his tiny light fighter. This is clearly absolutely unbelievable... unless it's me doing it in a video game, in which case it makes total sense. In fact, in X-Wing I used to park behind the engines in the turrets' blind spot and plink away at the ship from there until the whole thing exploded. Took forever.

Damn, BB-8 was so surprised by the incoming TIE Fighters that his head's popped off! There is a definite gap there. He's lucky his magnets or whatever are strong enough to keep his head from straying too far, because Poe is doing some high-velocity manoeuvres here.

Unfortunately Poe doesn't quite have Jedi reflexes and the bad guys eventually clip his fighter, taking out the guns just when he needed to blast the final cannon. So now it's up to the astromech to bypass the fault by sticking a metal spike into a board of resisters like he's plugging a leak. But then suddenly another resister begins sparking, and another, and BB-8 has to keep pulling out more and more arms to fix them all.

Man, this is so dumb.

Even worse, he eventually solves the issue by plugging the electricity leak with his head. I can believe in Jedi, hyperdrives and Wookiees, but I don't buy that pressing a metal dish against a circuit board is going to lead to anything positive. BB-8 was one of the highlights of the first movie, I don't want to see him reduced to bad jokes like this. Good jokes only.

On the plus side, the actor they've got playing the commander of the Siege Dreadnought, Captain Canady, is great. It's his ship that's getting stripped defenceless by a single fighter, but everything about his performance makes it seem like it has to be all Hux's fault somehow. He comes across like a veteran officer having to put up with a comically inept manager who loves the sound of his own voice too much. Though Hux already gave the order to obliterate everyone so I don't know what's causing the hold up.

Canady's ship finally destroys the Resistance base from orbit, depriving them of the 30 pallets of cannon shells left behind in C bunker. Also, they don't mention this, but I don't think the Resistance brought up all their fuel with them.
 

Fortunately, Poe has kept the First Order distracted long enough for the Resistance to get all their evacuation ships off the planet and Leia tells him to come back. But he disobeys orders! He feels like they can't pass up an opportunity to take out a Siege Dreadnought and calls in their bombers. To be fair, the other pilots seem just as hyped as he is.

It's nice to see Carrie Fisher back playing Leia, even if this was her final movie before her death. I remember there being some concerns that the filmmakers had done some digital necromancy like with Peter Cushing in Rogue One, especially as Leia had already been played by a digital replica in that movie. But it turned out that Fisher had completed filming all of her scenes, for this film at least.

Poe calls over to a pilot called Tallie to let her know that the Siege Dreadnought is targeting their cruiser now. This means that sticking around to attack the ship has put their fleet in danger. They could've just flown away before the Siege Dreadnought had brought its weapons to bear, but now they're in a race against time.

Hey Tallie's flying a new model A-Wing... and it's kind of tiny. I prefer the older model to be honest, but I can't say these shots don't look great. I love it when we get to see the actors sitting in cockpits during the action.

The scene is evolving into something we didn't get in The Force Awakens: a proper space battle. Unfortunately, slow-moving bombers travelling in a straight line with no turrets are like fish in a barrel for the TIE fighters. Sure they've got a fighter escort, but in this chaos that's not always helpful; wreckage from a destroyed TIE ends up colliding with one bomber and blowing up three of them.

Soon only one bomber is left and Poe calls Paige to let her know her ship is in position to drop its bombs. She's the only one on the ship left alive, so she climbs the ladder to pick up the firing trigger remote. All she has to do is press that button and the Siege Dreadnought will be replaced by debris and fire and screaming, but an explosion knocks her back down to the walkway over the bay doors at the bottom of the ship.

Damn, you can't tell from this screencap, but that's an open door below her. It's lucky that Star Wars ships have forcefields to keep the air in. Not that the movie tells us that.

There are just seconds left before the Siege Dreadnought opens fire on Leia's ship, so Paige keeps kicking the ladder to knock the firing switch down. The switch drops right past her, falling into the vacuum of space... but fortunately the scene's in slow motion, so she has enough time to grab it and press the button.

She holds her crescent-shaped medallion and waits for fire to engulf the ship. She was doomed either way so she didn't sacrifice her life by dropping the bombs, but she did spend her last moments saving the fleet.

A lot of people were taken out of the movie by this scene, as they didn't believe that the bombs would fall like this in space, and I'm on their side. I mean, the actual plausibility doesn't matter if the audience doesn't buy what's happening in the moment, and it's a real problem when people are too distracted by the physics to give a damn about Paige's beautifully-shot tragic death scene!

