Vanity Fair: Five Things That Are Not in Star Wars: The Last Jedi!
Vanity Fair’s latest report on The Last Jedi reveals 5 things that are in the movie and 5 things that are not. The things that are in the movie have already been discussed in the main coverage from yesterday, however the 5 things that are not in the movie give away some really interesting details and can probably give hard times to some fan theories.
From Vanity Fair:
Five things that are not in The Last Jedi
A big, central-to-the-plot romance. For all the fan-fiction fantasies of “Reylo” (an imagined union of Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren) or “Stormpilot” (the same, for John Boyega’s ex-stormtrooper Finn and Oscar Isaac’s pilot Poe Dameron), Johnson says that The Last Jedi offers “no one-to-one equivalent of the Han-to-Leia, burning, unrequited love. In our story, that’s not a centerpiece.”
A major creature character. Though, as mentioned above, The Last Jedi is rife with creatures, Johnson says there is no major non-human character akin to Maz Kanata in The Force Awakens or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. “Most of the creatures are peripheral characters, but they’re throughout the entire film,” he says.
New music from Lin-Manuel Miranda. The Force Awakens included the galactic-dub tour de force “Jabba Flow,” co-written and performed by Abrams and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, but The Last Jedi’s music was written entirely by John Williams, the franchise’s composer since the beginning. Johnson had considered enlisting his cousin, Nathan Johnson, who composed the music for all three of Rian’s prior films, to write some incidental cues. “But,” he says, “I was delighted to learn that John was actually keen to do those.”
Explicit political allegory. Though the vocabulary of Star Wars is threaded into our popular and political discourse—witness Steve Bannon saying “Darkness is good” and name-checking Darth Vader, and the popularity of “RESISTANCE” as a hashtag—Johnson isn’t keen to draw parallels between his story and current events. “To me,” he says, “the power is greatly diminished if suddenly you have a character stand up in front of the Imperial Senate who has orange hair and is saying, ‘Let’s make the galaxy great again.’ It just cheapens it all and divides the audience. What actually matters, and what these films can actually speak to, are the fundamental building blocks of what makes people good, what makes people brave, what are the things we should be fighting for.”
A revelation about Finn’s potential Force sensitivity. Boyega is intrigued that Finn, a civilian, got to wield a lightsaber in The Force Awakens. “He kind of held his own for a bit against Kylo Ren, who’s obviously kind of like a Sith,” he says. “It’s strange to know that Finn stood tall for that long.” Boyega is fluent enough in Star Wars mythology to know that non-Sith and non-Jedi rarely get to use lightsabers, and that when Han Solo did, in The Empire Strikes Back, it was only to slash open the belly of his recently deceased tauntaun so that the freezing Luke could be revived by the animal’s body heat.
In The Last Jedi, Boyega says, Finn’s reasonable facility with the saber is not further explicated. “But you never know,” he says. “I talk to Mark Hamill sometimes and he tells me stories about how he wasn’t told about the ‘Darth Vader is his father’ situation until he got on set. I feel like there must be something going on, something that makes me go, ‘Huh, why does he wield one, and what’s that all about?’ It’ll be interesting to see if that’s ever explored.”
While we can’t straight say that these debunk some of the fan theories, we at least know they won’t be developed in the next movie.
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“Johnson says there is no major non-human character akin to Maz Kanata in The Force Awakens or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.”
I think Maz’s appearance will be relegated to a brief one contained within another Rey force back. Will possibly explain how Maz ended up with the blue lightsaber. As much as I liked her, her role in TFA was to simply drive forward the plot of Rey’s journey to Luke.
I will be really disappointed if Maz doesnt have a bigger role in Last Jedi.
Personally, to me she is the most interesting new character added in the TFA.
She would be a great mentor to both Luke and Rey if they are attemtping to find balance in the force.
“She would be a great mentor to both Luke and Rey if they are attemtping to find balance in the force.”
Speculation. We don’t know how she feels about balance and if she can offer insight as such.
True we dont know if she has found balance or not (I assume she is just a lightside force user).
However, unlike Yoda, she has lived 1000 years not being restricted by the Jedi Code. Thus, she likely has a different interpenetration of the Force.
She likely does, but we don’t know how much she even uses it. Also, we don’t know if her interpretation would fit with Luke’s.
I think you’re all being overly optimistic on this point. In fact, I’m going to put my chips down on “Abrams just had to Abrams, had no resolution in mind for her, and we’ll therefore never get a satisfying answer to any of the questions posed by Maz’s existence or her possession of the saber”. That won’t however kill any future films for me, as I thought the character and the sequence she’s in was really pretty uninspired, an obvious attempt to channel Yoda in a film that hadn’t earned its Yoda yet, and I don’t particularly care to see any more of her.
