Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I am continuing to write about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

You're reading part two (of five), but if you'd rather jump back and read PART ONE, just click the text.

It's a bit of a shame I reckon that this isn't called Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, to match the earlier films. Sure it says 'Episode VIII' in the scrolling text at the start of the movie, but it's not on the poster or the Blu-ray cover. They could've at least stuck the number on the spine!

To be fair, the Star Wars movies only started to put emphasis on the episode numbers when the prequels came out. Before The Phantom Menace's name was finally revealed the movie was just called Episode I. You can get Episode I: The Visual Dictionary and Episode I: Racer. Companies only like numbers in their titles when they're low, that's why comics keep getting rebooted to a new issue #1. Funny thing is, in the rare cases when sequels do get high numbers in the title, they seem to sell just fine. Star Trek VI and Furious 7 did well enough, and the Final Fantasy games didn't truly take off until Final Fantasy VII.

Okay, I'll be going through another 50 minutes of this movie scene by scene, so with any luck I will be hitting the film's halfway point this time. It'll be close though. Also, there will be SPOILERS.

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Previously, in Star Wars: The Last Jedi:

Finn woke up in a Resistance cruiser's sickbay to find that his injuries from The Force Awakens had healed and his friend Rey had gone on a mission to the sacred Jedi island of Ahch-To to recruit Luke Skywalker. That hasn't been going great so far, as Luke is really done with the whole Jedi thing, though he did promise to teach Rey a few things. Meanwhile, Leia has been getting pretty sick of Poe disobeying orders and getting people killed, though their disagreement was put on hold when the First Order tracked down their fleet and blew her up. Leia used her Force powers to make it back to the ship before falling unconscious, but she dropped the beacon that Rey needs to return to the fleet. Finn noticed and picked it up, but he seems to want to hold onto it himself for a bit.

And now, the continuation:

The Resistance fleet is still being chased by the nefarious First Order, but they've gotten enough space between them that they can relax for a moment without being shot at. Well okay, they're still being shot at, but at this range their shields can handle it. Would this have been a different story if Poe hadn't sacrificed all of their bombers to destroy the enemy's fleet-killer dreadnought? That's a question that the movie has no interest in answering, but seeing as they're being chased by an even bigger dreadnought now I'm not sure it would've changed much.

Fortunately the Resistance cruiser Raddus has a second bridge on the underside of the ship, so they can still steer the thing. Though Commander D'Acy informs the crew that Leia is the only survivor of the ship's bridge crew and she is currently unconscious. Sadly Admiral Ackbar didn't survive.

Wait, that was Ackbar who got blown up? They just killed off Admiral Ackbar like that?

Star Wars: Episode IV - Return of the Jedi

The guy didn't have a huge role in Return of the Jedi, people mostly remember him for saying "It's a trap!" But I think he deserved more than to get blown up in the background of someone else's fake out death scene. Just a little bit more, nothing too extreme. Like maybe he could have rammed the cruiser into an enemy ship near the end of the movie maybe, something like that.

With Leia out and Ackbar down, command has been passed to Vice Admiral Holdo from the cruiser Ninka, played by Laura Dern in purple hair.

Vice Admiral Holdo doesn't seem dressed for the job, but that's the good thing about being in a rebellion, you can wear what you like! She's going more for the Mon Mothma former senator look I guess.

We're definitely supposed to have a reaction to the way Holdo looks and behaves, as she's less believable as a military commander than the fish man with giant eyes. In fact, she was apparently even weirder originally and they toned down Dern's performance in reshoots.

Holdo's only just taken command and she's already facing her first test of leadership: Poe. Their star pilot has been reckless and insubordinate to the point where Leia just demoted him. But he's also one of the highest-ranking survivors of a rag-tag gang of heroes united by a common desire to stand up against tyrants and the others look up to him. Plus he's clearly the kind of person who will take action on his own initiative if he feels strongly that something important isn't getting done.

Basically, he could be useful if you get him on your side and a problem if you don't, and when he very respectfully requests to know what the plan is she gets pissed off at him for losing their bombers and tells him to just go away and follow orders! We're naturally on Poe's side, so the film is deliberately painting Holdo as an antagonist.

