The Last Jedi - Movie Discussion - WARNING - Guaranteed Spoilers Within

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**Frazzled**

I don't see Disney taking risks with the prime product. The side movies (turning R1 into a war film) potentially, but not the core. Thus us their version of the marvel universe we are talking about.

**Hanskrampf**

For anyone still wondering if 'The last Jedi' is singular or plural, the official German title is 'Die letzten Jedi' - which is plural.

**Manchu**

Is Jedi masculine, feminine, or neuter in German?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Frazzled wrote:
I don't see Disney taking risks with the prime product.

I dunno. I think about what I liked most about TFA, it's hands down Kylo Ren. They made the main villain a loser. It reads like a commentary on SW fans. It reads like a commentary on Anakin, and by extension the prequels. It feels pretty risky to have a bad guy who is so unstable and, deep down, pathetic.

**Hanskrampf**

Manchu wrote:
Is Jedi masculine, feminine, or neuter in German?

Masculine. 'Der Jedi'
Both 'Die' and 'letzten' are in their plural forms.

**Manchu**

My German is getting rusty - the German title for RotJ confused me, because it uses der Jedi Ritter - but I thought genitive case means die becomes der. Or is "der Jedi Ritter" also plural?

**VictorVonTzeentch**

Manchu wrote:
Like a Disney exec making a movie, I'm going to continue ignoring EU "canon."

To me, the Force is just the Force. People can tap into it with good or bad intentions. Those intentions aren't present in the Force itself.

"Jedi" doesn't describe anything about the Force. Rather, that's a school of thought about the Force. Same goes for the Sith. Bringing balance to the Force wouldn't have anything to do with killing X Jedi knights or Y Sith lords.

Most of the EU Canon presented so far in the thread has been from TCW and Rebels so far, which according to Disney Execs isn't EU Canon, its just canon. Everything released since the new movies (except in TCW which was released before) is the canon like it or not.

**Hanskrampf**

Manchu wrote:
My German is getting rusty - the German title for RotJ confused me, because it uses der Jedi Ritter - but I thought genitive case means die becomes der. Or is "der Jedi Ritter" also plural?

Yes, also plural.
It's confusing, I know

Singular: der Ritter
Plural: die Ritter

But genitive!!!
Singular: des Ritters
Plural: der Ritter

**Manchu**

VictorVonTzeentch wrote:
Everything released since the new movies is the canon like it or not.

Yes, using the word canon was probably a mistake. What I meant was, there's a distinction between what's in the movies and what's not. I realize that theoretically, Disney is not drawing that distinction. But IME film productions do what they want and comic books and novels and video games have to adapt to that, not the other way around.

**Galef**

Regarding Jedi plural or singular:
Rian Johnson already confirmed it was singular. Also Yoda calls Luke the "Last of the Jedi" in RotJ, as does the crawl for Force Awakens. It literally says "Skywalker, the last jedi,...."

Luke is the Last Jedi.
Translations into other languages can easily be misinterpretations of the original English. i.e. the Translator considered "jedi" to be plural, with no true direction from the movie makers

-

**Hanskrampf**

Galef wrote:
Regarding Jedi plural or singular:
Rian Johnson already confirmed it was singular. Also Yoda calls Luke the "Last of the Jedi" in RotJ, as does the crawl for Force Awakens. It literally says "Skywalker, the last jedi,...."

Luke is the Last Jedi.
Translations into other languages can easily be misinterpretations of the original English. i.e. the Translator considered "jedi" to be plural, with no true direction from the movie makers

-

Huh, that would be a pretty great screw up on Disney's marketing front (or disagreement with the director), because apparently French, Italian and Spanish versions are also plural.

**Galef**

Yeah, I don't think they really analyzed it that much. The department that handles foreign language translation probably isn't "in the know" on the finer plot points of the movie.
They were handed the title, which contained an quantitatively ambiguous word and in most languages, the default is to use the plural in that case. So they used the plural form, even though it could mean singular.

I am not saying this is definitely how it is, I am merely pointing out the flaw in saying "X language title used plural, so it MUST be plural". It could be, but doesn't have to be.

