Because it’s Friday, Congress is out of
session, and not everything needs to be political, now seems as good a time as
any to offer a brief analysis of the latest Star
Wars trailer, which was released last week.
This teaser is similar in style to the first trailer for 2015’s
The Force Awakens—brief, disjointed
clips of only a few seconds each, promising a grand new story but offering
little in the way of plot details. We know more now about the Episode VIII plot
than we did at the same point for VII, based on both the trailer and public
statements by the cast and crew, but not much. Rey will train as a Jedi under
Luke Skywalker. The First Order will grow in strength, and there will be a
massive space battle at some point in the movie. Not exactly a lot to go on,
which only heightens the anticipation even further.
The trailer raises plenty of questions—What’s
with the salt-flat planet and the speeders kicking up red dust? Does the shot
of a large burning structure mean we’ll get a flashback depicting Kylo Ren’s
destruction of the new Jedi Order?—but the biggest is undoubtedly in the last
few seconds, when a voiceover of someone who sounds a lot like Luke Skywalker
intones, “It’s time for the Jedi to end.” What?
Does that mean Luke has strayed to the
dark side over the course of his long seclusion from the galaxy? Is he just
dejected and discouraged by the endless wars, and the failure of the Jedi to do
anything to stop them? Or does he mean that it’s time for the old Jedi, the old methods of teaching,
to end, and for the Jedi Order to become something new and different? Of
course, that last possibility assumes that the Order Luke rebuilt after Episode
VI was exactly the same as the Order in the time of the Old Republic. We don’t
have any evidence from The Force Awakens
to suggest that, and the Jedi Order founded by Luke in the old Expanded Universe
stories (now branded as non-canon Legends) is quite different from that which
served the Old Republic, which—if those aspects are carried over into the new
canon—would make another “rebirth” seem rather pointless.
Episode
VIII: The Last Jedi comes out in
December. It can’t get here soon enough.
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