Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer breakdown - everything is explained in this full analysis

Will Rey be turned to the dark side? And what is that adorable creature?
Guy Lodge10 October 2017

“This is not going to go the way you think!” cries Mark Hamill’s revived Luke Skywalker in the course of the banging, clattering, gleaming new Star Wars trailer, which hit the internet overnight to a fevered rush of fan scrutiny.

Yes and no, Luke. On the one hand, this concentrated taste of director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to The Force Awakens — Rogue One now feels like a memory from another dimension — teases a couple of sharp narrative pivots we may not have seen coming.

On the other, when it comes to showing off iconic imagery and familiar faces, the trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi fulfils almost every possible expectation. Lightsabers — ooh, now in brilliant white! The Millennium Falcon zooming through iridescent caverns! The literal cliffhanger on which The Force Awakens left us, picked up precisely where it left off! For most of the two-and-a-half minutes, things go very much the way we think, and that’s just fine.

Still, it leaves us with plenty of questions. Some are small: what is that part-penguin, part-Pokémon critter to Chewbacca’s left? Some are larger: those close-ups of the late Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa are heartrending enough, but is the accompanying voice-over by her tortured son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) about “killing” the past as ominous for her as it sounds? To say nothing of the trailer-closing possibility of Rey (Daisy Ridley) being lured to the Dark Side by Kylo Ren’s outstretched hand.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - In pictures

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Is that already too much information about the eighth entry in the Star Wars canon? In an age where online spoilerphobia has reached hysterical levels, Johnson himself cautioned the most paranoid War-riers to “absolutely avoid” the trailer on Twitter; later, his tongue ever so slightly in cheek, he tweeted to “forget everything I said and watch it watch it watch it”. Most fans won’t need to be told thrice.

Star Wars trailer: Four questions that fans are asking

Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in cinemas on December 14.

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