Ugh. They could’ve just left Maz for TFA. Pretty much confirms my suspicions, though. Would’ve liked to have had an alien as one of the new main characters. This stinks of meddling from K. Kennedy and Abrams. Enough with the abundance of human characters. There are several opportunities to have a new alien character in this movie, but they dropped the ball once again (kind of like what they did with ‘Rogue One’). A galaxy of aliens, and the key players are conveniently human. *sigh* Remember when Abrams said that the Star Wars galaxy should represent the people of Earth?! Sheesh..
They could have eaisly made one of the new characters a humonid alien like a twilek.
Rose Tico would have been an excellent opportunity to introduce a alien character.
We can see humans in every kind of film (outisde star wars). So why not utilise the great alien species which are part of star wars.
Interestingly, The Force Awaken’s working title for the character Maz was Rose. The real life Rose was an influential school teacher of J.J. Abrams. Now, as the story move forwards, we have a new character called Rose.
Why are you obsessed with Twi’leks?
Triggered much?
you are the one following me and commenting on things in a snarky way, so that’s probably enough out of you for the day, snowflake.
*sigh* Feel better about yourself, now?
Twi’leks are hot.
Im not obsessed with twileks. They are just an example of a simple alien which has humanoid features. Thus would all for the actor to not be restricted (as their face is shown); thus the audience can still connect with the actor.
Species like keldor (Plo Koon) would completely cover up the actors face which is a problem.
Ok, just curious. You always mention them specifically.
What if he was obsessed with them, why would that matter to you?
Hey Im Uncle Deadly and I love to make arguments!
How is asking a question (and then giving the reasonable reason for that question) an argument? It’s a discussion, which is the point of these comments.
You seem to be following my comments and saying snarky things at me, so the one making arguments here is you.
“This stinks of meddling from K. Kennedy and Abrams.”
Said with zero basis in fact.
I know rite? It’s not like K. Kennedy is Executive Producer or anything. Grow a brain, please.
Her job is not proof that she meddled with the film in that instance. Your assertion that Kennedy is meddling in the films by not allowing aliens as main characters has no basis in fact. It is wild speculation at best. No need to be a dick about it.
You are every bit guilty of speculation as I am, dick.
There is no public statement by Kennedy suggesting that they would be against having Aliens as main characters. There is no shred of even a hint that she is some how spear heading a movement to not include more Aliens. However, she continually speaks of the need to diversify the films.
Actually there is, if you are implementing racial quotas. Hard to have main characters as aliens when you want them to represent the ‘diversity’ of Earth.
Again with the racial quotas. Yeah, I think im done now. Lol
It is racial quotas, whether you like it or not. Why you are admitting defeat so early is amazing.
Dude, you just said above that the lack of aliens as main characters was because the other two trilogies didn’t have aliens as main characters, either. It is only logical to assume that Kathleen Kennedy would have ultimate say in this since she’s exec. producer. Sheesh.
Yes she has ultimate say inside Lucasfilm, but there is not even anything remotely pointing to the idea that she is spear heading any type of agenda to not include more Aliens. If anything, she does talk about letting the story tellers (writer and/or Director, story group) decide what is probably a lot more than we realize.
What a moronic thing to say with precisely (same as above) zero basis in fact.
Why does it stink of meddling from Kennedy and Abrams? Have they expressed such an idea before in the past? If so, where?
Please, learn to argue before stepping into the ring with the adults.
Give it a rest. You just like arguing for the sake of arguing.
Maz was a plot device, a weakly implemented one, but I do agree we should at the very least see more. I mean she just up and vanishes without very little explanation. I mean seriously, she knows the Force and has been around for a long time. That could be helpful moving forward with this movie.
Representative of earth was more about including more ethnicities. I don’t really take that as we can’t have Aliens. Not having additional Alien main characters is probably more about sticking close to the 6 original films where the main characters outside of the robots and Chewbacca were human.
Is that based on fact or just wild speculation?
Speculation based on the fact that almost everyone involved in Star Wars has continually said how diverse they want to make these new films and how close they want the franchise to feel towards the original movies.
Oh, then my speculation is every bit based on fact-. Since you essentially bolstered my argument by saying Abrams/Kennedy are responsible for lack of alien heroes by implementing racial quotas.
Yes the desire to include a variety of races means they instituted strict quota..wtf.
Apparently so. The desire to make it out about the ethnic diversity of Earth is ALL ABOUT implementing racial quotas. You can’t have one without the other.
