The Last Jedi

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you are meant to be."

Kylo Ren, to Rey

The Last Jedi is the sequel to The Force Awakens, written and directed by Rian Johnson, and is the eighth film in the main continuity of Star Wars.

Armed with the whereabouts of the Resistance's main base and emboldened from their to destroy it in The Force Awakens, the First Order dispatches an task force to finish the job. The Resistance, fearing retribution from the First Order, wastes no time with their evacuation. But even after narrowly escaping the devastation of their hideout and sustaining noticeable losses in ensuring skirmishes, the First Order maintains their relentless pursuit. Fearing the imminent destruction of the Resistance, Rose Tico and Finn set off in search of a new ally who can turn the tide of battle as Vice-Admiral Holdo executes her contingency plan to save her passengers. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker is training Rey on how to use the Force in order to bring Kylo Ren back to his senses.

Tropes used in The Last Jedi include:
  • A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Kylo Ren was originally one of Luke's students until Luke acts on a premonition about Ren turning evil and hesitated on killing his pupil in his sleep. Ren consequently massacred most of Skywalker's students and joined the First Order under Snoke's tutelage.
  • Abandon Ship: The Resistance's contingency plan boils down to evacuating their flagship so Holdo can use it as a battering ram against the pursuing First Order starships.
  • Abnormal Ammo: An drunken gambler mistakes BB-8 for a slot machine on Canto Blight and kept filling the droid with coins...Which were eventually used as improvised bullets against the casino's security forces.
  • Ace Pilot: Even though Poe Dameron has an lesser role due to his X-Wing getting destroyed, the opening battle of the movie showcases him destroying an Dreadnought's defensive turrets while being chased by an flight of TIE Fighters.
  • Achilles' Heel: The Dreadnoughts of the First Order has a bit of a soft spot on the top side of its hole, which is a design flaw that the Resistance exploits to destroy the Fulminatrix.
  • Achilles in His Tent: Luke Skywalker secluded himself after Kylo Ren massacred Luke's apprentices and the Resistance needs someone to help fight off the First Order and the only one who's still alive that can do that is Luke. Even though he refuses Rey's requests to get involved, he eventually does by distracting Ren via astral projection.
  • Action Prologue: Like some of the Star Wars movies, The Last Jedi opens with a high-stakes battle. Which is the Resistance abandoning their main base as the First Order attempts to eradicate them.
  • Actually a Doombot: Contary to the norm, this is done by the heroes when Luke stalls Kylo Ren's forces on Crait by tricking them into fighting his astral projection.
  • Adult Fear: So Kylo Ren's parents sent their son to his uncle, Luke, with the hopes that Ren would improve his mental health. Due to Luke attempting to kill Ren and hesitating doing it, Ren is convinced that he can't trust his family or the light side of the Force.
  • Advertised Extra: Despite the insane amount of merchandise that the Porgs have inspired, they're more of a nuisance to Chewbacca than a significant contributer to the plot.
  • Aerial Canyon Chase: It happens near the abandoned Resistance outpost on Crait, where Rey and Chewbacca uses the Millennium Falcon to lure the First Order's TIEs into a deadly canyon chase. And it works because Ren really hates that ship because it belonged to his father.
  • An Aesop: Your heritage shouldn't be the only driving force that makes you what you are; in order to move forward, you must let go of your grudges and learn from your mistakes. Just look at how Kylo Ren went from being obsessed with emulating Darth Vader to being Snoke's replacement (which is kind of a lateral move). Or how Rey and Luke learned how to move on after learning that the Jedi code was flawed and deserved to be abandoned
  • Airstrike Impossible:
    • The movie opens up with the Resistance evacuating the last of their personnel from D'Qar and Poe is stalling the First Order by cruising towards the First Order's group of warship while prank-calling Hux. After enraging the general, who neglected to scramble the TIE Fighters, Poe single-handedly destroys the defensive turrets of the Fulminatrix with minimum opposition.
    • Kylo Ren and a pair of TIE Fighters managing to destroy what's left of the Resistance's starfighters by flying through the hanger of the Raddus, the flagship of the Resistance.
  • All for Nothing:
    • After the Resistance narrowly escapes from the First Order at D'Qar, Rose and Finn embark on an unsanctioned voyage to find a codebreaker who'll help them get past the Supremacy's security systems. But it turns out that not only did they find the wrong expert, said expert betrays them by revealing the cloaked Resistance transports so the First Order can casually destroy them.
    • The Resistance's contingency plan hinges on Vice-Admiral Holdo evacuating the Resistance's flagship and buying time for the unarmed Resentment transportss to escape. This would of worked...if the codebreaker that Finn and Rose found didn't revealed the escapees to the Supremacy's targeting systems.
  • The Alleged Car: The sandspeeders that the Resistance are using on Crait were literally breaking apart from going through several years of abandonment.
