Star Wars Episode VIII SPOILERS thread

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For all things Episode VIII related info including spoilers.

The release date is now December 15, 2017.

The Official Synopsis from Star Wars.com

“In Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Skywalker saga continues as the heroes of The Force Awakens join the galactic legends in an epic adventure that unlocks age-old mysteries of the Force and shocking revelations of the past.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in U.S. theaters on December 15, 2017.”









New footage in Japanese Trailer

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Even heroes need to be saved – sometimes from themselves.

In this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, we bring you intel from the Star Wars galaxy with an exclusive look at The Last Jedi and the return of the man and the legend known as Luke Skywalker.

Those two things are not one and the same.

When Daisy Ridley’s Rey heard stories of Mark Hamill’s farmboy-turned-Jedi, she expected to discover the warrior we remember from the original trilogy. Instead, she finds a man overpowered by regret, eager to close the book on his past while living out the rest of his days on an isolated island. Isolated … but not unpopulated. We’ll get a new look at some of the creatures who inhabit this Force-sensitive temple alongside Skywalker. (And we don’t just mean the penguin-like Porgs.) As Yoda would say, “No … there is another.”

EW’s cover also delves into another bit of the movie’s hero-worship: John Boyega’s Finn, now a “big deal” in the Resistance, who embarks on a glamorous mission to the casino city Canto Bight alongside Star Wars newcomer Kelly Marie Tran, who plays Rose Tico, a self-described “nobody” who works as a Resistance mechanic. Online at EW.com, we’ll roll out coverage of The Last Jedi in eight installments, beginning today with Luke and Rey, then Finn and Rose, and a look at some of the new creatures and villains.

Tomorrow: Details about the late Carrie Fisher’s final appearance as Leia Organa, with a story from Poe Dameron co-star Oscar Isaac that will make you miss her even more than you do now, if that’s possible. Our goal is to avoid spoilers, but give fans a sense of where The Last Jedi is steering the Star Wars saga – all with insight from our guide, writer-director Rian Johnson (Looper, Brick.)

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Perhaps the only thing more unsettling than meeting your enemy is coming face-to-face with your hero.

That’s where the Star Wars saga left us at the end of The Force Awakens, with Daisy Ridley’s Rey standing atop a craggy, windswept island, holding out Luke Skywalker’s long-lost family lightsaber to the man she knew only as a legend. But in The Last Jedi, she actually has much further to go to find the warrior who inspired all those old stories.

This isn’t the Luke she’s heard about. It’s not the one we know either. This is a broken man. One who would have preferred to stay lost. And he feels the same way about that lightsaber. “The fact that Luke says, ‘I only know one truth. It’s time for the Jedi to end…’ I mean, that’s a pretty amazing statement for someone who was the symbol of hope and optimism in the original films,” Mark Hamill tells EW as part of our new cover story on the Dec. 15 film.

“When I first read it, my jaw dropped,” the actor says. “What would make someone that alienated from his original convictions? That’s not something that you can just make up in an afternoon, and I really struggled with this thing.” Luke definitely does not give Rey the warm welcome he received when he went in search of Alec Guinness’ Ben Kenobi in 1977’s original Star Wars. She is warned. She is given an explanation. Nevertheless …

“She’s so hopeful to everything,” Ridley says. “And obviously there’s a hint of, ‘What the hell?’”. This rejection hits Rey’s abandonment issues. Hard.

As we know, the young scavenger was ditched as a child on the hardscrabble junkyard world of Jakku by unknown parents and left for years to survive on her own. But lately, she has gotten accustomed to making fast friends, like BB-8, Finn, Chewbacca, and General Leia Organa. Even the murderous Kylo Ren became fascinated by her strength and resilience after kidnapping her. “Regardless of everything else, she’s been welcomed. No one ever really turns away from her,” Ridley says.

That changes when she arrives on Ahch-To.

