Film / The Last Jedi

aka: Star Wars 8

Due to the sheer volume of spoilers, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Luke Skywalker: It's time for the Jedi... to end.^note Clockwise from top left: Rey, Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux, Poe Dameron, BB-9E, Captain Phasma, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, Rose Tico, Finn, BB-8, and C-3PO and R2-D2.

The FIRST ORDER reigns.
Having decimated the peaceful
Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke
now deploys his merciless
legions to seize military
control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa's
band of RESISTANCE fighters
stand against the rising tyranny,
certain that Jedi Master Luke
Skywalker will return and restore
a spark of hope to the fight.

But the Resistance has been exposed.
As the First Order speeds toward
the rebel base, the brave heroes
mount a desperate escape....

Star Wars: The Last Jedi ^note Marketed as Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, or simply The Last Jedi is the sequel to The Force Awakens and the ninth live-action Star Wars film overall. It is directed and written by Rian Johnson, with a soundtrack by John Williams.

Picking up immediately after the events of The Force Awakens, the film follows the all-out war that has now broken out between the First Order and the remains of the New Republic led by General Leia's Resistance. On one side of the Galaxy, Leia, Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, Finn, Poe Dameron, BB-8 and Finn's newfound friend Rose Tico are desperately trying to escape the First Order's military advance. And on the other, Rey tries to convince a disillusioned Luke Skywalker to teach her in the ways of the Force, and help her and the Resistance stop both Luke's former pupil Kylo Ren and his dark master Snoke, the Supreme Leader of the First Order.

Most of the lead cast from The Force Awakens return, including Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher (in her final film appearance), Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Gwendoline Christie. Jimmy Vee replaces Kenny Baker as the primary R2-D2 actor, and Joonas Suotamo replaces Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca (though Mayhew is credited as "Chewbacca Consultant"). Both Tim Rose and Mike Quinn reprise their roles as Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb respectively. New additions to the cast include Benicio del Toro, Laura Dern, Amanda Lawrence, and newcomer Kelly Marie Tran.

The Last Jedi was released on December 15, 2017. Early filming began briefly in September 2015 for a sequence in Ireland—specifically, Skellig Michael, where the previous movie's last scene took place. Filming began properly in February 2016, with Ireland, Bolivia, and Croatia as shooting locations.

The film is chronologically followed by The Rise of Skywalker and by Solo in production order.

Previews: Teaser, Behind the scenes, Official trailer.

---

"I will not be the last troper."