But would the bombs have actually fallen out onto the Siege Dreadnought?

Paige and the switch both fell toward the hole, so there's definitely gravity inside the ship. Maybe the artificial gravity doesn't need a floor to work, maybe the ships are hovering above the planet instead of orbiting it, either way when the bombs are released they will fall. Each column is attached to a rod which slides down a rail, so they'll be accelerated by the artificial gravity until the last bomb leaves its influence. In fact, the rail itself might give them a bit of a push; they do move pretty fast when they go.

Once the bombs are moving they'll stay in motion until they're acted upon by another force, like the hull of a Siege Dreadnought slamming into them. So the scene may look weird, but it does actually make sense! (Though you could argue that it'd make even more sense to just fire the bombs out the front of the ship when they're flying up to the target.)

The remaining fighters race back to the cruiser's hangar, and the moment they're all in they get the fleet into the safety of hyperspace. It's a very Battlestar Galactica scene.

We don't need words to know that Leia is both relieved that the Siege Dreadnought blew up instead of them and kind of pissed about seeing so many ships disappear off her screen. They've lost all their bombers and their crews to destroy one super-ship. Not a Death Star, just a big ship, which the First Order apparently has infinite of. At least A-Wing pilot Tallie is still alive!

It's pretty clear that Hux isn't all that happy about how things went down either, especially when he's told that Supreme Leader Snoke is calling. Hux is well aware that his day is about to get much worse, but he pretends like the call is a good thing, then attempts to slip off to receive his rebuke in private where no one can see his humiliation.

He fails.

Giant Hologram Snoke uses his ultra-long range Force powers to slam Hux's face into the deck and then polishes the floor with him. It's a bit of a step up from Vader's power to choke people. In fact, this is probably the strongest demonstration of Force powers I've seen in anything. Sure Obi-Wan could detect the destruction of Alderaan from light years away, but being able to throw someone around without even being in the same star system is crazy.

Then the film cuts back to the Resistance cruiser, which is apparently called the Raddus, after Admiral Raddus from Rogue One... though that's never mentioned in dialogue.

Finn has finally arrived in the movie, wandering around dazed, spilling bacta all over the corridor from the suit he woke up in. It's supposed to be funny I guess.

I really like the hallways on this ship by the way, they're a lot more welcoming than the ones on the First Order vessels, and extremely Star Wars. These films take place decades after the Original Trilogy so they would've had an excuse to modernise the look, but I'm glad they basically kept the same aesthetic.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like that nasty life-threatening slash Finn received from Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens is going to have any consequences at all, besides making him sleep through the first 13 minutes of the film. It could be worse, Luke Skywalker missed the first 17 minutes of A New Hope, and Han Solo missed the first 48 minutes. Though the only thing he cares about is that he missed Rey leaving in the Millennium Falcon to find Luke.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens ended with Rey finally meeting the legendary Luke Skywalker and then holding out his old lightsaber, the one he inherited from his dad and lost at Cloud City (along with his hand). Then the two of them just kind of stood there, staring at each other until the ending music came on.

Most Star Wars movies begin years after the previous one, but when The Last Jedi finally cuts to Rey she's still there in that same place trying to give Luke his lightsaber. It turns out that the movie takes place so soon after The Force Awakens that it might actually overlap a little.

Rey realises that Luke isn't going to move, so she tries walking over to him instead.

Damn, that's a cool robot hand, Luke. He's not even hiding it with a glove anymore.

Fans had been waiting for two years to see what Luke would do when he got his lightsaber back. He seemed plenty emotional during his silent cameo at the end of the last film, but how will he react when he gets it back in his hands?

Oh, he just throws it away. Just doing a bit of littering on the sacred Jedi planet of Ahch-To. In real life this was filmed on Ireland's Skellig Michael Island... and I'm pretty sure they don't want you littering there either.

I think the term for this is 'bathos', where a story sets up a serious moment and then unexpectedly switches tones to get a laugh. It's a perfectly valid storytelling technique, though people have gotten a little sick of it after a couple of decades of Marvel movies. I think the problem with it here is that this is the payoff to a cliffhanger that fans had been waiting a long time for. That, plus it's not really Star Wars' style to undercut emotional scenes.

At least the message is clear: this isn't going to go down the way you thought. Unless you thought that Luke Skywalker would turn out broken, jaded and alone after his life collapsed and his dreams burned to ash. Just like every other legacy hero you've ever grown attached to!