But I really do think it means the actual last Jedi, because Rey needs to be the first of something new. The Jedi have served their purpose in the galaxy, and have been found wanting. Even Luke, the literal last jedi, doesn't abide by the strictest tenants of the jedi code/faith.
His willingness to "think outside the box" saved the galaxy. That may have turned out differently if he hadn't tried to save Anakin.

Side note on Luke's line from the trailer: "It didn't scare me enough then, It does now". I keep seeing people throw out Vader, Kylo, Snoke, or even Palpetine for the potential person he is talking about. But isn't he talking about himself?
In ESB, He says to Yoda: "I'm not afraid" to which Yoda replies "You will be, you will be"

So is this Yoda's words coming full circle? We'll see in December

-

**BobtheInquisitor**

You're thinking awfully hard about lines that probably won't appear in the final film. Maybe probably. For sure maybe possibly.

Star wars trailers are misleading.

**Manchu**

Eh I think he makes an interesting point. I kinda recall old canon speculation that Palpatine knew Vader was more powerful than himself but of course Vader also got mangled pretty bad in that dust up with Obi-Wan and that Luke would be a great replacement for Vader in that regard.

**Galef**

BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Star wars trailers are misleading.

Agreed. but Speculation is fun and nods to original movies are very common now-a-days.

My fingers are crossed for Luke's ghost council (Anakin, Obi-wan & Yoda) to make it into the movie. Those characters HAVE to exist in the galaxy, unless being "one with the force" only gives you a limited time to be a force ghost and this particular caveat has yet to be revealed in canon.

OH WAIT! What if Rey is the amalgamation of Anakin, Obi-wan and Yoda reincarnated? Like they chose to merge and reincarnate into the same being (think 40K shaman becoming the Emperor of Mankind). That would be both cool and somehow lame at the same time.

-

**BobtheInquisitor**

A spiritual Constructicon?

**Frazzled**

Galef wrote:
BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Star wars trailers are misleading.

Agreed. but Speculation is fun and nods to original movies are very common now-a-days.

My fingers are crossed for Luke's ghost council (Anakin, Obi-wan & Yoda) to make it into the movie. Those characters HAVE to exist in the galaxy, unless being "one with the force" only gives you a limited time to be a force ghost and this particular caveat has yet to be revealed in canon.

OH WAIT! What if Rey is the amalgamation of Anakin, Obi-wan and Yoda reincarnated? Like they chose to merge and reincarnate into the same being (think 40K shaman becoming the Emperor of Mankind). That would be both cool and somehow lame at the same time.

-

Rey is the Spazz Emprah!

**LordofHats**

I could only dream that episodes 8 and 9 dovetail into a Horus Heresy movie series. Mostly because the utter shock, confusing, and fan rage would be made of tears

**AegisGrimm**

Maybe because of the Balance, Rey and Kylo come together to be the first of the Imperial Knights from the Legacy era, who use both sides of the Force (and guns!). That would be kinda cool.

My real problem with the theory with Kylo and Rey switching sides is that Rey needs some sort of reason to go bad (at least in good writing, anyway-unfortunately this is Hollywood and Disney)

I do like the scene showing what I assume is Luke climbing from the burning rubble of his academy, which at least explains why he became a damaged hermit better than just 'walking away' because Ren went bad.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

I still don't think we've seen anything of the plot so far.

TFA trailer? Lied. Big time. Heck, they even omitted Rey from much of the merchandise to keep stuff a surprise.

Rogue One trailer? Maybe not such outright lies (making out Finn was the Jedi in waiting) but definitely and deliberately obscured a lot of stuff in the film.

The approach worked well for those two, and I'm sure we're seeing it adopted again.

**CthuluIsSpy**

LordofHats wrote:
At least Boba Fett went down fighting. He didn't squeal like a piggy and then let the heroes throw him down a trash compactor without a fight.