Luke’s brush-off makes Rey miss the gruff warmth of Han Solo, Ridley says, giving us a peek inside the head of her character: “’Oh my God, this other man that I lost within a couple days was somewhat of a father figure. Now he’s gone, and instead I’m with this grumpy guy on an island who doesn’t want me here.’” But Ridley says Rey is also placing huge expectations on Luke. She arrives on the island of Ahch-To, site of a primitive Jedi temple, not to become a hero herself, but to shove Skywalker back into the fight.

“I don’t think one girl, who he doesn’t know, turning up with a lightsaber is gonna make him go, ‘Oh, s—, yeah, of course I’ll get back into the action,’” Ridley says. “But does he not know her?” Hamill says in his separate interview. That’s a question Star Wars fans have been debating for two years. Soon they’ll learn the answer.

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The Last Jedi: Meet the porgs and 'The Caretakers' from Luke Skywalker's island. Part 3 of EW’s new ‘Star Wars’ cover story explores the creatures surrounding Luke Skywalker on Ahch-To

Who doesn’t like porgs? They’re all cute, and fluffy, and ingratiating…But they get everywhere.

Below, in a new image from The Last Jedi, we see Chewbacca at the helm of the Millennium Falcon with one such interloper. These penguin-like wide-eyed creatures are native to the planet of Ahch-To, site of the first Jedi temple, and they’re just one type of new creature the Dec. 15 film introduces to the Star Wars menagerie. The porgs are so ubiquitous, they even leaked out ahead of time, sneaking past Lucasfilm security to bounce around the internet. In real life, they were puppets created through Neal Scanlan’s creature shop, with wide black eyes and furry, flapping wings.

Writer-director Rian Johnson said that although Luke Skywalker retreated to Ahch-To, he didn’t want the Jedi to be alone. Inspiration for the porgs came during a visit to the Irish island of Skellig Michael, where the final scenes of The Force Awakens were shot. “If you go to Skellig at the right time of year, it’s just covered in puffins, and they’re the most adorable things in the world,” Johnson tells EW. “So when I was first scouting there, I saw these guys, and I was like, oh, these are part of the island. And so the Porgs are in that realm.”

But there is another alien life-form inhabiting the primeval Jedi temple.

THE CARETAKERS

“They’re kind of these sort of fish-bird type aliens who live on the island,” Johnson says. “They’ve been there for thousands of years, and they essentially keep up the structures on the island.” The Caretakers are slightly more anthropomorphic than the porgs. They’re animated with a person inside (Daisy Ridley said a friend played one of them) and they wear clothes and speak in an alien tongue. “They’re all female, and I wanted them to feel like a remote sort of little nunnery,” Johnson says. “Neal Scanlan’s crew designed them, and costume designer Michael Kaplan made these working clothes that also reflected sort of a nun-like, spartan sort of existence.” They can communicate with Luke through what Johnson describes as “a blubbery sort of Scottish fish talk” but they’re not thrilled to have him hanging around. Johnson says they “tolerate” his presence.

The Force is connected with life. Yoda’s world of Dagobah was a swamp, teeming with flora and fauna, and so this ocean world would naturally evolve beings who are drawn to this sacred place. Johnson said they’re amphibious and may have risen up from the seas to tend to the buildings on this craggy archipelago eons ago. “You get the sense they did at some point or maybe they occasionally do [return to the sea,] but when we see them, they’re land creatures,” Johnson says. “They’re these big matronly creatures, but they have these little skinny little bird feet. They were really fun to work with on set.”

JEDI CAVE PAINTINGS

We know from the teaser trailer that there is a tree-like structure on the Ahch-To island, and a fragile, ancient book that looks like the Journal of the Whills – a Jedi scripture that dates back to the original Star Wars mythology created by George Lucas. (In last year’s Rogue One, Baze Malbus, played by Jiang Wen, and Chirrut Imwe, played by Donnie Yen, were members of an order known as the Guardians of the Whills.) Johnson said The Last Jedi touches on mystical history but doesn’t dive deeply into creating a whole galactic religion, but there will be elements on Ahch-To that deepen the mythology. “Hopefully it will be fun to discover in the context of the movie,” he says. “My notion was this is a place that goes all the way back. This is where the cave paintings are.” Johnson said he had to resist the urge to make it look too clean, too modern. It had to be something more primitive.