Wait, did Luke slice off part of his X-Wing's wing to make a door? It certainly matches the pattern, five red stripes for his callsign Red Five, and a lightsaber would make an excellent cutting tool if he brought one.

I get the impression that the stone huts were already here when Luke arrived. Though he's made this one his home and he's not coming out.

Okay, this is why you don't leave dangerous weapons lying around where porgs can find them.

You know, I honestly can't remember if the internet loves the porgs or hates them. They're adorable little bird things, but Star Wars fans do tend to have opinions about cute comic relief creatures. Incidentally, I rewatched Return of the Jedi recently and those Ewoks are fearless and competent guerrilla fighters that will straight up cook sentient beings alive for dinner if they fall into one of their ingenious traps. I get why some fans hate the toyetic teddy bears, but I've become a staunch Ewok defender.

Fortunately Rey is able to retrieve Anakin's legendary saber before any porgs get added to its horrifying list of victims. Then she looks down over the edge and sees the rest of the X-Wing parked underwater.

So that's a clear sign that Luke doesn't plan to be leaving. It's also a sign that he tosses everything he doesn't want over this cliff.

Though I can't tell if it's missing a wing or not. It doesn't seem like it. Maybe Luke just brought another wing with him as a spare. I mean it's not like you can buy replacement parts on the legendary hidden planet of Ahch-To.

Luke seems to be hoping that Rey will just get bored and go away, but what actually happens is that Chewie smashes his door down and yells at him. This doesn't cheer him up any, especially when he realises that Han isn't with them. The poor guy had no idea he'd died in the previous movie.

Over on the flagship of evil, Kylo Ren finally makes his appearance in the movie and we also get to see Supreme Leader Snoke in person! Okay, he's still CGI but now he's in the room with us, not a big holographic head. Speaking of the room, this place looks like a planet set from Star Trek: The Original Series. It's very Spectre of the Gun.

The supreme leader is a lot happier with Hux now that he's explained how he can follow the Resistance fleet, so the general gives Ren a smug grin on his way out. Ren, on the other hand, is not Snoke's favourite person at the moment.

Snoke tells Ren that he had been impressed at the potential of his bloodline, being descended from Vader himself, but now he's so disappointed he doesn't even want him wearing his ridiculous mask anymore. You could read this as Rian Johnson criticising Ren's look, but it's more that he needed audiences to see the character's face in this story (and Snoke's doing a bit of negging).

I wasn't impressed by Snoke in The Force Awakens, as the film seemed to be trying to build him up as a mystery without doing anything to set him apart from Emperor Palpatine. I felt like I already knew everything important: he's some magical asshole who wants to sit in the biggest chair.

But this time they've added something to the character to make him distinct: now he wears a gold robe, and to be honest I think it's a big upgrade. This is a Snoke I can actually care about! The fact that Andy Serkis has been given an opportunity to act also helps. I've read that this version of Snoke was inspired by Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, which is... an interesting choice. Though the two men presumably have very different backstories and Force abilities.

Snoke also has something in common with Star Wars fans, as he was a bit confused and disappointed by the lightsaber fight at the end of The Force Awakens. Ren got his ass handed to him by a girl who had never used a sword, how does that even happen? Snoke blames it on Ren not having his head in the game after killing his father, though I think the fact that Chewie had just shot him and he was bleeding all over the ground probably didn't help much either.

Ren's had a bit of medical treatment in the meantime, so he's doing better now. They even moved the cut on his face over a bit so that it looks more badass. And we'll be seeing it throughout the movie, as Ren destroys his mask in a big tantrum after Snoke calls him a child.

Snoke is really adamant that Luke can't be left alive because as long as he's around there's hope.

Unfortunately for the heroes, Luke remains unmoved by Rey's slightly half-hearted plea to come with them and bring back the Jedi order. He doesn't think he's going to be much use even if he does come, as what's he going to do, walk out in front of them all with a laser sword? Hey he used the phrase 'laser sword' like his dad did in The Phantom Menace!

So Luke leaves her and starts to go about his daily routine, catching fish with a giant pole and drinking unpasteurised green milk. They actually enhanced the milk with CGI to make it look more gross.

Rey follows him around until she's distracted by whispers coming from the remains of a mysterious old tree. It's like how she came across the lightsaber in The Force Awakens, except this seems to be leading her to a misty Dark Side place.