Yeah, that was dumb. There was a lot of things that irritated me in TFA, and the order's overall incompetence is one of them. I mean, Phasma is supposed to be a high ranking commander, and all it takes is a question at gunpoint to make her fold? Pathetic.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wyzilla wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
The problem with the idea of balance in the Force is that, while the Sith are Evil, the Jedi are not actually Good. The Jedi were more about maintaining balance in the Force. It's hard to maintain balance on a seesaw when one person sits on one end (the Sith), and the other person only sits in the middle (the Jedi).

As I might point out the idea that the Jedi are about "balance" is this really cheesy shoe horn George Lucas kept trying to shove into the franchise in his last few years, and that anyone with a moral compass more complex than an eight-year-old is capable of picking to pieces.

It's one of the reasons why Star Wars internal ideology is actually completely bonkers. The Sith are evil because they're encouraged to be selfish, power hungry, and abuse the force*. The Jedi are balanced because they're encouraged to be selfless, not pursue personal power, and respect the force as some kind of god entity that guides them. Wait what? All of those seem like unquestionably good things. How is that "balanced" on a scale of black and white morality? I mean sure maybe they're more balanced personality wise but any attempt to proclaim the Jedi as "not paragons of goodness" falls on deaf ears the first chance the Jedi get to go out of their way and rescue someone just cause. And that's really just if you buy into the Jedi as serious about all that. If you instead turn it around and frame the Jedi as massive hypocrites, then both the Sith and the Jedi are different brands of evil and the rest of the galaxy is held helplessly hostage in a millennia long civil war between evil space wizards, with the Jedi simply being preferable because their brand of tyranny doesn't involve mass murder and slavery (except when it does).

There's been a bit of back petal on this in recent Star Wars material, most notably the character of Bendu in Star Wars: Rebels. The writers seemed to realize how much Lucas was butchering the concept of Dharma and no one was buying into it either because it was too confusing or too transparently false. Now the Jedi are the Good, the Sith are the Bad, and the middle is occupied by some lone alien on a deserted planet who likes playing mind games. Of course they still managed to feth that up because despite Bendu constant protestations about how he was "the one in the middle" he pretty much always sided with the good guys when it counted and only ever uttered his middleness as an excuse to do nothing which makes him more morally hypocritical than enlightened.

But this is Star Wars, and it always worked best when operating on a more black and white scale of idealism, so maybe people should stop trying to randomly shoehorn in the gray when none of the plots or story lines of the franchise outside Drew Karpyshyn are really built for it.

And this is why the internal ideology of Star Wars is bonkers, and people really shouldn't put that much thought into it

*I want a cross over of Code Geass and Star War by the way. Lelouch would have some harsh words for the rhetoric this universe runs on

Uh, you are aware right that balance is actually total removal of the Sith right? According to George Lucas himself the Sith and the Dark Side is a tumor. It isn't supposed to exist. "Balance" is the Sith being completely wiped out and only the light side, which is the true force, reigning. Anakin Skywalker wasn't supposed to butcher the Jedi Order to bring balance to the Force, just killing Palpatine, Maul, and Dooku would have done that.

Except that's still not balance. Balance implies negative and positive in equal quantities so that they cancel each other out. If you wipe out the sith, that would leave the Jedi order unopposed, pushing their doctrine and effectively monopolizing the force. That's not good. No group should have that much power and influence. Especially when you consider that the Jedi have a history of wiping out entire societies they don't like (see : mandalorians)
Jedi are Lawful and Sith are chaotic. Either one in excess will lead to ruin.

**Paradigm**

AegisGrimm wrote:

My real problem with the theory with Kylo and Rey switching sides is that Rey needs some sort of reason to go bad (at least in good writing, anyway-unfortunately this is Hollywood and Disney)

I think the most obvious one is Luke pushing her away after she places her hopes and trust in him, Luke's bitterness could easily reflect itself in Rey. Meanwhile, I think Kylo will move more towards the Light and him and Rey will end up on their own in the middle. I'm confident that Kylo won't pull the trigger on Leia's ship as the trailer implies, realising at the last minute that if killing Han didn't erase his doubts and complete his fall to the Dark Side then neither would that. Some other FO pilot takes down the flagship and Kylo turns on Snoke and the FO as a result.

