Get ready for ‘The Last Jedi’
The new Star Wars movie lands this week.
Even Oscar Isaac, cool guy supreme, melts into a pool of nerd the moment a Star Wars movie cues up.
“When those little blue letters come up and say “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away … ,’ your heart starts pumping and the Star Wars symbol comes on and the John Williams score starts,” says Isaac, whose hero pilot Poe Dameron returns in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (in theaters Thursday evening). “And immediately, all the emotions and memories from when you were a child boil up inside.”
The franchise weathered a tough year, from Carrie Fisher’s death to directors falling in and out of upcoming installments. But all that goes away for devotees with a new film to spark excitement on where George Lucas’ long-running saga goes next.
Secrets abound, of course, but writer/director Rian Johnson and cast members weigh on what you need to know going into Last Jedi:
Luke is the star of this show.
Johnson wanted to hew The Last Jedi to what has come before. But everything for Johnson started with the original trilogy and Luke, who helped defeat the Empire but has exiled himself from his family and the Resistance fighting the powerful First Order. “No matter how different Luke’s headspace is,” the filmmaker says, “there had to be a gut check where I could check back in with my 10-year-old self and the Luke that he knew, and I had to at least be able to see the line between the two of them.”
The heroes may not be so good and the villains not wholly bad.
The Last Jedi is a film “about the unknown,” says Laura Dern, who makes her debut as Resistance leader Amilyn Holdo. She adds that all the characters explore “the deepest questions George Lucas first presented about the light and the shadow and the humanized part of good vs. evil. (Johnson) let us live in the gray.”
Han’s death affects everyone, but mourning will have to come later.
Harrison Ford’s cosmic smuggler met an untimely demise in The Force Awakens via the business end of a lightsaber wielded by son Ben, aka First Order enforcer Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Johnson teases that Han’s death “lingers through the whole movie, and it’s a factor in everybody’s journey going forward.”
‘Jedi’ is a tribute to Carrie Fisher.
It’s going to be impossible for fans to see her as Leia without getting emotional, Isaac says, because Johnson has treated her final role in a “beautiful and graceful way.”
J.J. Abrams is coming back!
Whatever happens in The Last Jedi, the Force Awakens director returns to wrap everything up in Episode IX. (Abrams replaces Colin Trevorrow, who was ousted in September.) Abrams “sent me an email that said ‘I’m crying!’ and I sent him one back saying, ‘I’m crying, too!’ ” Ridley says.
But Rian Johnson isn’t done yet.
The Last Jedi filmmaker has been tasked to create three new movies outside the saga. Johnson says he’s at “the very beginning of the beginning” with his trilogy but won’t be pulling from the “terrible” stories he thought up as a kid. “Screenwriter me has some notes for 10-year-old me,” Johnson quips. That said, Star Wars at its core is “not about how it looks, it’s about how it makes you feel as a kid. ... That’s the thing I’m going to try to get back to.”