Then we're introduced to new character Rose, who's crying over a crescent-shaped medallion identical to the one her sister Paige was holding when she blew up the dreadnought. Though her mood shifts when she spots the famous hero Finn lurking suspiciously around the escape pods. At first she's straight-up star-struck at meeting a main character, but when she figures out what he's up to she stuns his ass for being a deserter. Hey, no one ever had an issue with Han leaving, even in Empire Strikes Back when he'd been working for the Rebels for years!

This scene was apparently rewritten during production because Kelly Marie Tran was just so cheerful they decided to make use of it, instead of making her character suspicious of Finn from the start.

Finn eventually gets to explain that he's not trying to run to save his own skin, he finished that character arc in the last movie. Now his main goal is to protect his friend Rey. She'll be using the binary beacon to find them, so Finn's going to get it as far away from the First Order as he can.

Finn comes up with a scheme that will win Rose over and let him save Rey: they'll secretly take out the First Order's hyperspace tracker for a few minutes, allowing the fleet to slip away. Though first they need to get past the security and for that they need Maz Kanata's help. Unfortunately she's busy at the moment, but she tells them they can trust the Master Codebreaker in the city of Canto Bight. It's not a planet, just a city, so that narrows it down a bit.

The plan relies on them being able to take a shuttle out to another planet, pick this guy up, and then return to the exact position the chase is at in order to sneak on board the First Order dreadnought Supremacy. It kind of raises the question, why they can't just ferry people off the ship with multiple trips in the shuttle? Also, why doesn't the First Order just hyperspace to a point ahead of the Resistance fleet? These questions are not answered.

C-3PO points out that Holdo won't agree to a reckless Star Wars hero plan like this, but Poe's got a solution for that. They just won't tell her.

Meanwhile, on Ahch-To, Rey and Kylo Ren are having a weird morning, as they can suddenly see each other as if they were in the same room. This is not a Force power we've seen before!

The first thing Rey does is shoot him, though all that achieves is to blow a hole in the ancient Jedi hut she was sleeping in. The first thing he does is try a mind trick to make her bring Luke Skywalker to him, which obviously doesn't work either. So he switches to figuring out what's going on here. He knows enough about the Force to know that she can't be projecting herself as the effort would kill her. So there's an important piece of information for later.

I've read that these scenes were actually filmed with both actors present in each location, which probably helped a lot for their performance even if one of them was always standing behind the camera.

Luke comes out to see what's up and we're suddenly able to see the village is full of these frog nun caretakers doing chores... and fixing holes in their ancient huts whenever they appear. Rey doesn't think they like her.

Skellig Michael island really does have ancient stone huts which were home to real-life monks over a thousand years ago, but the production crew built their own version of the monastery on a cliff in Ireland about 20 miles to the north. Much less awkward than filming on a remote World Heritage site full of protected wildlife.

Rey's first lesson from Luke involves sitting on a conspicuously dangerously narrow cliff, but then everything's like that on this island. Even the huts are on a cliff. She still hasn't given up on getting him to come back with her though, explaining that the Resistance needs someone who can fight Kylo Ren as he's way too strong in the Force.

One of the criticisms of The Force Awakens is that Rey became strong enough to take on the main villain with no training and didn't need to put in the work to get good. She was doing mind tricks and everything. But here Luke asks her to spill everything she knows about the Force, it turns out her knowledge is actually pretty limited.

She says that it's a power that Jedi have that lets them control people and make things float, and that's all she's got. Luke replies with his catchphrase for the movie "Impressive, every word in that sentence was wrong". It's not a power and it's not about lifting rocks.

He explains that the Force is an energy field that binds the universe together and Rey replies "Okay... but what is it?"

Luke has her close her eyes and reach out, and when she takes him literally he trolls her with a leaf.

She reaches out with her feelings instead and sees clips illustrating concepts like life, warmth and violence. That's it, that's the Quickening! Sorry, wrong movie.

The meaning of this lesson is that the Force is everywhere, in all living things, and the Light Side will continue to exist just fine without the Jedi. But she reaches out further, to a sinister place beneath the island, and it starts calling her. The music indicates that this is not a good thing. That, plus the way the cliff is falling apart.

Then she gets a bucket of water poured on her head in reverse and snaps out of it. So that was weird. I don't quite get this part.