It if is about including more ethnicities, then that would certainly explain the lack of aliens as main characters.
Most interesting. I’m fine there not being a romance. This isn’t a SWs problem but more so a movie problem as more too often romances are shoehorned into the story. And that isn’t me discouraging them. Do a romance, if it makes sense and one can make it interesting. TFA, like or hate it, the characters we’ve only just come to realize. Let them develop in this movie and then go to other places. Though, to be fair; ESB could do it because that screenplay was intelligently thought out.
The politics bit does worry me. I trust RJ to give us some necessary context of the world(to be fair, TFA could have saved a lot of trouble, if I was to be honest), but my fear is that he will pull his punches. 30 years have passed since the OT. That is a long time. And yeah, we got the NC to flesh things out, but my question I pose to people is why relegate this stuff to the NC to make the movies make sense. Fans of the movies who want to know this stuff shouldn’t be forced to check out the NC, unless they want to.Plus, the OT didn’t need much context because of what they were fighting for due to its very simple premise.
Here, I feel like there need a bit more. At barebones, let us know who is involved in this conflict and the motivations going forward. Overall, I am super excited for this movie and I do pray that RJ can knock it out of the park. Because, I’d love to see him continue into the mainstream(Perhaps, one day he can do a Thundercats movie. One can dream 🙂 ).
He meant that he wasn’t going to inject real world politics in an allegorical sense… such as Lucas who said the Emperor = Nixon, the battle of endor = Vietnamn, etc etc. I think there will be politics in this movie though, since Bloodlines was based on a lot of ideas that Ryan addressed.
If you think about it that makes sense though, when he wrote & filmed Episode 8 Trump wasn’t president yet.
If that is the case, then I am perfectly fine and one can disregard my sentiments. Yeah, BloodLine was amazing. I love that book, next to Thrawn it is one of my favorite books of the NC and reminded me why Leia was such a badass in the political circuit. And I recalled that RJ did collaborate with Gray on that book with some key notes. So if I see some of that come back, I’ll be excited.
As for SWs and real world politics, it is funny to look at the series. As you stated, ROTJ’s Ewok battle was very Vietnam, something Lucas did mention as an inspiration. Heck, the scene with Palpatine in ROTS convincing the Senate to go Empire I know got a ton of flak as the Iraq War was going on during that time. And you are right about RJ writing the story before the election.
Definitely Lucas based AOTC / ROTS on the Iraq war, I forgot about that. It’s kind of interesting because Lucas had mentioned in the past that his father was a conservative, so that probably influenced his writing Star Wars as his relationship to his father was also an analogy for Luke & Vader.
Why does Lucas’ father being a conservative explain Luke and Vader’s father/son relationship? Seriously?
Lucas & his father had a lot of conflict about a variety of issues. His father didn’t want him to go into film making, a lot of that was due to his father’s conservative values and that definitely had an impact on his drive to succeed as a film maker/ Star Wars’ success.
“the secret history of star wars” details this & how those issues are related. Star Wars was a very personal story for Lucas.
His father would be proud then. Conservatives believe, if you work hard, you’ll succeed. That’s when you deserve something.
Kind of ironic given that most of the people working in the film industry are liberals. Where did all the hardworking conservatives go? (lol)
Yeah that never made sense to me. Kind of like when they were marching and protesting against themselves a few yrs ago.
I’m not sure what you are getting at.
In any case, PM me if you actually want a debate, all I did was explain the difference between what Johnson intended to say & how Lucas injected his political views in Star Wars. If you have a problem with it, take it up with Lucas.
No. I get it. You might of misunderstood. No problems. : )
What does Trump have to do or not do with the lack of politics in the film? Why should it matter? I don’t want to go to Star Wars movie and be preached to. When Lucas set out to make ‘A New Hope’ he said he wanted it to be an entertaining film free of politics (in a time when all there was was politics). Whatever subsequent references to politics were really subtle. I don’t know too many people in the theater watching ROTJ thought of the ewok battle as similar to the Vietnam war unless Lucas told them.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the film as Johnson said.
& what does that have to do with being preachy? Look, all I did was repeat what Lucas said about these political figures/ events & their inspiration on the films. & who cares? It’s not even controversial to say that Nixon & the Vietnam war was evil.
Thank goodness!!!
If they don’t address that last one in some way, then the movie is not worth my time.
dear lord…..
They changed much of the first fcking movie after getting $hook by racist backlash, and that last one about them NOT DOING ANYTHING IN THIS ONE regarding Finn’s use of the lightsaber in TFA — if true — is a continuation of the DIFFERENT direction from where they originally were going to take Finn in TFA.