“The first designs that we had were temples, and I just kept pushing it back and saying, ‘No, think earlier, think earlier. Let’s push this all the way back and see how deep we can go into the foundations of where this all started.’”

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The Last Jedi: With Finn and Rose, a 'big deal' is redeemed by 'a nobody'
Part 2 of EW’s new ‘Star Wars’ cover story features John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran

We’ve already seen John Boyega’s conscience-stricken Stormtrooper try to escape from a life of wrongdoing. In The Last Jedi, Finn finds himself ready to abandon the good guys, too. You can’t blame him. He has been critically wounded by a lightsaber attack that still burns and has never quite healed. He watched Han Solo, another reluctant hero, die horribly at the hands of his own son. Finn did his part. Starkiller base has been destroyed. Now he wants out. “It got really real for him,” Boyega tells EW. “And he just wants to get away and not be involved. His intention in the first place was to go to the Outer Rim. He was always brought back [in The Force Awakens,], but this is his chance to get away and perhaps find Rey and go off together. He’s trying to do that at first.”

But it’s not going to be that easy for him.

Along with Luke Skywalker and Rey, the Stormtrooper formerly known as FN-2187 becomes a key part of The Last Jedi’s never-meet-your-heroes theme after befriending Rose Tico, a Resistance mechanic played by Star Wars newcomer Kelly Marie Tran. “Everyone in the space, throughout the galaxy, would have heard about the young Jedi who discovered her powers and defeated Kylo Ren and the young former Stormtrooper who helped save the day,” Boyega says. “He’s a hero to people like Rose, who fight for the Resistance because their homes have been destroyed by the First Order.” Finn’s boast to Han Solo from the previous adventure has come true. “When Rose first meets Finn, that’s how she views him,” Tran says. “He is ‘a big deal.’”

Rose, meanwhile, is not.

A NOBODY IN THE SHADOWS

She is a gearhead, a grease monkey, a behind-the-scenes jack-of-all-trades, while her sister Paige (played by Veronica Ngo) is the dynamic one — a Resistance gunner who fights on the front lines alongside Resistance luminaries like Poe Dameron, Oscar Isaac’s X-wing ace. “Poe Dameron is super cool. Finn’s super cool. Even though [Rose] is good at what she does, she’s not known,” Tran says. “She’s not cool. She’s this nobody, this background player, which is what makes her interesting. She’s not the best. She’s not royalty. She’s someone who is just like everyone else.” But Finn — she’s starstruck by him. “He appreciates the adoration for a second, but when he meets her, Finn is trying to escape the whole war. He’s trying to leave,” Boyega says. “And she comes in and basically gives him a depiction of himself that wasn’t necessarily true.” But he likes the impression Rose has, the vision she has of him.

A good guy. A brave guy.

Seeing himself through her eyes gives the ex-Stormtrooper something to live up to. “It’s now an opportunity for him to be the best he can be. He has to make a decision, and Rose is there to help him make that choice,” Boyega says. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that, yes, she helps Finn stay in the fight, although the urge to get out is still burning inside him. Also… living up to Rose’s high expectations is not a task anyone can truly fulfill.

JOURNEY TO CANTO BIGHT

Just as The Force Awakens seemed to reflect plot points from the original Star Wars, this film follows a few patterns from The Empire Strikes Back, although writer-director Rian Johnson says that was unintentional. “I just tried to kind of ignore that aspect of it and have the story take the shape that it needed to,” the filmmaker says. “But look, Rey is off in a remote location with a Jedi master, and the Resistance is in a tough spot, and we’re intercutting those stories. By its very nature, there are some structural parallels. But these are new characters, they’re dealing with new things, and that ultimately is what defines the movie. So I think that’s going to be unique.” Another parallel with that earlier film: Finn and Rose are part of a squad of good guys who head off on a mission to a glamorous location — not Cloud City on the gas giant planet of Bespin this time, but the casino metropolis of Canto Bight on the world of Cantonica.