Tropes # to F

• 13 Is Unlucky:
  • In the Battle of Crait, the Resistance uses thirteen speeders against the First Order's walkers and TIE fighters. All of the speeders are destroyed with most of the pilots dead, and none of them achieve their objective.
  • Luke says that he taught a dozen students alongside Kylo, for a total of thirteen.
• 2-D Space:
  • As is standard for Star Wars films, bizarrely and weirdly invoked in the way that blaster beams arc from ship to ship as if they were actually artillery shells, only IN SPACE!.
  • Inverted, and played with, in the beginning with Poe; he uses an end-over-end turn after his bombing run, but flies back along the same plane to begin the main fight.
  • Averted when the Millennium Falcon drops off Rey in the pod, it drops out of hyperspace quite a bit of a ways off the Z-axis relative to the ongoing chase with the Resistance, and it "descends" to the Supremacy.
• Abandon Ship: Poe is frustrated with the Resistance leadership over this, as Holdo appears to have no strategy beyond evacuating the Raddus in a group of defenseless transport ships. It later emerges that this is actually a slightly more valid plan than Poe thought, as it's revealed that the transport ships could fly past the First Order's radar toward an old Rebel outpost on a nearby planet.
• Abnormal Ammo: Small alien gambler Dobbu Scay of the Canto Bight casino inserts coins into BB-8, thinking he's a slot machine, and BB-8 later shoots them at a guard in jail when said guard tries to prevent DJ's escape, which is enough of a distraction for DJ to knock the guard out.
• Ace Custom: Poe Dameron's T-70 X-wing fighter Black One comes equipped with a large booster engine that allows the already nimble fighter to go very fast. In the hands of Poe, he evades the dreadnought turbolasers like they're not even there and take out almost all of their surface cannons before they could even know what hit them.
• Achilles' Heel: The First Order Dreadnought has a weak point in the central depression of its hull, and is left helpless when Poe destroys all of the ship's surface guns, paving the way for the Resistance bombers to try and bomb that depression. The Fulminatrix is taken out by a single bomber's payload due to that weak spot.
• Achilles in His Tent: Luke refuses to leave Ahch-To to help the Resistance, despite Rey's pleas and Leia's pleas by proxy.
• Action Prologue: The first ten minutes of the movie are spent showing the evacuation and subsequent battle over D'Qar, which the First Order already discovered. Then we finally get to see Luke's reaction to Rey giving him a lightsaber.
• Actor Allusion: There's a deleted scene where after Luke tricks Rey into believing the natives are being attacked by raiders, but it turns out it was actually a party which Luke uses to prove Rey her implusiveness to help people is what the galaxy needs, not the Jedi. When Rey confronts him about it, Mark Hamill (Luke) pulls a distinct laugh similar to his other most iconic character.
• Actually a Doombot: A heroic example with Luke Skywalker, using an Astral Projection to keep Kylo and his men occupied while the Resistance escape. As per the trope, his deception isn't revealed until Kylo strikes the supposed killing blow.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The novelization says that Poe's Black One fighter has an intelligent computer with its own personality that can only communicate with BB-8. And according to BB-8, Black One is a vainglorious pain in the ass.^note A similar thing happened in The Thrawn Trilogy. Luke let Artoo and his X-Wing go without memory wipes for so long the flight computer basically became AI and molded its personality around Artoo, to the point that only Artoo could communicate with it and did so at true droid-counterpart levels.
• Adaptation Expansion: The novelization contains several quick asides that explains away famous gripes with the Force Awakens and the Last Jedi. For example, Snoke's inner monologue contains a moment where he mocks Rey for thinking her pulling the lightsaber from the snow was a big deal, since that is something everyone that is in-tune with the Force does as their very first thing.
• Advertised Extra: From the advertising and merchandising, you might think the Porgs play an important role in the plot, like the Ewoks. You'd be wrong.
• Aerial Canyon Chase: Chewie and Rey, aboard the Millennium Falcon, draw away the TIE fighters from the battleground above the Rebel base on Crait, mostly thanks to Kylo Ren's hatred of this ship. The starfighters are then shot or crashed one by one in a chase through the crystal canyons and caverns of the salt planet, including some very narrow passages where the Falcon barely squeezes by flying on its side.
• Aerith and Bob: In a series that's mostly Aeriths but with a few Bobs that stick out, this movie introduces some prominent characters of the latter category, most notably Rose, and her sister Paige (the bomber pilot from the opening who does a Heroic Sacrifice to take out the dreadnought).
• An Aesop:
  • Your past can't define you any more than you let it; to truly progress and become stronger you must let old hang-ups go so you can go into your future free of the shackles that the past has lain on you. This Aesop is given to us by Kylo Ren in dialogue, but he is ultimately unable to either let go of his past or learn from it. Meanwhile, Rey comes to know the Man behind the Myth when she finally meets Luke, and although there's a fair bit of broken pedestal involved, she (and Luke) realizes and accepts that history is ultimately something worth holding onto and learning from, no matter whether that history be one of success or failure.
  • Legends can inspire... for good and for bad. They can spark hope and motivate people to be good and selfless, but they can also stimulate hubris in those who seek to be the hero of their own story.
