Director Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is less than a month away. And it’s been a pretty good year for Johnson. He’s the only “Star Wars” filmmaker that hasn’t been kicked off, fired or pushed off his film in the last 18 months. Not only that, Lucasfilm seems to love the guy and they’ve given him the keys to a new upcoming “Star Wars” trilogy that apparently won’t arrive until 2020 and will have nothing to do with the Skywalker saga.
READ MORE: ‘Star Wars’ Live-Action Series Is Coming To Disney’s Streaming Services For 2019
With the movie right around the corner, right on cue comes deeper reveals, content, photos and more from Entertainment Weekly who are all over this movie. The magazine delivers four cover with various ‘Last Jedi’ characters gracing them, almost a dozen new photos and lots and lots of insider stories from the cast.
READ MORE: Rian Johnson Creating New ‘Star Wars’ Universe Film Trilogy
While Mark Hamill recently debunked fan theories that Luke has already turned to the dark side in “Last Jedi,’ Johnson’s nevertheless toying with that idea of contrasting, but tempting opposites in the movie. “There’s a history in ‘Star Wars’ of the attraction between the light and the dark, whether it’s the story of Anakin basically turning from this sweet kid and seeing his seduction to the dark side, or even with Luke,” he said.
“Even though you never really believe he’s going to go over to the dark side, the whole revelation of ‘I am your father’ has to do with Vader and this darkness that [Luke] thought he could just dismiss as ‘That’s the bad guy. I don’t have any of him in me,’” he explained. “Suddenly he realizes ‘No, I come from him. I have quite a bit of him inside me.’”
The theme seems to continue throughout the movie. EW suggests Rey and Kylo Ren have a kind of strange admiration for one another that could pull them together.
“He has been aware of this ability in himself from such a young age, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people around him who are on the same level,” Adam Driver said of his character in relation to Rey as a person with some of the same abilities he has. “I think that there is something familiar there, as well as something to be feared, or something … that he can’t quite place.”
EW digs deeper into many of the stories and subplots of ‘The Last Jedi,’ more details about Laura Dern’s character and whether or not Finn, wounded mortally in “The Force Awakens,” will ever get his mojo back. But where does it go next? Johnson suggests his film doesn’t tell the full story, there is much, much more to come and it might be more complex than you think.
“There’s a big part of the story yet to be written and not by me,” Johnson said, alluding to J.J. Abrams who has been tasked with directing ‘Episode IX.’ “But I don’t think it’s very interesting if the whole story is just ‘Will Kylo get his comeuppance?’ He’s a more complicated character than that and I think he deserves a more complicated story than that. I don’t see the point of trying to get behind his mask and learn more about him if all we’re going to learn is ‘Yeah, he’s just an evil bad guy that needs to be killed.’”
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” opens December 15. Tide yourself over with these new photos and mag covers until then.