They prefer pleasing the racists, so they don’t care about my business, and what you think about my stance matters as little to me as what mine matters to Disney when stacked up against racists’ $$$.
I mean, I don’t want to be mean, but what you’re saying sounds…profoundly stupid. You have any source for that? Because Disney has been very, VERY close to the chest with all of the information about the development of the story, and what changes were made after the first draft. They also clearly CLEARLY decided that chasing the $$$ meant expanding the appeal of the franchise outside of middle age and younger white guys, so I’m gonna have to go ఠ_ఠ at your analysis there.
I think it is pretty clear that Finn was never meant to be Force Sensitive or even suspected to be Sensitive. He was a guy who had training with melee weapons, and since he didn’t have the Force he got beat pretty handedly by Kylo. There are no racist-pleasing retcons here, that was the intent from the start.
Are you joking? They were never going to make Finn, an ex Storm Trooper, a force user.. his character and story were done before he was cast…. And everyone loves Mace Windu.. he is black.. like.. what are you saying XD
You know this is a Star Wars news site about all the upcoming films? Might not be your favorite place 😉
So the vibe I’m getting from that one picture is that they’re really intent on making Poe the new Han. Huh. Well, if it means they give Isaac something more to do than be a bland, exposition-spouting costume-stuffer again, I guess I’m all for it.
If they make Poe “the new Han,” then they don’t know what they are doing. Let Poe be Poe.
BUT LOOK AT HIM, MAN! He’s almost wearing Han’s clothes as much as Lando did!
Exactly, let Poe be Poe. I don’t get you people, you all cry foul, when The Force Awakens felt just like A New Hope, and you don’t want The Last Jedi to feel like The Empire Strikes Back. But, you want another character to be just like Han Solo? I don’t get you all, let him be what he is, not a carbon copy. Don’t we have enough of those? Rey=Luke, Kylo Ren=Vader, Luke=Ben/Yoda you really want Poe=Han too? That’s crazy.
I don’t think we’ve seen the ‘new Han’ yet. Poe doesn’t strike me as that character. Let’s wait and see what Benicio Del Toro brings..
Also will not include the one thing I wanted to see on screen:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6447318aa5a7b23cb26a12cd8bf53bff21739c153dfbfe410fad828e3e99ef81.jpg
🙁
maybe in a flashback (he said hopefully)
I had been under the impression that Lupita was indeed in the film ? In fact, I thought there was some footage of Rian and Lupita working together ??
Otherwise, do we not have Maz in this at all ? Without that pernickety lightsabre explanation ? And what about Yoda and the talk of Frank Oz being on set ??
Or, as someone here has said, are these two in the film, just only for brief cameos ??
I’ve always considered romance to be a key ingredient in Star Wars.
The last two movies were quite sterile when it comes to that, leaving something to be desired at certain times (certain scenes with Rey+Finn and Jyn+Cassian, at least from my perspective). Even if it’s not central to the plot, I hope it’s still there.
It’s not gonna ruin the movie or anything, but I think aliens should be more than just set pieces. Humans aren’t the only ones who can leave a mark on the galaxy, right? From a merchandising standpoint, these characters probably have even greater potential to become icons because of their uniqueness, rather than just another human dressed in drab that will sit around on toy shelves. Also, we might as well start putting non-humans in the spotlight now, so that when we’re part of the galactic community irl, we won’t have to risk insulting them with our entertainment.
I’m not really concerned about what they do with the music, as long as John Williams is involved.
Just like romance, the politics part is pretty important to Star Wars. Whether it’s allegorical or not, I don’t really care.
No Force-sensitivity for Finn? That’s a little disappointing. I found him to be the most relateable character in TFA, so I was hoping for big things for the guy (a la Kyle Katarn). I’m guessing they’re keeping him strictly on the military path, and I’m sure they have their reasons.
I wish the people that wrote the books and comics would be involved with the writing of these films because they are not afraid of making aliens main characters.
The further away from film they go, the more freedom they seem to have with these types of details. Even animation does a really good job.
To those five things, I say:
– Thank God
– Meh
– Meh
– THANK GOD
– Thank God
Hayden and Natalie had such a legendary lack of chemistry in AOTC/ROTS that it’s ripples are still being felt today hence no romantic subplot in any of the films ever since.
that’s not true at all.
poor storytelling…
That’s fine. You don’t need a love story all the time. We had an awesome one between Han and Leia. We had a lame one with poor lines and poor acting between Anaikin and Padme. At least this shows TLJ will be different to ESB.