  • "The greatest teacher, failure is." This is the point of the entire movie's plot being a "Shaggy Dog" Story, because it not only applies to Luke's failure to rebuild the Jedi or stop Ben from turning to the dark side, as Yoda is referring to, but also Finn and Rose's failure to disable the lightspeed tracker, Poe's failure to oppose Holdo, the Resistance's failure to stop the First Order's advance, and Leia's failure to recruit allies to help them.
• Air Strike Impossible: Several examples throughout the film, by both heroes and villains alike:
  • During the Action Prologue, Poe gives the First Order Dreadnought a nasty case of "Trench Run Disease", hugging its hull and picking off its defensive guns to clear the way for the Resistance's fleet of heavy bombers. When Hux asks why Poe's X-Wing isn't taken down, Captain Canady retorts that the lone starfighter is too small and agile for the surface cannons to intercept, and bemoans that his crew should have sent out fighters instead of thinking they're invulnerable.
  • The Resistance bombers, with the assistance of Poe and his fellow starfighter pilots, slog their way through a swarm of TIE fighters, with several bombers being picked off on their way to their target due to the furball's intensity. Most of the bombers are taken out in one fell swoop due to a nasty case of Disaster Dominoes, but the sole remaining bomber is able to release its payload just before being destroyed, taking down the Dreadnought.
  • Kylo Ren returns the favor in his TIE Silencer later on, skillfully evading the Resistance fleet's defensive fire, flying through the hangar bay of the Raddus and blowing up the remaining Resistance starfighters before they can launch.
  • Finally, the Resistance soldiers have to try and destroy the First Order's superlaser siege cannon with a small force of old speeders. As it happens, they can't break through the screening force's defenses and they are forced to break off without success.
• Alien Sky: The twin suns on Ahch-To.
• The Alleged Car: The sandspeeders on Crait are falling apart from years of disuse. Poe takes notice when a floor panel snaps off from him merely putting his foot on it.
  Poe: What the hell?
• All for Nothing:
  • Finn and Rose's lengthy adventure to Canto Bight to find a codebreaker? Rendered completely moot when the codebreaker betrays them, never mind that he wasn't the codebreaker they were sent there to get in the first place.
  • Admiral Holdo's plan to evacuate everyone nearly succeeds until the aforementioned codebreaker decrypts the unarmed transports' cloaking, allowing the First Order to nearly wipe them all out. Even after the narrow escape of a handful of survivors, Leia's subsequent plan fails as well, as the signal they fought to send out for rescue brings no one.
• All Just a Dream: The novelization starts with Luke and his wife living on Tatooine. This turns out to be a dream Luke's having where he never had any adventures and just lived a normal life.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Rian Johnson and Gwendoline Christie created an elaborate backstory for Captain Phasma to help improve Christie's performance; however, no information about Phasma's past appears in the final film. Her backstory has been covered in the Phasma novel and Captain Phasma interquel comic series, released as a part of the Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi multimedia project.
  • The Visual Dictionary for this movie reveals the name of the Canto Bight stableboy to be Temiri Blagg (named after the actor who played him, Temirlane Blaev.)
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The First Order is dispatched to assault the Resistance base on D'Qar at the beginning.
• And Mission Control Rejoiced: The bridge of the Raddus after the Dreadnought is taken down.
• Animal Stampede: Invoked. Finn and Rose free the captive fathiers on Canto Bight, and they wreck the casinos and the streets in their escape.
• Answer Cut:
  • Finn asks Poe where Rey is, and instead of an answer, we see a shot of Ahch-To.
  • Similarly, Luke asks where Han is, and the camera immediately cuts to his killer, Kylo Ren.
• Anti-Climax: This movie subverts expectations the audience may have:
  • The movie repeats the climactic scene of Force Awakens where Rey hands Luke his old lightsaber, only for Luke to promptly Blind Shoulder Toss it off a cliff and walk away.
  • Who are Rey's parents really? Kylo claims they were nobody junkers who sold their child for some drinking money and eventually died in a ditch (contradicted in The Force Awakens). In the end, it was only ever her desire to be a good person and help those in need, like BB-8, that really mattered.
  • The fight between Finn and Captain Phasma barely lasts two minutes onscreen and ends with Finn handing Phasma her ass on a silver platter, complete with her unceremoniously falling to a fiery (apparent) death as Snoke's ship falls apart around them.
• Appropriated Appellation: Finn proudly corrects Captain Phasma's "scum" to "Rebel scum".
• Arc Symbol: A lot of focus are given on circles and spheres, befitting the theme of legacy ("full circle").
• Arc Words:
  • "Darkness rises, and light to meet it."
  • "We are the spark that will light the fire" once again recalls the Spark of the Rebellion phrase and the association of fire with rebellion/resistance that originated in Rebels and appeared in subsequent material.
  • "Raw power" or "raw strength" is used in the trailer both by Snoke and Luke.
  • "Let the past die," seen in both trailers and spoken by both Kylo and Yoda.
  • "Godspeed, Rebels!", first by the captain of the hospital ship to the remaining Resistance ships as it runs out of fuel and gets obliterated by the First Order destroyers, then by Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo to Leia and the survivors as they head to Crait, before she performs her Heroic Sacrifice.