“The whole city is kind of one sort of luxury resort that’s been built on this very otherwise abandoned, arid planet,” Johnson says. “It’s like Vegas with aliens. So maybe it is just like Vegas.”

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The Last Jedi: Supreme Leader Snoke emerges with elite Praetorian Guard. Part 4 of EW’s new ‘Star Wars’ cover story

Villains always have heroes of their own. But they’re not necessarily anyone you’d ever want to meet. That’s not the case with Star Wars. In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren will venture to the side of one of his malevolent icons, and fans will finally get their wish to see the enigmatic tyrant in the flesh. Supreme Leader Snoke only appeared in The Force Awakens via hologram, but in the new film out Dec. 15, the towering character (performed via motion-capture by Andy Serkis) will finally emerge from hiding.

These will be his protectors – the Praetorian Guard, a variation on the crimson-cloaked Imperial guards who flanked the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.

“The Emperor’s guards were very formal, and you always got the sense that they could fight, but they didn’t,” writer-director Rian Johnson tells EW. “They looked like they were more ceremonial, and you never really saw them in action. The Praetorians, my brief to [costume designer] Michael Kaplan was that those guys have to be more like samurai. They have to be built to move, and you have to believe that they could step forward and engage if they have to. They have to seem dangerous.” The Praetorians get their name from our own true-life history and the elite special guard who protected ancient Roman emperors. “If we can get kids’ ears to perk up in history class a little bit when they hear that, that’d be a cool thing,” Johnson says.

Since we’re seeing the galactic Praetorians up close, that means Adam Driver’s aspiring Sith will also bring us face-to-what’s-left-of-his-face with his Dark Side mentor. “They’re his personal guards,” Johnson says. “They stick with [Snoke]. So they’re essentially bodyguards.” The last time we saw Snoke in The Force Awakens (seen below), he was summoning Kylo Ren and Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux back to his own sanctuary as the Resistance launched a crushing assault on the First Order’s planet-killing device, Starkiller Base.

Star Wars fans have exerted immense energy over the past few years creating Snoke theories aimed at unraveling the villain’s history. Johnson says The Last Jedi will reveal more about Snoke and his goals, but his history will remain somewhat murky. “Similar to Rey’s parentage, Snoke is here to serve a function in the story. And a story is not a Wikipedia page,” the filmmaker says. “For example, in the original trilogy, we didn’t know anything about the Emperor except what Luke knew about him, that he’s the evil guy behind Vader. Then in the prequels, you knew everything about Palpatine because his rise to power was the story.” In The Last Jedi, Johnson says, “we’ll learn exactly as much about Snoke as we need to.” The good news for fans of the bad guy: “We will see more of him, and Andy Serkis will get to do much more in this film than he did in the last one,” Johnson says. “And that guy is just a force of nature.”

In the behind-the-scenes video released at Disney’s D23 Expo last month, there appeared to be a shot of Johnson looking up at a looming figure that many thought looked Snoke-like. Whether it is or not, we still don’t know. But practical effects have been a priority for the new Star Wars films, so will we see Snoke performed as a real-life puppet? “No, it’s entirely a mo-cap performance,” Johnson says. “[Creature designer] Neal Scanlan built a maquette that we had on set for lighting reference and to give the actors a sense of what it was going to feel like. And then we scanned that and [Industrial Light & Magic] used that in their renderings, but Snoke will be an entirely CG creation.” Johnson says Serkis will deliver satisfying menace when we finally get up close and personal with the First Order’s ruler.

“I’d be sitting at the monitor just with my eyes as big as dinner plates,” Johnson says. “It’s one of those performances where after every line, I’d look over at whoever’s standing next to me with an expression on my face like, ‘Oh, my God, we just got that.”

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