Cue Rey and Ren both cut off from their respective masters, and forming an alliance that ultimately represents more of a Balance in the Force than the Jedi or the Sith in opposition ever did; not equal but opposing forces, but rather both sides of the Force being used in unison to achieve true balance.

I think the perfect ending to TLJ would be bringing Rey and Kylo together, setting them up to wage their own war against Snoke and the First Order in episode IX. Hopefully somewhere along the way, something (maybe Leia's death) shakes Luke out of his bitterness and brokenness and sets him up again as a proper hero to lead the Resistance from the front.

**gorgon**

Isn't the new canon that the Force was discovered by a brother and sister around a Force tree? That the brother grew strong in the DS while the sister turned to the LS? Then they came into conflict and she was killed...I think.

A Ben/Rey alliance would bring that story back around and heal the ancient breach. It's especially symbolic if they're also related.

I think there were also people speculating that Snoke is the brother in the story.

**Galef**

gorgon wrote:
Isn't the new canon that the Force was discovered by a brother and sister around a Force tree? That the brother grew strong in the DS while the sister turned to the LS? Then they came into conflict and she was killed...I think.

A Ben/Rey alliance would bring that story back around and heal the ancient breach. It's especially symbolic if they're also related.

I think there were also people speculating that Snoke is the brother in the story.

This would be interesting. It would also give a good opportunity to bring Anakin back as a facilitator of this balance. TFA did give us the impression that Kylo has been speaking to old papa Vader in some capacity, after all.
Maybe destroying the Sith (and Jedi) was only the first part of the prophecy for Anakin to fulfill.

**LordofHats**

gorgon wrote:
Isn't the new canon that the Force was discovered by a brother and sister around a Force tree? That the brother grew strong in the DS while the sister turned to the LS? Then they came into conflict and she was killed...I think.

A Ben/Rey alliance would bring that story back around and heal the ancient breach. It's especially symbolic if they're also related.

I think there were also people speculating that Snoke is the brother in the story.

The current canon (as detailed in "brief" here) is rather sparse and a little bit contradictory because the current work by Disney is back stepping away from some of things Lucas threw in in his last few years. Some elements of the old EU like The Hundred Year Darkness have been recanonized since Disney took over but none of that history has been given much detail. Disney seems to favor the duality of the force as Light and Dark, but even then they still threw in Bendu in Star Wars: Rebels who proclaimed himself as neither light or dark, just "the one in the middle."

You're thinking of the old EU where the origins of the Force and the Jedi/Sith were awesome, and got a pretty decent comic series dedicated to the period (Star Wars: Force Wars by Dark Horse) and that narrative did become part of the canon in the form of The Son and The Daughter who appeared in Clone Wars (the Mortis Trilogy Season 3, available on Netflix), but managed to be a thousand times stupider because Lucas seems incapable of describing how "balance" and "ultimate overwhelming goodness" are any different from each other while continually insisting the later is just as bad as the mustache twirling villainy that passes for ultimate evil in Star Wars.

**gorgon**

Now that I think about it, the brother/sister thing might have come from that fake leak of TLJ's script. So it's probably bunk.

**Wyzilla**

CthuluIsSpy wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
At least Boba Fett went down fighting. He didn't squeal like a piggy and then let the heroes throw him down a trash compactor without a fight.

Yeah, that was dumb. There was a lot of things that irritated me in TFA, and the order's overall incompetence is one of them. I mean, Phasma is supposed to be a high ranking commander, and all it takes is a question at gunpoint to make her fold? Pathetic.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wyzilla wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
The problem with the idea of balance in the Force is that, while the Sith are Evil, the Jedi are not actually Good. The Jedi were more about maintaining balance in the Force. It's hard to maintain balance on a seesaw when one person sits on one end (the Sith), and the other person only sits in the middle (the Jedi).

As I might point out the idea that the Jedi are about "balance" is this really cheesy shoe horn George Lucas kept trying to shove into the franchise in his last few years, and that anyone with a moral compass more complex than an eight-year-old is capable of picking to pieces.