It's a good scene though I reckon, and I like how it bounces between the two characters as they each try to make their point and end up learning something new about the other. Luke brought Rey up here to teach her why the Jedi should die but now she's freaking him out with how she didn't even try to resist the Dark Side.

She changes the subject and mentions there's something she didn't see: him. He hasn't just cut himself off from the Jedi, he's cut himself off from the Force. He changes the subject back, saying that he saw this raw power from Ben Solo as well and it didn't scare him enough back then. So there's another hint at what's bothering him.

(Though he can't be sensing her Force power as he's cut himself off from the Force, so I guess he's just horrified by how she got soaked by a whole bunch of evil water).

Chewie seems to have made friends with the porgs in the meantime, or at least he's stopped trying to get them out of the Falcon. They're just tearing that seat apart right in front of him.

Outside, Rey's experiencing rain for maybe the first time in her life when she has another vision of Ren. They're still not entirely getting on and she gets on his case a bit for murdering her mentor Han, who also happened to be his father. After their chat he realises that his hand is wet from the rain, so that's a little more of a connection than they had before.

I wasn't 100% keen on this unique Force weirdness much the first time I watched The Last Jedi, but I've warmed to the idea after watching Rise of Skywalker. I can see it from a different point of view now.
 

Meanwhile Finn, Rose and BB-8 leave the Resistance cruiser in a shuttle, with Lieutenant Connix covering for them on the bridge by lying about them just being debris. The heroes have just 18 hours before the fleet runs out of fuel so they need to find this guy quickly. Deadlines are a theme with these sequel trilogy movies, everyone's always in a huge rush.

They take a hyperspace trip to Canto Bight, which I keep wanting to call Canto Blight. That's not what it is though. Rose has heard stories of the place. Like Mos Eisley, it's supposed to be full of the worst people in the galaxy.

Cut to rich people drinking space champagne at a casino. Which I guess would be from the planet Champagne in this galaxy.

Anyway, the heroes park their ship on the beach and head inside to look for the Master Codebreaker.

There's a clever shot here that flies across several casino tables before it reaches Finn, who's taking it all in with a big grin on his face. Finn's a former Stormtrooper who spent most of his life mopping floors in various First Order ships and bases, so he's probably seen nothing like this in his life. Rey's learning about the Force in her adventure while he's learning about the galaxy.

Rose hasn't had such an isolated life though and she's clearly not impressed by this place.

BB-8 gets waylaid for a bit by someone mistaking him for a slot machine, and honestly this is a bit too cartoony for me. I loved the little droid in The Force Awakens but I'm not into what they're doing with him in this film.

Meanwhile, Finn and Rose are having zero luck spotting their guy. Though they do spot a racetrack outside and go to watch the fathiers (space horses) run. Though Rose tells him to look closer and he takes that literally, looking through a telescope to see the animals being whipped.

Rose explains that she hates this place because these are the people who've gotten rich from the business of star wars, selling weapons to the First Order. And we actually hear a bit about the First Order here, as Rose reveals that they strip-mined her colony and then shelled it to test their weapons. This is good! I mean it sucks what happened to her, but it's good that the First Order are getting fleshed out very slightly more.

The prequel trilogy has been criticised for going on and on about the taxation of trade routes and so on, but at least those movies put in the work and did some actual world building. Perhaps I'm giving them more credit than they deserve, maybe series like The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch did most of the work of fleshing out that era, but the three films clearly gave the writers enough to inspire them. Meanwhile, Rise of Skywalker inspired The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special... which is a time travel adventure that jumps to the past.

Anyway, the heroes eventually succeed in their quest to find the trustworthy Master Codebreaker (played by Justin Theroux)... but then they get arrested for a parking violation. This is why you always gotta park in a docking bay or in the desert way outside of town.

Back on Ahch-To, Rey is practicing with her staff and showing off all her pre-existing combat skills, when she gets the idea to practice with the lightsaber instead. The thing scared her back in The Force Awakens but she's getting more comfortable with it now that it's stopped giving her weird visions.

I think The Force Awakens was the first Star Wars movie to use an LED prop saber which actually illuminates the actor and environment, and you can see here that it gives the blade a different look than in earlier trilogies.

This is what what the lightsabers looked like in the first two films. Luke's holding the exact same lightsaber that Rey is, so it should look the same, but the blade isn't even consistent across the original trilogy.