  • Artistic License Physics: As the Supremacy fires on the unarmed Resistance transports that were headed to Crait, the flagship's projectiles were travelling in arc in deep space. Which is kind of jarring, considering that there's hardly any gravity in the vastness of space to affect the gunfire and Crait's position shouldn't be causing them to fly in an arc.
  • Awesome but Impractical: The bombers that the Resistance fielded against the Fulminatrix were designed after the heavy bombers from World War II: Hauling a massive payload of ordnance, slow-moving, and has several crewmembers manning defensive turrets. What makes them impractical is that they're easy prey for the First Order's TIE Fighters, which caused only one of them to barely complete their bombing run.
  • The Dog Bites Back: One of the main points of the movie is that your underlings can only handle so much verbal abuse from you until they retaliate; or in this case, Ren killing Snoke for mocking him about his helmet and heritage.
  • Eye Scream: The fate of one of Snoke's guards is having an igniting lightsaber burn through one of their eyes and the rest of their skull.
  • Faceless Goons: Where an Stormtrooper's helmet retains some features of a face, the faceplates of Snoke's bodyguards are completely featureless.
  • General Failure: While General Hux was somewhat reasonable in The Force Awakens, he really let himself go in The Last Jedi. Mainly because he was distracted by a prank call and letting a single starfighter past his escorts without immediately taking action. This isn't a terrible thing on it's own, but this is Poe Dameron he let in, who subsequently rendered the heavy-hitter of his fleet vulnerable to his bombing run. Plus, it doesn't help that Snoke reprimanded him in front of his crew over this.
    • And there's also the issue of him recalling Kylo Ren and his wingmen when they were making significant progress against what's left of the Resistance fleet in favor of a drawn out artillery barrage, which wound up destroying most of the Supremacy's escorts.
  • Going Down with the Ship:
    • As the First Order purses the Resistance through a remote region of space, a growing number of the Resistance's ships are running low on a fuel. In order to save their personnel, the passengers are evacuated to their flagship. However, the captain of the fleet's medical frigate elects to stay behind and subsequently perishes as the First Order turns their guns on his vessel.
    • Holdo also stays aboards the Raddus in order to buy some time for the Resistance to land on Crait, which she achieves by ramming the Resistance's flagship into the Supremacy at lightspeed.
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: On Crait, Leia orders for a distress signal to be sent and mentions that the technicians should use her personal code. It doesn't work, considering how nobody showed up with reinforcements.
  • Half the Man He Used To Be: Snoke dies after gloating about how loyal Ren is and how he'll cut down his "true enemy" while ignoring the fact thst Rey's lightsaber is on his armrest of his throne and is pointing right at him. Ren carries out Snoke's words by igniting Rey's lightsaber, which cuts him in half and the top portion of Snoke's corpse promptly falls off the throne.
  • Klingon Promotion: Since Kylo Ren wanted to pursue his own ambitions in the First Order and Snoke was standing in the way of this; Ren uses this as an excuse to usurp Snoke, since he had a hand in killing his master.
  • Make an Example of Them: Hux's solution to Finn's treachery is to have him executed in front of a few hundred Stormtroopers to prevent another one from going rogue.
  • Praetorian Guard: Like Palpatine, Supreme Leader Snoke has eight personal guards. But unlike Palpatine's guards, their crimson armor actually blends into the walls of Snoke's throne room; plus, they also wield an variety of weapons instead of just being uniformly armed with pikes.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: Although the Battle of D'Qar ended with the Resistance escaping after destroying the Fulminatrix, a Dreadnought that Hux intended to use to eradicate Leia's portion of the Resistance; it came at the cost of the Resistance losing the last of their heavy bombers and learning that the First Order can easily track them to hyperspace, rendering the evacuation a case of "prolonging the inevitable."
  • Ramming Always Works: Especially at lightspeed with an flagship-sized cruiser. But it also causes enough collateral damage destroy an fleet of Star Destroyers.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Finn's reaction upon learning that the First Order is chasing the Resistance through deep space is to look for an escape pod, although he doesn't get far with this because Rose Tico forcibly stops him.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Luke Skywalker had a vision that Kylo Ren will fall to the Dark Side of the Force and decided it would be a good idea to preemptively deal with this, but he hesistated at the worst possible moment and Ren saw that Skywalker attempting to kill him while he was asleep. Faced with at the sight that his master was trying to kill him; Ren gathered any students who were loyal to him, massacred the rest of Luke's students, and eventually joined the First Order.