It's one of the reasons why Star Wars internal ideology is actually completely bonkers. The Sith are evil because they're encouraged to be selfish, power hungry, and abuse the force*. The Jedi are balanced because they're encouraged to be selfless, not pursue personal power, and respect the force as some kind of god entity that guides them. Wait what? All of those seem like unquestionably good things. How is that "balanced" on a scale of black and white morality? I mean sure maybe they're more balanced personality wise but any attempt to proclaim the Jedi as "not paragons of goodness" falls on deaf ears the first chance the Jedi get to go out of their way and rescue someone just cause. And that's really just if you buy into the Jedi as serious about all that. If you instead turn it around and frame the Jedi as massive hypocrites, then both the Sith and the Jedi are different brands of evil and the rest of the galaxy is held helplessly hostage in a millennia long civil war between evil space wizards, with the Jedi simply being preferable because their brand of tyranny doesn't involve mass murder and slavery (except when it does).

There's been a bit of back petal on this in recent Star Wars material, most notably the character of Bendu in Star Wars: Rebels. The writers seemed to realize how much Lucas was butchering the concept of Dharma and no one was buying into it either because it was too confusing or too transparently false. Now the Jedi are the Good, the Sith are the Bad, and the middle is occupied by some lone alien on a deserted planet who likes playing mind games. Of course they still managed to feth that up because despite Bendu constant protestations about how he was "the one in the middle" he pretty much always sided with the good guys when it counted and only ever uttered his middleness as an excuse to do nothing which makes him more morally hypocritical than enlightened.

But this is Star Wars, and it always worked best when operating on a more black and white scale of idealism, so maybe people should stop trying to randomly shoehorn in the gray when none of the plots or story lines of the franchise outside Drew Karpyshyn are really built for it.

And this is why the internal ideology of Star Wars is bonkers, and people really shouldn't put that much thought into it

*I want a cross over of Code Geass and Star War by the way. Lelouch would have some harsh words for the rhetoric this universe runs on

Uh, you are aware right that balance is actually total removal of the Sith right? According to George Lucas himself the Sith and the Dark Side is a tumor. It isn't supposed to exist. "Balance" is the Sith being completely wiped out and only the light side, which is the true force, reigning. Anakin Skywalker wasn't supposed to butcher the Jedi Order to bring balance to the Force, just killing Palpatine, Maul, and Dooku would have done that.

Except that's still not balance. Balance implies negative and positive in equal quantities so that they cancel each other out. If you wipe out the sith, that would leave the Jedi order unopposed, pushing their doctrine and effectively monopolizing the force. That's not good. No group should have that much power and influence. Especially when you consider that the Jedi have a history of wiping out entire societies they don't like (see : mandalorians)
Jedi are Lawful and Sith are chaotic. Either one in excess will lead to ruin.

Except that's not canon. Star Wars is black and white morality, barely any grey exists. The Mandalorians in both continuities got assaulted and broken by the Jedi Order because they aligned themselves with the Dark Side, which is an aberration. To put it in D&D terms if you were cast detect evil, Sith and their supporters would light up like the sun. Balance is in fact the total annihilation of the Sith and the Dark Side in general. The idea that the Jedi were bamboozled by the prophecy and them getting wiped out was part of it is total fan fiction.

**LordofHats**

Wyzilla wrote:

Except that's not canon. Star Wars is black and white morality, barely any grey exists. The Mandalorians in both continuities got assaulted and broken by the Jedi Order because they aligned themselves with the Dark Side, which is an aberration. To put it in D&D terms if you were cast detect evil, Sith and their supporters would light up like the sun. Balance is in fact the total annihilation of the Sith and the Dark Side in general. The idea that the Jedi were bamboozled by the prophecy and them getting wiped out was part of it is total fan fiction.

I feel like it's been mentioned numerous times, and you're still for some reason not understanding.

It is canon, because the TV series are still canon and the first one, Clone Wars, has a three parter that Lucas specifically had made to explain the nature of the force, and that nature was bonkers, especially in how it tried to show the dark side as having redeeming value* and the light side as having negative aspects. Someone better probably could have pulled it off honestly cause it's was done well in the EU a few times, but the way it played out in Mortis was confusing and backwards.