The two images on the left are from the original Star Wars, which used a spinning rod covered in retroreflective sheeting that appeared to glow on camera. Then they rotoscoped the colour on top afterwards... except for the frames they missed. Honestly I think these lightsabers look pretty good a lot of the time, with a bit of chaotic flickering to them. There weren't much fun to fight with though, as they were fragile and had to be held in a way that reflected the light.

The second two images are from Empire Strikes Back where they decided to use metal rods as blades and do all the glow in post production. Much easier to film a good sword fight that way. They apparently created a mask for each frame that covered everything except the blade and then shone a light through it to make an authentic-looking glow that stays a bright white during motion.

Here's the same lightsaber again, in Revenge of the Sith.

The prequel trilogy gave us the cleanest, brightest blades imaginable thanks to the magic of computers. When they move they become perfect wedges of white and their glow is always vivid no matter the background. They look great and there are no rotoscoping errors, but they're a bit lifeless and sterile by comparison. Plus, there's still no light hitting the actors except in a few specific moments.

In theory, a practical LED-lit blade augmented with modern CGI should be the best of both worlds, giving us the natural glow of the retroreflective sabers along with the vivid colour of the prequel sabers, while also casting interactive light on the actors as a bonus.

The trouble I have with it though is that the saber can end up looking like a chunky light tube instead of an energy blade and out here in the daylight you can barely even see it sometimes. Though the effect does works better inside, where it's darker.

Rey demonstrates her control by swinging the blade and stopping short just before hitting the rock. She actually does a great job of it... until she doesn't, and the blade goes right through. Everywhere worth visiting on Ahch-To is near a cliff, so when the rock falls it goes over the edge.
 

Fortunately, the caretakers below are miraculously unharmed. It's only their wagon that gets smashed, and you can buy them anywhere on Ahch-To.

This moment illustrates how a loss of control for someone as powerful as Rey could have horrible consequences for other people... but it's mostly here for a joke. I just feel sorry for the poor frog nuns though and I want Rey to go and build them a new wheelbarrow later as penance. To show that she's a good person.

But right now it's time for lesson 2.

Luke explains a bit about his philosophy and how his opinions of the Jedi have changed after watching the prequel trilogy. Their hubris allowed Darth Sidious to create the Galactic Empire right under their noses and he wiped them all out. The Jedi let Sidious corrupt his father into becoming Darth Vader. In fact, he even blames the Jedi Master who trained Vader, which is a bit of a mean thing to say about poor Obi-Wan.

Rey points out that story had a happy ending, when he redeemed Anakin and brought balance to the Force. But Luke feels that it was his own Jedi hubris that let it all happen again. The First Order took power like the Empire did, his sister's son was corrupted like Vader.

And his Jedi temple fell. Luke was so destroyed by this that the movie breaks Star Wars rules and shows a straightforward flashback.

Luke reveals that he had sensed the darkness growing in Ben Solo and when he confronted him, his student turned. Ben took some of the other Jedi students so they could appear in a later movie as the Knights of Ren and killed the rest. Leia didn't blame him for what happened to her son, she blamed Snoke, but Luke couldn't forgive himself. He had failed. The Jedi had failed, again.

I've noticed that Luke has a very different teaching style to Obi-Wan and Yoda. They had him deflecting blaster fire, doing somersaults and lifting rocks to give him the combat skills he'd need to stand a chance against Vader and the Emperor, but they didn't give him the context he needed to understand and defeat them. In contrast, Luke's not teaching Rey anything about how to fight Ren, he's just trying to get across how much the Jedi suck.

Rey's got some wisdom for Luke though: Kylo failed him, but she won't.

It's been 12 hours since Finn, Rose and BB-8 arrived at Canto Bight and the fleet isn't doing well. The ships are basically motionless relative to each other but they've had their engines on the whole time, so when the medical frigate's fuel runs out and its engines switch off it suddenly slows down in relation to the other ships. This drops it in range of the Supremacy and Hux is so happy to finally get to blow something up!

The ship had mostly been evacuated, but the captain ended up going down with it just to make this more sad.

With 6 hours of fuel left Holdo makes the hard choice to... continue driving in a straight line. Connix is clearly getting worried now.

Finn and Rose are still stuck in a cell for parking their shuttle on the beach, but their cellmate Benicio Del Toro turns out to be a resourceful guy. He was trying to sleep, but they kept him up by talking about how they need a codebreaker and a thief, so he just gets to his feet and opens the door for them.

