Recently I was sitting around thinking about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, as I tend to do, and had a profound realisation. I realised that even though I think I know a lot about the movie, I really don’t know anything at all. And that realisation made me incredibly happy.
All Images: Disney
It’s perfect, really. A feeling of contentment layered over near-infinite mystery. However, there are a bevy of new Star Wars toys hitting stores this weekend and a new trailer likely coming in the next several weeks. If this is a perfect plateau of information, it isn’t going to last, which I’m OK with too. Of course I want to know more. Anything. Everything. But right now, at this moment, Disney and Lucasfilm have fed me a perfectly healthy amount of information. Anything beyond this is just icing on the cake.
So what do we know? Well, a lot of generalities, but virtually no specifics. So, for example, we know Luke and Rey start the movie on Ahch-To and that they’re training. We assume they leave that planet, but we haven’t seen any of that. We know that General Leia plays a major role, part of which is with Poe Dameron — but what’s going on with the Resistance and First Order? No clue.
Leaked photos of Supreme Leader Snoke reveal that we’ll see him in the flesh this time around, and we assume that will have something to do with Kylo Ren, but how they will proceed after the death of Han Solo and destruction of Starkiller Base is anyone’s guess. In fact, the most specific piece of concrete information we have about the movie is that Finn and Rose go off on an adventure to find Benicio Del Toro’s character DJ, and at some point they have to dress up as First Order officers. That’s as major a spoiler for the film as we have, and even it was officially released in the behind-the-scenes footage shown at the D23 Expo.
We know more about ships and characters than the movie itself. There’s the gorilla-like AT-M6, the pizza-shaped Dreadnaught ship, Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer and the Resistance Bombers. Location-wise, we know the film makes its way to Canto Bight, a casino planet, as well as Crait, where some kind of major battle will take place. Obviously, those won’t be the only locations or ships.
And yet, none of this really reveals anything about the movie. They’re just perfect little nuggets of information that work to spark our imaginations instead of telling us something that specifically happens in the film. It’s like having a few pieces to a puzzle, but no idea how to put them together because we don’t know what the final image is going to be.
That’s kind of awesome, and if today was December 14, we could all go into the theatre with a minimal amount of spoilers. Unfortunately, though, that is not reality. Disney has a movie to sell and fans have insatiable appetites. We’ll gladly and hungrily learn more over the next four months from the toys (many of which will be revealed this Friday), trailers, interviews and TV spots. But we can still revel in this moment. This was the moment where we had a perfect balance of information and anticipation. I’m excited for more, and I’ll go crazy for it when I get it. But I’m also beautifully satisfied right now.