The teaser trailer for The Last Jedi dropped today and it looks real good!
Just a few quick points:
The trailer opens with Rey (Daisy Ridley) still on the island where she found Luke (Mark Hamill), at the end of The Force Awakens. Then we hear the voice of Luke – you can hear the Joker in his voice if you listen hard enough – telling Rey to “breather … just breathe.” Incidentally, this line, as well as the instructions that follow, remind me very strongly of how Luke was trained by Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah.
Anyway, what follows is a kind of foreshadowing – I think – of the central theme here: the restoration of the balance between the Light and the Dark sides of the Force. Rey’s hand, lingering over a <del>cracked tablet</del> torn parchment with the sigil of the balanced Force seems to reinforce this. Perhaps Rey will succeed where Luke failed?
After that, we see flash cuts of Finn (John Boyega), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), and then Rey again, this time sporting a padawan hairstyle and carrying a lit blue lightsaber. Blue! And speaking of lit sabers, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) pops up too, wielding his red saber with the raggedy cross guards, while a menacing voice – <del>Ren’s</del> Luke’s – intones: “I only know one truth … it’s time for the Jedi to end.”
The trailer closes with a shot of Luke, standing just inside the mouth of a dark cave, silhouetted against a brightly lit exterior. Then the titles fade in with “Star Wars” outlined in red.
Watch it!
I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised not to see Leia (Carrie Fisher) here – it would’ve been cheap pandering, I think, if they had included her. Still, this is just the teaser trailer, so we’ll have to wait and see. Overall, however, this definitely looks like it’s gonna be a darker Star Wars than any of its predecessors, and it might very well turn out to be the Star Wars movie we’ve all wanted to see. What do you think?
<span style=”color: #ff6600;”><strong>UPDATE:</strong></span> I guess I spoke too soon. Leia does appear in this trailer, if only in silhouette, perhaps as a part of Rey’s vision of “light.”