*and as much as I hated the whole "what do mean being overwhelmingly selfless and full of love is bad" bit that was going on I think this was easily the most botched part of the episodes. Trying to portray The Son with sympathetic aspects kind of went rapidly down the tube when they made him come of as even more of a sociopath than he already seemed to be XD

You can keep arguing the semantics of "balance" (poorly) but that's just missing the point. And I wouldn't really say that it was fan fiction that the Jedi were "bamboozled". Its a fan theory sure but death of the author and all that (not to mention it made sense at the time on the heels of the rather lackluster and unconvincing performance of Hayden Christiansen making the whole thing really look like fate demanded it). How were fans supposed to know that Lucas would rapidly develop a raging hate boner for them and dedicated his last couple years to crucifying his own work to spite them?

**Paradigm**

Of course, the easy way to reconcile the two versions of Balance, the whole 'Dark Side is an aberration in the Force' thing and a more logical position where Balance is Light and Dark in harmony is to just say that the former is simply how the Jedi have come to see it, and doesn't actually reflect any real 'truth' about the Force. The Jedi are known to have been easily led astray and often short-sighted in their beliefs, especially at the end, so you simply state that the reason they believe the Dark Side to be an abnormality that has to be destroyed it because that's more palatable to them than accepting that what they've preached for a few thousand years might in fact be totally wrong.

If, for example, Yoda came to this realisation, would he say 'Ok, we're now doing Dark Side classes with the Younglings every other Friday', or would he do any amount of mental gymnastics to justify teaching that Balance= Overwhelming presence of the Light Side'? The Jedi ideology is known to be flawed on so many levels that this would be an easy thing to explain away.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Ah ah ah....the latter Jedi ideology is flawed.

Who knows what the original teachings were? If I might risk a flame war, consider the pure teachings of Christ, and those who completely laughably call themselves Christian today (NOT ALL CHRISTIANS. Just the ones that don't seem to get it, at all).

**Bran Dawri**

LordofHats wrote:
The current canon (as detailed in "brief" here) is rather sparse and a little bit contradictory because the current work by Disney is back stepping away from some of things Lucas threw in in his last few years. Some elements of the old EU like The Hundred Year Darkness have been recanonized since Disney took over but none of that history has been given much detail. Disney seems to favor the duality of the force as Light and Dark, but even then they still threw in Bendu in Star Wars: Rebels who proclaimed himself as neither light or dark, just "the one in the middle."

You're thinking of the old EU where the origins of the Force and the Jedi/Sith were awesome, and got a pretty decent comic series dedicated to the period (Star Wars: Force Wars by Dark Horse) and that narrative did become part of the canon in the form of The Son and The Daughter who appeared in Clone Wars (the Mortis Trilogy Season 3, available on Netflix), but managed to be a thousand times stupider because Lucas seems incapable of describing how "balance" and "ultimate overwhelming goodness" are any different from each other while continually insisting the later is just as bad as the mustache twirling villainy that passes for ultimate evil in Star Wars.

Mmm, but the Jedi were never about "ultimate overwhelming goodness" or compassion. They're trained almost from birth to completely suppress all emotion and work within the rules/laws of their order. Or else. I mean, they kicked Ahsoka out for not lying down and accepting a false accusation.
Individual Jedi could be compassionate and generally nice people, but the Order as a whole was not about either. Just like it's possible some Sith aren't power-hungry evil monsters (like Maul's brother, I suppose), although the nature of chaos is stacked against that.
The Jedi/Sith conflict is more about Lawful vs Chaotic than good vs evil. At least in modern SW. (The original trilogy was more "farmboy coming of age against the backdrop of an Evil Empire with Evil Magic Space Wizards ruling it).
I have no problem with there being other flavours of Force users than eunuched Jedi or powerhungry monster Sith, like Bendu claiming allegiance to neither side, and Ahsoka's new white lightsabers. I believe Ventress was headed that way as well after being abandoned by Dooku.