Cover Story: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview. I. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1. Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling- text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long- ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary.
It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2. The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi. At D23 Expo, going on right now, Marvel unveiled a life-size statue of Thanos as he’ll appear in Avengers: Infinity War. And unlike previous glimpses of the Mad. Cast and crew information, synopsis, and comments. Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’1. Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re- stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later. New Hope. Daisy Ridley’s Rey hones her lightsaber skills—and channels her inner Force. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, . He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 6. Rey- Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 1. None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on- screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet- and- exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. No more candy bars. No more stops at In- N- Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, . On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed- gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark- side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co- pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega). Driver’s Seat. Daisy Ridley as Rey, at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, with Joonas Suotamo as co- pilot Chewbacca. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba- boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of . And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks. Freedom Fighters. Carrie Fisher, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Kelly Marie Tran as the rebels General Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rose Tico, with droid BB- 8. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. II. A Long Way from Tosche Station. Rian Johnson, a sandy- haired, baby- faced 4. Californian heretofore best known among cin. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey- centered trilogy. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said. As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action. But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1. Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi- Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un- Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine. You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa- Solos and their little boy, Ben. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard- Cohen- at- Mount- Baldy variety. Night Creatures. Neal Scanlan (seated), creative supervisor of the Star Wars creature shop, and guests at the Canto Bight casino. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch- To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive- shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.” Luke, it transpires, has been living in this village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”That Luke is so changed a person presented Johnson with rich narrative opportunities. The Last Jedi is to a large extent about the relationship between Luke and Rey, but Johnson cautions against any “one- to- one correlation” between, say, Yoda’s tutelage of young Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and old Luke’s tutelage of Rey. He was cast for his sincere mien and Bicentennial- era dreamboat looks—part Peter Cetera, part Osmond brother. He still catches grief, he noted, for one particularly clunky line reading in the first movie, when Luke responds to his Uncle Owen’s order to polish up their newly purchased droids by complaining, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” Though his approach to the line was, he swears, deliberate—“I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve got to make this as whiny and juvenile as I can,” he said—Hamill admitted that his greenness as an actor left him with “somewhere to go later, where I wouldn’t make those kinds of choices.”In his years out of the spotlight, Hamill has flourished as a voice actor, most notably playing the Joker in a series of animated Batman TV shows, films, and video games. He performs the part with a demented brio and an arsenal of evil laughs ranging from Richard Widmark manic to Vincent Price broad—a far cry from the gee- whiz wholesomeness for which he is best remembered. Oscar Isaac, at 3. Driver is 3. 3, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid- 2. Luke Skywalker. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”Star Wars celebrates its 4. Watch the video below to find out six things we wouldn’t have without the franchise. III. Significant New Figures. On the Disney campus, I sat in on a postproduction meeting in which Johnson was reviewing some scenes from The Last Jedi. Star Wars (film) - Wikipedia. Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) is a 1. American epicspace opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first film in the original Star Wars trilogy, the first Star Wars movie in general, and the beginning of the Star Wars franchise. Starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew, the film's plot focuses on the Rebel Alliance, led by Princess Leia (Fisher), and its attempt to destroy the Galactic Empire's space station, the Death Star. This conflict disrupts the isolated life of farmhand Luke Skywalker (Hamill), who inadvertently acquires a pair of droids that possess stolen architectural plans for the Death Star. When the Empire begins a destructive search for the missing droids, Skywalker accompanies Jedi Master. Obi- Wan Kenobi (Guinness) on a mission to return the plans to the Rebel Alliance and rescue Leia from her imprisonment by the Empire. Star Wars was released in theatres in the United States on May 2. It earned $4. 61 million in the U. S. It surpassed Jaws (1. E. T. When adjusted for inflation, Star Wars is the second- highest- grossing film in North America, and the third- highest- grossing film in the world. It received ten Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), winning seven. It was among the first films to be selected as part of the U. S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being . At the time, it was the most recent film on the registry and the only one chosen from the 1. Its soundtrack was added to the U. S. National Recording Registry in 2. Today, it is often regarded as one of the best films of all time, as well as one of the most important films in the history of motion pictures. It launched an industry of tie- in products, including TV series spinoffs, novels, comic books, and video games, and merchandise including toys, games and clothing. The film's success led to two critically and commercially successful sequels, The Empire Strikes Back in 1. Return of the Jedi in 1. Star Wars was reissued multiple times at Lucas' behest, incorporating many changes including modified computer- generated effects, altered dialogue, re- edited shots, remixed soundtracks, and added scenes. A prequel trilogy consisting three prequels was released beginning with The Phantom Menace in 1. Attack of the Clones in 2. Revenge of the Sith in 2. The