Major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi is one of the most shocking entries in the franchise, and that's only amplified by an ending that sees an evolution of the saga George Lucas started all those years ago.

Running at 150 minutes long, Episode VIII is the closest the saga has come to being a true "epic". Its story takes place over a tight time period, yet is truly sprawling; along with the primary dichotomy between Rey and Kylo (and the exploration of Force and order that comes with it), there's a final stand for the Resistance and the First Order fraught with overbearing threat and duplicity, and an undercover mission for Finn and Rose that touches with the dark, opponent truth behind the conflict. It's a big film, and everything ties together perfectly in the end.

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And what an ending it is! There's no "I am your father" twist at the heart of The Last Jedi - the closest the film gets to it is with the reveal Rey's parents were nobodies, an essential subversion of the Skywalker Saga's familial focus - but a lot of shocking things still go down in the finale, rounding off arcs that have been unfolding for forty years and teasing the future of the franchise. Today we're going to take in what happened and ask what it really means.

Luke's Death and the End Of the Old (This Page)

Luke Sacrifices Himself To Save The Resistance And Becomes One With The Force

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars The Last Jedi

The final act itself follows the Resistance's last stand on Crait as the First Order slowly closes in. With their skimmers all destroyed, all hope seems lost... until Luke Skywalker turns up, seemingly out of nowhere. The trim Jedi has a heart-aching reunion with Leia where the pair unspokenly acknowledge Han's death and Skywalker reveals he's not here to save Kylo. He goes out to face his dark side nephew, who brashly tries to destroy him with firepower: it fails. The pair engages in a tense lightsaber battle without a single clash as it's slowly revealed Luke isn't here to kill Ben Solo: he's distracting so the Resistance can escape. The fight comes to an end when Kylo makes a running swipe at Luke, only to discover his uncle was never there, only projecting himself across the galaxy from Ahch-to.

Back on his cliff in the Jedi Temple, Luke hovers over the meditation rock and slowly descends as his projection vanishes. Exhausted by the efforted of projecting himself across the galaxy, he collapses on the stone. In his final moments, the Ahch-to sunset becomes a blazing twin suns, visually returning the farm boy to his homeworld of Tatooine before he fades away to become one with the Force.

First up, Luke's death is - like Obi-Wan Kenobi's and Yoda's before him - less about his loss than his transcendence into the Force. As Rey says to Leia, "It wasn't sadness or pain. It was peace and purpose." The entire fight represents a round-off to Luke's The Last Jedi arc; he allows the Force back in after blocking it out for years, realizes how he can still help the Resistance, and, following a discussion with Yoda's Force Ghost, understands that his failures should be used to teach and grow the future Jedi, rather than ending it. As the long-dead Master said, "We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters", making Skywalker's sacrifice an emotionally narrative summary of the sequel trilogy's passing of the torch.

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In terms of Luke's Saga-wide arc, it's even more powerful. Him accepting that Kylo Ren is beyond redemption is - regardless of if it's proven true by Episode IX - a reversal of his attitude towards Darth Vader in the originals, where he (like Rey with Ben) went against his masters' advice to try and redeem his father. Further, his final moments seeing the twin suns are a return to how we first met him back in 1977. That sunset represented his longing to leave, but was reframed in The Empire Strikes Back by Yoda as him holding back from being in the now (a similar affliction Rey had, just with the past). With his death, Luke is free to return to that, closing his living circle and raising interesting questions of destiny.

Rey in Snoke's Throne Room in Star Wars The Last Jedi

Rey Rejects Her Connection With Kylo Ren Because She's No Longer Lost

During Luke's distraction, the Resistance escapes the Crait base by following an unmapped crawl space used by the Vultpex ice foxes. When they're trapped by a pile of rocks, Rey uses her powers to free the remaining fighters, symbolizing her ascension to the first of the new Jedi. As they depart, she and Kylo - who's invaded the Crait base in anger - connect one more time through the Force and stare for a moment before she looks away, breaking the connection forever.

The relationship between Rey and Kylo was at the core of The Last Jedi, with their mysterious, repeated Force bridge making them realize how they both equally lost and become disenfranchized with their current masters. Initially presented as something out of their control, it was eventually revealed to have been the work of Snoke, all a part of his semi-foreseen plan to destroy the light within Ben Solo. Of course, once the pair had defeated the Supreme Leader and his guards, it became clear that while they were both similarly lost, the belonging they sought was opposite; the cracking of the Skywalker saber sent them on two different destinies.

Related: Star Wars: The Last Jedi Review The Saga Continues in Epic Fashion

Rey is emboldened by this and Luke's sacrifice, and with it now clear Ben is lost - even his mother says so - is finally able to cut the connection between them. Like Skywalker before her, she's got over her sand-planet-based predilections - in this case the belief her parents, revealed to be junkers who sold her off, would come back for her - and embraced the here and now. She's accepted that, whatever brought her and Ben together - Snoke or something greater - it's gone now. This, along with her increased Force potential, allowed her to break the bridge Snoke created.

A New Generation of Jedi Is Out There

Extended Fathier Chase The Last Jedi: 7 Deleted Scenes That Should've Made The Cut (And 8 We're Glad Didn't)

There's one final scene in The Last Jedi that would almost work as a post-credits stinger if Star Wars had this tradition. We return to Canto Bight and the children who helped Finn and Rose unleash the Fathiers on the casino, now on downtime and telling stories of Luke Skywalker (seemingly the events of the final battle). They're told to go back to work and one of the kids - who has the Resistance ring from Rose - uses the Force to grab a broom. As he's sweeping, he pauses and gazes up at the night sky, holding the broom like a lightsaber and dreaming of a future beyond where he is now.