  • "Go on. Say it." is spoken by Kylo Ren to Rey on two very heightened moments, both concerning the issue of her parents: once when she's struggling to ask him why he murdered Han Solo, and later when he's forcing to admit that she knows her parents were nobodies.
• Armor-Piercing Response: "Strike me down in anger and I'll always be with you. Just like your father." Its recipient is clearly enraged and bothered by it.
• Arms Dealer: The residents of Canto Bight gained their wealth by selling weapons to both the Resistance and the First Order.
• Artifact Title: Retroactively. The "Last Jedi" referred to in the title was meant to be Leia, whose powers would have emerged in the final part of the trilogy. Unfortunately, Carrie Fisher's passing meant this never happened.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • The shots fired by the flagship's weapons visibly arc downwards as they fly towards the Republic cruiser, to evoke the image of artillery shells. But both ships are in deep space; there is no reason for the shots to fly in anything other than a straight line.
  • There's also no reason for bombers in space dropping their payloads like airborne (atmospheric) bomber aircraft. Supposedly they are magnetic, but there's no evidence of this from the film itself and they act just like gravity bombs.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Luke does this at the end because his astral projection power drains too much of his life energy. Like Obi Wan and Yoda, he vanishes into thin air.
• Astral Projection:
  • A recurring component in the movie is a "Force Bond" between Rey and Kylo Ren that allows them to appear before each other and talk despite being in entirely different parts of the galaxy.
  • In what is probably the most impressive Force feat in all the movies, Luke projects himself from across the galaxy to the planet Crait while physically remaining in his hovel at the edge of known space to make amends with Leia and face down the First Order.
• Astronomic Zoom: The film opens with a shot of the Resistance fleet orbiting D'Qar before zooming down to the base being evacuated.
• Audience Surrogate:
  • Finn fulfills this role on Canto Bight; prior to the film he has only lived in military environments under First Order control, and spent short bursts of time in other locations. As a result, he starts off bowled over by the opulence of the place, and needs Rose to explain the full picture.
  • It's actually used rather cleverly through the movie as different characters play the role of Audience Surrogate, depending on their past and qualifications (so we have Poe asking questions about First Order weapons to Finn, etc.).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Bombers that attack the Dreadnought may look cool and were designed intentionally as a callback to World War II, but in actuality having slow-moving ships that have to be directly above a target to fire on it is extremely impractical, given a single lightweight X-Wing was able to deal a good amount of damage to the same target.
  • Ramming one large ship into another at lightspeed is a sure way to take out even capital ships like the Supremacy and the surrounding fleet. But as discussed in the next film, this is an extremely costly move that also destroys the ship used to attack. The only reason Holdo (who eventually gets the attack named after her) does it is because it's a last-ditch effort to keep the First Order off of the Resistance's backs.
• Awesomeness Is a Force: Luke briefly causes the Battle of Crait to come to a complete stop purely by showing up.
• Awful Truth:
  • Rey believes her psychic connection with Kylo Ren means he is ready to turn to the light side of the Force. Even after she discovers that the connection was created by Snoke as a trap, she still believes, and her belief is seemingly confirmed when Kylo kills Snoke and saves her life. She is wrong, and devastated when she finds out the truth; he killed Snoke not to defeat the First Order, but to usurp it.
  • We finally gain a little more insight into why Kylo Ren became what he is today and it's horribly tragic. Luke, his trusted uncle and mentor, was so afraid of the growing darkness in him he briefly contemplated killing him. He almost instantly came to his senses and was horrified he'd even considered it... but Kylo saw only his uncle looming over him, lightsaber ignited, tears in his eyes and reacted about as well as you'd expect....
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Rey and Kylo Ren fight the Praetorian Guards this way. At one point Rey grabs onto him and leans on his back for leverage.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Rose points out that the rich residents of Canto Bight are terrible people, and backs it up by showing Finn how they abuse the fathiers (large, four-legged mammals) on the island. Sure enough, one of the fathiers is seen with wounds on its neck before it is freed.
• Bad Vibrations: In the usual Jurassic Park homage, the fathiers' stampede through the Canto Bight casino is preceded by the shot of a cup full of some liquid getting ripples on its surface.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • After Luke tosses his lightsaber away, we see two porgs playing around it, one stepping on the activation switch while the other peers into the emitter. It seems to be setting up that one porg is going to accidentally switch the saber on and kill the other. Instead, Rey simply picks up the lightsaber.
  • Kylo Ren seemingly repeats history and kills Snoke to help Rey, but then immediately takes control of the First Order himself. He does offer for her to join him, but she naturally refuses.