They see him leave... and then they run in the opposite direction! Maybe they still think they can reach the Master Codebreaker?

Fortunately BB-8 has broken into the prison and he has Del Toro's back. In fact the droid has somehow bound and gagged three guards already and he takes down another by firing the coins he collected during his time as a slot machine. I know Star Wars is a family movie series that has to keep children from dozing off, but how does any of this make any sense?

I mean this coin launcher he's got installed begins smoking like a gun barrel, so the droid puts it up to his mouth and blows the smoke away.

Why does Rian Johnson want me to hate BB-8? The droid used to be one of my favourites but he's just a cartoon character right now. Actually, that's unfair to cartoon characters like Ahsoka, Ezra and Omega. He's this movie's Jar-Jar Binks.

Meanwhile, Finn and Rose went straight for the sewer entrance that detention blocks just seem to have in the the Star Wars universe, and they end up in the fathier stables. They're not out of the woods yet though, as a stable boy gets startled and is about to hit the alarm. Finn does a pratfall, landing on his ass, but Rose steps up and shows the kid her Resistance ring. It's got a little slider on it that reveals the Rebel Alliance logo and that's all the kid needs to see to help them out.

They release all the fathiers just as the cops arrive and I hope no one got any bones broken or fingers severed as those guys got properly trampled.

So now Finn and Rose are riding a fathier in a stampede through the streets of Canto Bight. A bit of action to break up all the talky scenes. They wrecked the casino first and now they're smashing every car along the way. This was actually filmed on location in Dubrovnik, Croatia, so it's a real street. They just added some Star Wars doorways to the walls and dressed it up a bit.

Unfortunately their ship explodes just before they reach it, which seems to happen a lot in the sequel trilogy. This is a bit of a problem as they needed that ship to escape the cops and return to the fleet, not that they'd be able to do much good without a codebreaker. It seems like their mission has ended in absolute failure, though Rose feels like it was worth it. They've inconvenienced some ultra-rich weapon dealers and freed some animals from cruelty, so that's a reasonable amount of rebellion for one evening.

Will the animals stay free? Probably not if they keep hanging around close to the city. But that's true of Finn and Rose as well.

Surprise! Benicio Del Toro decides to swing in at the last moment like Han Solo and pick them up in his ship, putting the mission back on track. I guess BB-8 told him where they were.

A lot of people really don't like the Canto Bight sidequest, considering it to be the worst part of the movie. It's only 10 minutes long but it apparently casts a big shadow over the film. I didn't mind it on my first watch, but this time around I was paying attention to what Finn got to do and it wasn't much. This story is all for his benefit, he's the one learning about the world and what it's like to rebel against bad people, but he doesn't get to make any decisions or say anything interesting.

Plus honestly Rose doesn't get to do a lot either. The trouble with the chase sequence is that it isn't about the characters overcoming obstacles with intelligence and skill, it's just about wrecking things. Cops get trampled, the casino gets trashed, cars get stomped, and the heroes mostly just hold on for dear life. Compare that to something like the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi, where Luke and Leia are continually making choices, and it's like night and day.

By the way, the movie has gotten really dark. I know night is really dark when you're far away from street lights, but it's a movie, I want to see things.

See, look how dark this is right now. And it's a full moon!

Luke goes back to his favourite spot on the cliff and tries to reconnect with his unconscious sister with the Force, while Rey has another long distance chat with Ren that she doesn't want to have.

She asks him why he hated Han so much, then turns around to see that he's got his shirt off.

Well at least she didn't catch him taking a crap.

Rey wants him to put a cowl on to cover up his sexy evil body, but he's evil so he's not gonna. He explains to Rey that her parents are her weakness. They abandoned her and now she's obsessed with finding out who they are. She needs family so much she just keeps latching onto any father figure she meets. First Han and now Luke.

Then he tells her his own version of what happened that night the Jedi temple fell. The truth, from his point of view. Ben woke up to find his bedroom illuminated by the green light of a lightsaber, held by a master who feared his power.

Damn, Luke's looking scary in this flashback. This isn't the kind of thing you want your heroes to be doing. Hey he's holding his green Return of the Jedi saber! And we get to see Ben's Jedi saber as well.