It's actually the opposite! She's found Luke's Jedi library, with all the original Jedi texts sitting on a tiny shelf. Not Jedi holocrons or anything like that, actual books on paper. This might actually be the first time we've ever seen a book in Star Wars, that's how old they are. She'll probably open them and they'll turn to dust in her hands.

Now it's Luke's turn to be interested in her. He wants to know who she is and why the Resistance sent her in particular. This gets her to actually open up about what's on her mind... though the movie can't resist undercutting the moment with humour again.

Luke - "Where are you from?
Rey - "Nowhere."
Luke - "No one's from nowhere."
Rey - "Jakku."
Luke - "All right that is pretty much nowhere."

I mean, it made me smile, but I can get how this could be obnoxious. The conversation does the job of setting up Rey's arc for the movie however. She doesn't know who she is, she's not from anywhere, and something's awakened in her that's scaring her. In Phantom Menace terms, she's had a high midi-chlorian count her whole life but now they're speaking to her and she needs help to understand what the Force even is.

But he's not going to teach her or anyone else. The whole reason he stranded himself on this island where he could never be found was to make sure that when he died, the Jedi would die with him. So there's a little extra info about what's going on with him. We're getting somewhere slowly.

Cut to Leia slapping Poe. Actually first there's a scene of the Resistance fleet coming out of hyperspace, with Leia's table visibly shaking a bit as they drop out of light speed. It's a nice touch. But then Leia slaps Poe, and demotes him. She wants him to learn a lesson from this, but he still doesn't think he was wrong to lead so many heroes to their deaths to blow up the Siege Dreadnought. She points it was only heroes that died, no leaders.

They've dropped out of hyperspace in the middle of nowhere and now they need to find a new base. Leia assures Finn that Rey will still be able to find them wherever they go due to the cloaked binary beacon she's wearing. Wait, she's carrying a tracking device? Isn't that a bit of a risk?

TWO MINUTES LATER

Okay, so some Star Destroyers turned up, along with Snoke's flagship, and things have gone a little bit pear-shaped. Now Kylo Ren is flying around with his custom TIE fighter, pulling a Poe Dameron and putting explosions everywhere. He even does a bit of spinning, I guess because his Skywalker genes are telling him that it's a good trick.

That's Snoke's ship in the background: the gigantic Mega-class dreadnought Supremacy, and it's basically the flying capital city of the First Order. In fact, you could argue that it's maybe too big, as it's 60 kilometres wide, that's like the size of London! But it's only a third of the width of the Death Star, and that thing was hyperspacing around like a spaceship too, so I suppose it works in this setting.

The question on my mind is: does the Supremacy have the same fleet-killing arsenal that the Fulminatrix had? Because if it doesn't, then Poe may have saved all of their lives with his choice to blow up the Siege Dreadnought, and if it does, then destroying it didn't change a damn thing.

The First Order had the advantage of launching their fighters first this time, which means that Ren's able to wreck the Resistance cruiser's hangar bay just as Poe and BB-8 are running to their X-Wing! Poor Poe only has a 60% chance of getting into his fighter before it explodes in these movies.

He survives and BB-8's only temporarily decapitated, but A-Wing pilot Tallie isn't so lucky. Even the pilots that survived Poe's reckless attack at the start are getting wiped out! Incidentally, Tallie was played by actress Hermione Isla Conyngham Corfield. I just thought that name was worth typing out in full.

Leia orders her ships to move away from the Star Destroyers so that there will be no covering fire for the TIE fighters and they'll have to pull back. I'm not sure that makes any sense, but okay.

They can't just lightspeed jump away however, as they only have enough fuel left for one jump and if the First Order can track them through hyperspace then they'll just get caught again.

This is another one of those things that viewers had an issue with, as there no explanation given for why the fleet is using up its fuel so quickly. Ships have been shown to need fuel in Star Wars, but they usually jump around all over the place without any concern at all about running out. The thing is, this is true for this movie as well, with the First Order fleet, the Millennium Falcon etc. following normal Star Wars rules. It's just the Resistance fleet that's struggling.

Ren aims his weapons at the cruiser's bridge, but he knows that his mother's in there and he hesitates. He found enough evil inside himself to kill Han, but he just can't bring himself to kill Leia. In fact, he takes his finger off the trigger!

Unfortunately his wingmen apparently don't have mothers on the cruiser as they open fire, blowing up the ship's bridge and sending Leia flying out into space!

It's not exactly the first time something bad has happened to the original heroes in these movies, as Han got stabbed and Luke's students all died, but I think this took people by surprise. It's too soon to lose Leia!