  • Senseless Sacrifice: The main reason why the Resistance was fleeing to Crait is that they were using an abandoned mine as means of requesting a rescue from their allies. But with nobody immediately asking the call and Leia's cell being reduced from several hundred to the capacity of the Millenium Falcon after fighting on Crait, it really feels that nobody is going to help them.
  • Serendipity Writes the Plot: The main reason why the Porgs exists is because a species of endangered puffins were constantly in the way of the cameras at one of the filming locations. Rather than chase them away from their natural habitat, it was deemed practical to superimpose CGI over them.
  • Shaggy Dog Story:
    • The Force Awakens was initially about the Resistance alerting the New Republic of the growing threat of the First Order and developing a way to fight them. But with the destruction of the headquarters of the New Republic and the Resistance's main base, the plot is flipped to the heroes struggling to stay alive. Plus, the loss of Starkiller Base had barely fazed Snoke, since one of it's intended targets were already obliterated and the starships of the First Order outguns the New Republic forces by a massive margin.
    • The Supremacy is capable of tracking starships through hyperspace and Rose & Finn decide that the best way to counter this is to board the ship to disable this feature. But the only problem is that they need to find a hacker, first. They run this by Poe Dameron, who authorizes this and prepares to start a mutiny against Holdo. Their plan was about to work...Until the hacker that they hired turned out to be a double-agent who sides for the First Order and the pair were nearly killed because of this. Additionally, this was rendered redundant after Holdo reveals her contingency plan and Poe agrees with it.
  • Shirtless Scene: During one of the Force Bond scenes, Kylo Ren was seen as shirtless.
  • Silence Is Golden: The scene where Holdo rams her cruiser into the Supremacy is immediately followed by absolute silence as the First Order's flagship and it's task force were decimated from the impact and debris. [And the unusual nature of that scene had caused certain theaters to post warnings about the lack of sound.]
  • Sink the Life Boats: With the flagship of the Resistance running off the last of it's fuel reserves, their contingency plan is to evacuate the ship with a flotilla of unshielded and unarmed transports. Hux, being the merciless that he is, orders the cannons of the Supremacy to fire on the transports to thin out the Resistance.
  • Sitting Duck: The main reason why the Stern Chase is happening is because Kylo Ren and his wingmen had managed to destroy the last of the Resistance's starfighters while they were in their hangers shortly after the First Order followed them through hyperspace.
  • Smash the Symbol: After being mocked by Snoke on how ridiculous his helmet is and that he'll never live up to Darth Vader's legacy, Kylo Ren smashes it in a fit of rage as Snoke's words sink in. And this also signifies the end of Ren trying to hold onto the past.
  • Smoke Shield: On Crait, Snoke orders his heavy walkers to fire their guns on Luke, creating a massive dust cloud in the process. But as the dust subsides, Luke is unscathed due to the fact that he's using astral projection.
  • Stern Chase: After the Resistance have evacuated from their (formerly) hidden base on D'Qar by travelling through hyperspace, they learned that the First Order is capable of following them with ease. Faced with all of their starfighters destroyed, running critically low on fuel, and experiencing an unyielding artillery barrage from the First Order; Vice Admiral Holdo's solution is to order her fleet to retreat without jumping to lightspeed. Even though, the Resistance fleet is faster than the First Order's warships, it's only an matter of time before they run out of fuel and slide into the range of the cannons of the Supremacy.
  • Tempting Fate: Immediately before his demise, Snoke is bragging to Rey about how loyal Ren is and that his apprentice will cut down his true enemy with an lightsaber sitting right on the armrest of his throne and is pointing right at him. It doesn't take much for Ren to ignite it on the guy who's been mistreating him.
  • We Can Rule Together: After Rey helps him kill Snoke and his bodyguards, Kylo Ren offers Rey to help him run the First Order and take over the galaxy. She refuses and the two starts fighting as Ren tries to illustrate how wrong she is.
  • Whip Sword: Two of Snoke's Elite Praetorian Guards wields an rapier that collapses into an energy-infused whip.
  • You Do NOT Want to Know: The Resistance contacts Maz Kanata for advice on how to escape the pursuing First Order and she exasperatedly mentions is dealing with what she's calls an "union dispute" and insists that the details are best left unmentioned. But it's pretty clear that there's an riot going on, considering that gunfire can be heard in the background and she's holding a blaster pistol.
  • You Rebel Scum: In recognition of Finn's treachery and on the verge of death, Captain Phasma calls the former Stormtrooper scum; to which Finn corrects her, "rebel scum."
  • Your Mom: At the beginning of the movie, Poe Dameron manages to stall an invading First Order fleet by prank calling General Hux, who is rather confused by the Resistance pilot's audacity until Poe mention's Hux's mother. Hux didn't take it well, considering that he order his forces to open fire on Poe.