Ben reacted fast, bringing his blade up to defend himself, giving us at least one scene of lightsabers clashing in this movie. Then he brought the ceiling down onto them both.

Ren tells Rey to "Let the past die, kill it if you have to," which is a line that seems to have really stuck with people. It can be a seen as a message about Star Wars itself, that we have to let the old stories and heroes go before we can truly move on. But it's from the bad person with wrong opinions who literally murdered Han Solo so I'm not considering it to be the film's overall statement.

In fact, it's a bit weird that Ren's the one saying this, considering how much he wanted to be Darth Vader. But I can see him rebelling a bit against Snoke after failing at everything he's tried to achieve, losing both parents, and getting yelled at. Screw Darth Vader, he wasn't even all that great at being evil anyway!!!

Rey is still trying to figure things out so she follows her feelings to that Dark Side cavern she saw earlier. I guess it's a bit like the Dark Side cave in Empire Strikes Back where Luke fought an image of Vader which turned out to have his own face.

Rey also has a vision, though it's not of Kylo Ren or Snoke or even her parents. All she sees is herself, with her immediate past stretching out in front of her and her future selves behind her.

I guess she's so focused on what she is and where she fits in that it's all she's seeing, but who can even say? It's one of the trippiest sequences in any of the Star Wars films and it gets even weirder when she starts talking about the events we're seeing in the past tense. She came there because she wanted to see her parents and she does see shadowy figures approaching... but it's still only her.

It turns out that she was describing the vision to Ren afterwards. She seems to have gotten a lot more friendly towards him all of a sudden and she tells him he's not alone. The two reach out to each other and actually touch hands...

And then Luke comes in and sees what they're up to.

Unfortunately for the frog nun caretakers, Luke has reconnected with the Force enough to blast the ancient hut apart in anger, leaving Rey sitting in the rain. Anger being one of those bad emotions Jedi shouldn't have. It was a really good effect though, and it was apparently done practically by attaching wires to the foam bricks and pulling them all at the same time.

Rey reflects Luke's bad mood right back at him, asking if he did try to murder Ren in his sleep. He yells at her to get off the island and walks off, so she smacks him around the back of his head with her stick. He didn't see that coming with his Jedi precognition!

Luke tears a bit of metal off with the Force and uses it to defend himself. It's probably not a good idea to be waving metal rods around in a storm, but Rey's enraged by the revelation that Luke turned Ben into the monster that killed Han and is terrorising the galaxy, and she's cutting loose.

It's not an effortless battle for Luke, but he's clearly the Vader in this situation. He deflects all the attacks he doesn't outright dodge, and even gives her a tap on her back to remind her who the master is. Luke finally just takes her staff away from her, so Rey raises the stakes by grabbing the lightsaber. He stumbles backwards to get out of the way, using the Force to break his fall, but he doesn't seem to have a move to get out of this one.

Though maybe stumbling back was the right move. It ended the fight without anyone getting hurt and he didn't even have to raise a lightsaber against his student this time. A student who may be dangerously close to falling to the Dark Side.

Luke relents and finally reveals the secret that's been tearing him apart, telling Rey his side of what happened the night that Ben Solo turned evil. It's actually very similar to Ren's story.

It turns out that Luke did stand there with a lightsaber, contemplating the murder of his sister's son to avoid all of the screams he saw in his future. A lot of fans think this is bullshit, as the Luke Skywalker from the original movies would've never killed someone in their sleep. Well, we never get an objective version of the scene, but if you believe that Luke is an honest man then he's telling the truth when he says he was never going to harm Ben. And he never did harm Ben. The kid was so Dark Side at this point that he went and murdered most of Luke's students right afterwards, but Luke still feels ashamed for instinctively firing up his blade when he sensed the evil.

It kind of raises the question of how the hell Snoke corrupted Ben so completely from a distance, as Palpatine's influence on Anakin was nowhere near this easy. I kind of hate how inexplicably overpowered Snoke is to be honest.

Rey believes Ben's choice hasn't been made yet and there is still time to pull him back to the light. She mentioned earlier that she knows how Darth Vader's story ended and now she thinks she can do the same thing and get the good ending. In fact, she's seen the future!