Ostensibly this is telling us that a new generation of Jedi is out there, ready to be found and trained by Rey (who even has the old texts, despite their redundancy). But there's more to it than that. The entire scene reflects Luke's binary sunset longing from the original Star Wars, which due to The Last Jedi showing his moving on while seeing a vision of Tatooine becomes an ultimate stamp on the passage of time, the moving of generations and the beauty in that inevitability. It's the spiritual passing of the torch to a new set of heroes - heroes who, like Rey, come from ignominious, decidedly unspecial backgrounds.

That's particularly striking; these kids are unimportant. They exist as underlings to the rich and were only brought into the conflict tangentially by Rose, herself a bystander until she met Finn, who was previously just a cog in the machine. Temiri Blagg isn't a new Luke, he represents how the new Luke or Rey can come from anywhere.

Star Wars The Last Jedi Teaser Poster Rey

The Last Jedi Is Classic Star Wars Themes Reimagined

In a basic sense, The Last Jedi is about themes Star Wars has always been about: hope and sacrifice, destiny and peace. We have our two main characters - Rey and Kylo Ren - wrestling with who they are supposed to be and finding a common ground in that sense of loss, but ultimately driven apart when it becomes clear the underlying desires land on opposite sides of the spectrum. They are even more cracked mirrors at the end, both having lost their mentors in fitting ways and inheriting their titles (Jedi and Supreme Leader, respectively). It's the dichotomy that's always been the underpinning of Star Wars but normally represented within a single character or across generations: here the fight is literal.

The subplots reflect and deepen this. Poe's failed mutiny against Holdo comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to fight, a lesson he only truly learns when discovering Luke is diverting the First Order; you don't have to do battle to win (war does not make one great). Finn and Rose's discovery and ransacking of Canto Bight, and the subsequent duplicity of the openly amoral DJ is even more directly tied; on their journey, we are repeatedly shown that the rich exist above the conflict, profiteering from the galaxy's rotation of wars while safe from its blowback with little to no care for who "rules".

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Altogether, it's a more morally complex yet thematically clearer take on Star Wars. George Lucas' "There are heroes on both sides" adage from the Revenge of the Sith opening crawl that powered the prequels feels potent, yet without an upsetting of the greater good vs. evil conflict; as in Rogue One, the word "hope" rules strong, powering the good in people, but as Leia's saying about finding it even in darkness emblemizes, it's not a simple case of choice.

One aspect of all this the film really leans into that hasn't been excavated prominently before in the franchise is being in the here and now. It was always present in Obi-Wan and later Yoda's teachings and warnings to Luke about being too concerned with the future, and manifested symbolically through the Living Force in the prequels, but here we have Rey explicitly grappling with her destiny and how it relates to her past. Her vision in the Ahch-to cave is the realization she's on a seemingly predetermined path, but only because she allows herself to be defined by the obsession with her parents. Maz warned her of this in The Force Awakens - "The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead" - and here she finally begins to see it, albeit under the immense pain of undermining her belief they would come back; it's only getting to the discovery point and seeing what she really needs to realize is her own self-worth, then moving past it, that Rey gains control of her own destiny.

And that brings us to the one fundamental thing that Rian Johnson's film, specifically its ending, shifts.

The Last Jedi Is Really About Moving On

The Chosen One myth has dominated Star Wars since its introduction in The Phantom Menace, and while Episode I's other big addition to the mythology (midichlorians) was roundly rejected, this has been embraced by fans (even though, with his inevitable turn and manipulated origins, Anakin was always intended to be a subversion of the trope). Indeed, in the lead up to The Last Jedi it was said that Luke had felt Ben was the true Chosen One; it isn't stated explicitly in the film, but his motivation to train his nephew certainly lines up. However, through the story we get a wearing away of that predestination prophecy.

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Luke, of course, realizes that the Jedi Order as a construct - a religion following texts - is not where true clarity and power comes from, and that it is his actions that define him. Although it's the younger generation it really reflects; Rey realizes her lifetime definition is her true weakness and has to embrace the fact she is unimportant to be a hero, whereas Kylo in his villainy steps so beyond the Vader obsession in his own greed that the fact he's a Skywalker ceases to matter. Together, they disprove the power of the Skywalker lineage and the idea of predestination, instead moving beyond.

It's the purest throwback. Star Wars was always about unlikely heroes and ignominious origins, only for that to be lost as we spent more time with these characters; never forget, in the original film, Luke was just a lowly farm boy, his father a lost old knight rather than the space dictator he'd take down. Rey already returned us to that by being nobody, as do Finn and Rose emerging from often faceless armies, but it's the events of The Last Jedi that really bring it home, personified by Luke's final moments putting him again in Tatooine's glow. The kids at the end crystalize the point; the next Luke Skywalker isn't tied to the conflict yet by family or prophecy, but through his actions will be. The idea of greatness doesn't depend on origin. Anyone can be a hero.

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When you put all we've discussed together, you can see one unified thematic vision. The Last Jedi is about moving on. That's what's behind all elements in the movie. Everyone's moving on: from life, from their past, from their destiny. Indeed, the franchise is moving on from itself, in Kylo's own words "letting the past die"; J.J. Abrams' film was devoted to the series confines, while Rian Johnson's throws aside so much, from narrative tropes to physical objects.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a classic extension of the series, but it also trumpets something new-yet-eternal; just what George Lucas wanted with his ground-breaking B-movie throwback in 1977.

Next: Star Wars: 25 Things You Completely Missed In The Last Jedi

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