film will be followed by three more sequels in a sequel trilogy beginning with The Force Awakens in 2. A direct prequel, Rogue One, was released in 2. The film's fourth sequel, The Last Jedi, will be released in December 2. The galaxy is in the midst of a civil war. Spies for the Rebel Alliance have stolen plans to the Galactic Empire's Death Star, a heavily armed space station capable of destroying an entire planet. Rebel leader Princess Leia has the plans, but her ship is captured by Imperial forces under the command of the evil Darth Vader. Before she is captured, Leia hides the plans in the memory of an astromech droid, R2- D2, along with a holographic recording. R2- D2 flees to the surface of the desert planet Tatooine with C- 3. PO, a protocol droid. The droids are captured by Jawa traders, who sell them to moisture farmers Owen and Beru Lars and their nephew Luke Skywalker. While cleaning R2- D2, Luke accidentally triggers part of Leia's message, in which she requests help from Obi- Wan Kenobi. The next morning, Luke finds R2- D2 searching for Obi- Wan, and meets Ben Kenobi, an old hermit who lives in the hills and reveals himself to be Obi- Wan. Obi- Wan tells Luke of his days as one of the Jedi Knights, former Galactic Republic peacekeepers with supernatural powers derived from an energy called The Force, who were all but wiped out by the Empire. Contrary to his uncle's statements, Luke learns that his father fought alongside Obi- Wan as a Jedi Knight. Obi- Wan tells Luke that Vader was his former pupil who turned to the dark side of the Force and killed Luke's father. Obi- Wan then presents to Luke his father's weapon – a lightsaber. Obi- Wan views Leia's complete message, in which she begs him to take the Death Star plans to her home planet of Alderaan and give them to her father for analysis. Obi- Wan invites Luke to accompany him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. Luke declines, but changes his mind after discovering that Imperial stormtroopers searching for C- 3. PO and R2- D2 have destroyed his home and killed his aunt and uncle. Obi- Wan and Luke hire smuggler Han Solo and his Wookiee first mate Chewbacca to transport them to Alderaan on Han's ship, the Millennium Falcon. Upon the Falcon's arrival at the location of Alderaan, the group discovers that the planet has been destroyed by order of the Death Star's commanding officer, Grand Moff Tarkin, as a show of power. The Falcon is captured by the Death Star's tractor beam and brought into its hangar bay. While Obi- Wan goes to disable the tractor beam, Luke discovers that Leia is imprisoned aboard, and with the help of Han and Chewbacca, rescues her. After several escapes, the group makes its way back to the Falcon. Obi- Wan disables the tractor beam, and, on the way back to the Falcon, he engages in a lightsaber duel with Vader. Once he is sure the others can escape, Obi- Wan allows himself to be killed. The Falcon escapes from the Death Star, unknowingly carrying a tracking beacon, which the Empire follows to the Rebels' hidden base on Yavin IV. The Rebels analyze the Death Star's plans and identify a vulnerable exhaust port that connects to the station's main reactor. Luke joins the Rebel assault squadron, while Han collects his payment for the transport and intends to leave, despite Luke's request that he stay and help. In the ensuing battle, the Rebels suffer heavy losses after several unsuccessful attack runs, leaving Luke as one of the few surviving pilots. Vader leads a squadron of TIE fighters and prepares to attack Luke's X- wing fighter, but Han returns and fires at the Imperials, sending Vader spiraling away. Helped by guidance from Obi- Wan's spirit, Luke uses the Force and successfully destroys the Death Star seconds before it can fire on the Rebel base. Back on Yavin IV, Leia awards Luke and Han with medals for their heroism. Lucas favored casting young actors who lacked long experience. To play Luke (then known as Luke Starkiller), Lucas sought actors who could project intelligence and integrity. While reading for the character, Hamill found the dialogue to be extremely odd because of its universe- embedded concepts. He chose to simply read it sincerely, and he was selected instead of William Katt, who was subsequently cast in the Brian De Palma- directed Carrie (Lucas shared a joint casting session with De Palma, a longtime friend). Instead, Lucas asked the actor to assist in the auditions by reading lines with the other actors and explaining the concepts and history behind the scenes that they were reading. Lucas was eventually won over by Ford's portrayal and cast him instead of Kurt Russell, Nick Nolte. Foster, for one, turned down the role because she was already under contract with Disney and working on two films at the time. Lucas commended Cushing's performance, saying . Adored and idolized by young people and by people who go to see a certain kind of movie. I feel he will be fondly remembered for the next 3. It sounds like something that flew out of a cupboard. Lucas needed an established actor to play the important Obi- Wan Kenobi character. Producer Gary Kurtz said, . At the time, sci- fi movies still looked quite cheap as the effects were not advanced and he had a lot of samurai pride. He agreed to take the part of Kenobi on the condition that he would not have to do any publicity to promote the film. Harrison Ford said, . He was always prepared, always professional, always very kind to the other actors. He had a very clear head about how to serve the story. Thirty well- established voice actors read for the voice of the droid. According to Daniels, one of the major voice actors, believed by some sources to be Stan Freberg, recommended Daniels's voice for the role. The 7 feet 3 inches (2. Chewbacca after he stood up to greet Lucas. Door opened, and George walked in with Gary behind him. So, naturally, what did I do? I'm raised in England. Soon as someone comes in through the door, I stand up. George goes 'Hmm . He chose the former because he wanted to play a hero; British actor David Prowse took the other. Richard Le. Parmentier plays an admiral, named Conan Antonio Motti, who dares mock Darth Vader's faith in the force and his failure to locate the rebel base and the stolen Death Star plans, and is nearly force choked to death by Vader, only saved by Tarkin intervening and ordering Vader to release him. Michael Leader plays a minor role as a Stormtrooper known for accidentally hitting his helmet against a door. He was unsuccessful in pitching his idea to several major Hollywood studios because it was . Eventually, Lucas presented the treatment to 2. Century Fox, and the film was approved. One of the claims is that he intended to make the film a Space Western. In the 2. 01. 0 coffee table book Star Wars: Year By Year: A Visual Chronicle produced by DK Publishing and Lucasfilm, George Lucas is said to have made his film as a direct contrast to THX 1. He felt that the bleak tone of the film led to it being poorly received, and therefore chose to make Star Wars a more optimistic film. This is what led to the fun and adventurous tone of the space opera. Of course I realize now how crude and badly done they were.. He pushed towards buying the Flash Gordon rights. So I began researching and went right back and found where Alex Raymond (who had done the original Flash Gordon comic strips in newspapers) had got his idea from.
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