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Unfortunately, she doesn't realise that she's about to re-enact the part of Empire Strikes Back where the young hero gets a premonition and rushes off to face their enemy without enough training, despite Luke straight up telling her "This is not going to go the way you think." That should've been the tagline for the movie really.

Rey tries one last time to give Luke his lightsaber back and get him to help the Resistance but he still won't do it. Luke was supposed to be their last hope, but now Rey believes that it has to be a redeemed Ben Solo. It's funny how she never once considers their hope might be her. There is another!

It's just occurred to me that the film hasn't undermined any emotional scenes with jokes for ages. It's been very serious since Canto Bight. And dark too.

Once Rey's flown away in the Millennium Falcon, Luke goes to the tree to burn the ancient Jedi texts and destroy their teachings once and for all! The guy is still just as determined as ever to do what's best for the galaxy, he's just come to the conclusion that the galaxy is better off without him or the Jedi in it. No more arrogant masters failing vulnerable students ever again. He's done with this cycle of failure, time for a fresh start. Kill the past.

Suddenly Luke realises he's not alone, as the Force ghost of Yoda has appeared! Luke tells him he's really going to do it, he walks up to the tree... and then stops. I guess he's really not going to do it.

Then Yoda goes and blows the tree up with lightning!

So that's a new trick for a Force ghost. They've never been able to influence the world like that before, though I'm sure it's a little bit easier to summon lightning when they're already in a thunderstorm. On a sacred Jedi island.

Luke actually rushes in to save the books but the fire blasts him back. Meanwhile Yoda's just laughing his ass off and tapping his feet. The guy's back to his mischievous persona he had for five minutes in Empire Strikes Back before revealing his true identity. Also he's back to being a puppet for the first time since The Phantom Menace, made with the original mould from Empire Strikes Back. Fortunately this time the puppet worked out much better so he hasn't been replaced with CGI in a re-release. Yet.
 

This must be bringing back bad memories of staring at his burning Jedi temple. Hopefully it doesn't spread and burn the whole island down. The frog nuns have suffered enough!

Yoda tells Luke to get over the books as they weren't exactly page-turners, and that the library contained nothing that Rey doesn't already possess. I don't know why Yoda's being so manipulative and sneaky here, but his very careful wording indicates he knows that Rey took the books with her. I mean why wouldn't she? Luke told her 500 times that he wants nothing to do with the Jedi.

On a first watch it seems like Yoda's agreeing that it's time for the Jedi to end and for Rey to make a new start with the wisdom she already possesses. Kill the past. But he's actually saying the opposite.

Yoda taps Luke on the nose with his ghostly stick and tells him he's still looking at the horizon instead of thinking about what's going on now. He's more concerned about the Jedi creating another Kylo Ren than he is about dealing with the one the currently have.

The old translucent muppet lays out the message of the movie by reminding Luke of what he told him in Return of the Jedi: pass on what you have learned. Passing on the ways of the Jedi, but also the failures of the Jedi. Which is what he's been doing this whole time with Rey.

Yoda says that the burden of masters is to be what their students move beyond, which is pretty nice of him. It shows that he respects Luke as a master and implies that he moved beyond him. And he did, he redeemed Darth Vader and defeated the Emperor, dealing with the failures that Yoda and Obi-Wan passed on to him. Then he spent the next 30 years achieving basically nothing it seems.

Return of the Jedi

This is my issue with the Luke Skywalker plot really. I'm fine with him eventually suffering a tragedy and exiling himself, and I'll even give the film bonus points for echoing Obi-Wan and Yoda's exile without just copying it. But Revenge of the Sith set up a sad future for those two fugitive Jedi, while Return of the Jedi promised a bright future for Luke and his students. A future that had already been explored in the books and other media that this movie trilogy eventually replaced!

Now it turns out that Luke became that character from the Hitchhiker's Guide books who lives in a cave and gives visitors a printed list of all the choices they ever made in their life so that other people can make the opposite choices and not end up living in a cave. If you're the type of fan that forms any kind of emotional attachment to characters, that kind of hurts.

Anyway Luke's not in the next bit so I'll be whining about different things in part three of The Last Jedi!

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Discovery season 3, episode 7, Erigah, but I'll be getting back to the rest of The Last Jedi soon.

No one can remember all of this film at once, there's too much of it, so if you want to leave a comment about the events of this particular chapter you can do that right now.