The review is full of spoilers. You have been warned!
If 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens has a central flaw, it’s a dogged commitment to riffing on the beats of the original Star Wars. There’s another mysterious, Force-sensitive Jedi orphan from a desert planet. Another planet-destroying super-weapon wielded by an evil empire. And—by the end of the movie—another dead mentor.
The Force Awakens was such a deliberate echo of the original Star Wars that most people assumed Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, would be a similar echo of The Empire Strikes Back. That wasn’t necessarily a problem—Empire is, after all, the best Star Wars movie ever made by a comfortable margin—but it did have the side effect of making it seem like Disney’s sequel trilogy might be playing things a little safe.
Now that The Last Jedi is actually in theaters, it’s clear that—in the hands of writer/director Rian Johnson, who has already been tapped to direct a brand-new trilogy—the future of Star Wars is looking much bolder. The Last Jedi doesn’t just subvert The Empire Strikes Back; it uses Empire like a weapon, tricking viewers into thinking they know this story before veering off into an unknown and thrilling new direction.
In the months leading up to its release, there were few hints that The Last Jedi would work so hard to subvert the expectations of Star Wars fans. The promotional campaign did nothing to indicate that the movie had anything but Empire Strikes Backs-ian ambitions. The trailers played up images of Rey, in the midst of Yoda-style training with Luke Skywalker, and a Resistance battle against upgraded AT-ATs on a white planet that might pass for Hoth if you squinted enough.
The Last Jedi’s first act does offer a few hints that the movie will eventually swerve out of The Empire Strikes Back’s shadow. "You’re no Vader. You’re just a child in a mask," says Snoke to Kylo Ren in the reintroduction of both characters—an insult that stings enough that Kylo immediately smashes his own Vader-styled helmet. Most of all, there’s Luke’s early warning to Rey, which doubles as a warning to the audience: "This is not going to go the way you think."
But the echoes are still there. Like Luke, Rey spends the majority of the movie away with her friends, pursuing the Force with a reluctant teacher. She eventually descends into a cavern for a dreamlike confrontation with her "enemy"—as Luke once did on Dagobah—and discovers, as Luke did, that the answer is herself. She even flees her training to confront her greatest enemy. Meanwhile, Finn and Rose flee the First Order—and are eventually betrayed by Benicio del Toro’s DJ, whose slippery pragmatism recalls Lando Calrissian.
In short: everything is looking very bad. It’s at this point, around the two-hour mark, that The Last Jedi could end, saving the resolution to these troubling questions for Episode IX. How will the Resistance rescue Finn and Rose from the First Order, as the Rebellion managed to save Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt? How will Rey respond to the shattering truth about her past? There’s even a moment—on a spaceship—when The Last Jedi could cut to the credits after its own version of The Empire Strikes Back’s memorable closing shot, with Poe Dameron stepping in for Luke Skywalker.
And then The Last Jedi continues. And what you know about The Empire Strikes Back—and whether you sensed, implicitly or explicitly, that The Last Jedi knew you know about it—is used against you.
It starts with the return to Kylo Ren. You can easily imagine a version of this character that would follow the arc of his idol, Darth Vader. It starts with a dramatic fall to the Dark Side before the movie begins. It climaxes in the murder of a former ally. And it ends—in the final movie—with a return to good via the murder of the villain who turned him to the Dark Side in the first place, in service of the hero who showed him the Light Side again. It’s dramatically satisfying. And utterly predictable.
Which is why The Last Jedi is so wise to pivot so sharply away from it. As Snoke tortures Rey, and commands Kylo Ren to make the killing stroke, he leapfrogs the middle of his Vader arc. Instead, Kylo Ren murders Snoke and teams up with Rey—an echo of the climax of Return of the Jedi, when Darth Vader finally turns on Emperor Palpatine.
But Kylo Ren’s face turn is ultimately a feint. The Last Jedi takes his arc in a darker direction: After betraying Snoke, he becomes Snoke, and pitches Rey on joining him. And if it superficially resembles Darth Vader’s pitch to his own son in The Empire Strikes Back, Kylo Ren’s offer is way off the Star Wars roadmap. Kylo Ren explicitly rejects everything we’ve been told about both the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force. Instead, he says, he and Rey can carve their own path, free of the musty, centuries-old Jedi teachings that have so dramatically shaped both of their lives. You can see how Rey might be seduced by it. Especially since it comes with a hook: the true identity of Rey’s parents.
This is The Last Jedi’s most brilliant subversion of The Empire Strikes Back, and the moment when it severs ties with the Chosen One narrative that has driven Star Wars since the very beginning. Remember, Luke Skywalker didn’t just discover Darth Vader was his father. He discovered his own birthright: the heir to the man once hailed as the greatest of the Jedi, with the innate power of the Force to prove it. Kylo Ren, with a similarly legendary Skywalker lineage, discovered similar powers.
The truth about Rey’s parents is essentially the Empire Strikes Back twist in reverse—though no less devastating in its impact. The subject of Rey’s parentage has inspired constant and feverish speculation since The Force Awakens, but the answer turns out to be brutally straightforward. Her parents were common junkies who sold her off for drugs—two of the untold millions of characters we’ll never know, who presumably exist in the far-off backdrop of the Star Wars narrative. Kylo Ren even frames the Star Wars universe as a narrative in which Rey, by all rights, should have no part. "You have no place in this story. You come from nothing. You are nothing," he tells her.
This is Star Wars severing ties with the Skywalker family, which has been at the center of the story and the galaxy from the very beginning. It’s the revelation that any person might still have a pivotal role to play in this story, beyond anything the Skywalker-centric narrative could have intended.
And it’s why The Last Jedi steers away from The Empire Strikes Back one last time to end not on despair, but hope. Yes, Luke Skywalker is dead—but the galaxy doesn’t need him as much as it once did. We have Rey, and that nameless kid who has already begun to learn the Force while sweeping the stables of Canto Bight, and the countless other people who will work, in their own way, to oppose the First Order.
"Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to," says Kylo Ren at the center of the movie. And the new Star Wars movies have done just that, killing off Han Solo and Luke Skywalker while paving the way for a genuinely unpredictable new future. It’s a hell of a needle to thread, but The Last Jedi manages to strike a balance, honoring the legacy of the Star Wars franchise while snuffing it out in favor of a bigger, more hopeful galaxy.