They were also surprised to see her use the Force to pull herself back in.

In fact, she flies right into a hologram of the enemy flagship, cutting it through the middle. A bit of foreshadowing for you there.

This is a case of audiences subverting the filmmaker's expectations, as this was supposed to be an awesome moment. Instead some people thought it looked ridiculous to see Leia flying inside like Mary Poppins and others thought it was absurd that she'd survived at all.

Personally, it makes me think back to the ice cave in Empire Strikes Back, where an untrained but desperate Luke pulled his lightsaber into his hand using a power he'd never used before. Leia is one of the five most powerful Force users in the galaxy, with potential comparable to her dad Anakin Skywalker, her brother Luke Skywalker and her son Kylo Ren. If Snoke can slide a dude across the floor from a star system away, I'm sure she's got enough 'Force pull' in her to get a weightless person moving.

But can I buy that she'd survive without air in the vacuum of outer space long enough to pull this off?

Well, I've seen it happen in The Expanse, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Who, Dark Matter (kind of), Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Stargate SG-1 and Star Wars: Rebels. Though not Red Dwarf, it didn't work so well there. But generally sci-fi lets you get away with this. In fact, it seems in real life you can survive with a minute or two of exposure without any long term effects, and you may recover in just a few minutes. Assuming you weren't also blown up by a missile.

But like with the bomber scene earlier, if the audience doesn't find it plausible in the moment then the scene has failed. It's the film's job to give people just enough exposition to properly appreciate these moments. Like Finn could've asked "Why is the Resistance going to so much trouble to find Luke, isn't his sister just as powerful?" Or someone could've said "I'm starting to think I'll survive longer out there in the vacuum. Without a suit". Obviously the lines I've come up with aren't 100% ideal, but that's fine, no one gets everything right in the first draft. That's why movies do reshoots to fix scenes like this.

Of course, the real issue with the scene is that the cruiser's flying with its engines at full burn and these ships are fast enough to travel between Hoth and Bespin without a hyperdrive, so Leia should've been watching the fleet become a tiny dot in the distance.

Anyway, Leia's back, but she's not in the best shape so she'll be taking a nap. Finn sees her drop the tracking device that will lead Rey back to them and picks it up.
 

It's getting dark over on Ahch-To and Chewbacca's being tormented by a group of porgs apparently sad that he's eating one of their friends. Maybe even their mother, we don't know. All they're doing is staring at him but that's bad enough.

We don't know if Chewie finishes his meal or not, but he does growl at them and make them fly away.
 

Meanwhile Luke visits the Falcon and finds Han's dice, which mean a lot more to him than they do to me. They apparently appeared in one scene of the original trilogy and the scene that was going to reintroduce them in The Force Awakens ended up being cut. So this is one of those 'remember this?' moments, except with something we would never remember.

Also, that's apparently writer/director Rian Johnson making a cameo appearance in the film as Luke Skywalker's hand.

Star Wars: Episode VI - A New Hope

For no reason in particular, here's a shot from the first Star Wars movie, showing the gang hanging out together in the Millennium Falcon's main hold.

Speaking of the first movie, Luke is reunited with his old friend R2-D2, who uses bad language and emotional manipulation to get him back into the game. Seriously, Luke tells him off for swearing while on a sacred island, so I guess we just got confirmation that R2 can get crude with his beeps.

This time we get a reference everyone will remember as he plays the hologram message from Leia to Obi-Wan Kenobi from back in A New Hope. The filmmakers found the original footage and were able to reuse it.

Luke's been trying his best to ignore his sister's call for help, but he's got no defence against this. He still doesn't want the Jedi around in the universe and he's not coming back with them, but he agrees to give Rey three lessons... on why the Jedi need to end.

It's nice that R2-D2 could play such a crucial role in the plot even though he basically only has a cameo. In fact, I'd say that Poe is arguably the main protagonist at this point; not bad for a guy who was barely in The Force Awakens. Rey's currently in second place and I guess Finn is technically in this part of the movie too. He did have more screen time than Paige (barely), but what he did with it wasn't nearly as memorable. Maybe he'll do better next time.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Star Trek: Discovery's latest adventure, Whistlespeak. I know this is a jarring shift of gears when I'm only 25% of the way through The Last Jedi, but I don't want to let Discovery get ahead of me.

If your mind is still on the movie you can always leave a comment and share your thoughts on the story so far. Everyone's got opinions about The Last Jedi so I'm sure you've got something to say.