  • Played for Laughs when what appears to be a spacecraft hissing steam as it lands turns out to be an extreme closeup of an automated steam iron.
• Bait the Dog: DJ plays himself up as a Wild Card, but still gives back the medallion that he'd taken from Rose as payment. After that, they're captured and, facing execution, DJ sells out the Resistance directly, leading to the death of most of the escapees from the Raddus.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: Yoda pulls one on Luke.
  Luke: So it is time. For the Jedi Order to end.
  Yoda: Time it is... for you to look past a pile of old books.
• Balance Between Good and Evil:
  • Lampshaded by Snoke, who notes that as Kylo Ren has grown strong in the Dark Side, Rey has emerged as a champion for the Light.
  • During Rey's training, Luke shows her that such duality exists everywhere.
• Battering Ram: The First Order uses a superlaser cannon to break down the door to the Rebel base on Crait, and it's called a battering ram by the Resistance.
• Battle Amongst the Flames:
  • Kylo and Rey initially duke it out against Snoke's Praetorian Guards in the throne room adorned with red First Order banners, but midway through the fight, Rey kills one of the guards and sends his weapon flying towards the banners, quickly setting them ablaze as everything starts to fall apart.
  • In the aftermath of Holdo's ramming maneuver that wrecked the Supremacy and the First Order fleet, Finn, armed with a Z6 Riot Control Baton, goes toe-to-toe with a pike-wielding Phasma while their surroundings are in flames during an intense shootout.
• Battle in the Rain: The fight between Rey and Luke on Ahch-to takes place during a downpour.
• Big Bad: Supreme Leader Snoke, personally chasing down the Resistance fleet. At least, until Kylo kills him halfway through and takes over the First Order.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: The movie opens with the First Order stumbling on the Resistance's evacuation of D'Qar. In order to buy time, Poe launches an attack on the Dreadnought Fulminatrix, shooting down its surface cannons and paving the way for Cobalt Squadron's smal fleet of bombers. They then slowly make their approach towards the Dreadnought as a massive furball between TIE Fighters and Resistance starfighters ensues. The endeavour almost fails when all but one of bombers get wiped out by an ill-timed case of Disaster Dominoes, leaving Paige's bomber alone to press on the attack. She manages to arm and drop the bombs, destroying the Dreadnought and allowing the Resistance fleet to escape though hyperspace, but the victory is only temporary, and the losses incurred unsustainable.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Millennium Falcon, when it comes to Rose's aid on Crait when she is tailed by three TIE fighters.
• Big Damn Reunion: Luke and Leia. And later Finn and Rey amidst the falling rubble.
• Big Door: The large, heavily-armored door to the Resistance base on Crait, which is supposedly the only way in or out. The First Order tries to knock it down during the climactic battle.
• Big "NO!":
  • Kylo Ren lets one out at the end of the film when he realizes that Luke has been using Astral Projection to distract him.
  • Luke belts out another in his telling of how Ben Solo fell to the Dark Side.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Played with. The text on Finn's medical pod seen is written in an actual well-formed Fictionary called Aurebesh, but the vast majority of the text is gibberish. However, one part of the text says "stable", referring to Finn's medical health. When BB-8 and Poe prepare their attack run, this text appears on Poe's screen. It reads "I have a bad feeling about this."
  • Played straight later on. The crate that Rey stuffs herself into late in the movie has a script on it that reads "property of Han Solo", according to the artbook; Rian Johnson apparently wanted it made clear that it came from the Falcon.
• Bitch Slap: Leia slaps Poe for his unauthorized maneuver in the opening fight. According to Vanity Fair, it took 27 takes to get right.
• Bittersweet Ending: The movie ends with the Resistance at their lowest point since the end of Revenge of the Sith. The Resistance lose the bulk of their army, most of their equipment, with a tiny party that can fit the Millennium Falcon with Leia as their only leader. Kylo Ren has usurped Snoke and taken control of the First Order, which despite the massive damage to their starfleet are fully able to take over the galaxy. Luke has died but not before becoming an Inspirational Martyr whose legend raises the morale of the Resistance, spreading to Canto Bight where the small slave children tell his story, and hinted to be future recruits for the new Jedi Order. Most of all, Rey is alive, very strong with the Force, and with the original ancient-scriptures of the Jedi's Spiritual and Warrior Traditions in her possession, sets out to carry on Luke's legacy.
• Black Comedy: Chewie cooking and eating some Porgs... in front of a bunch of other, horrified Porgs.
• Blind Shoulder Toss: Luke's first action in the movie is to take one look at the lightsaber Rey hands him and chuck it casually over his shoulder.
• Blown Across the Room: Poe, when stun gunned by Leia.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: When Phasma captures Finn and Rose, she decides that execution by blaster is too good for them. During the delay in their execution, the Raddus rams the Supremacy, freeing the two Resistance members and killing a large number of their captors.
• Book Burning: Having lost his faith in the Jedi, Luke decides to burn down the tree containing the sacred texts, ending the last vestiges of the Order. It's subverted, however, when he can't go through with it. Then it's Double Subverted when the ghost of Master Yoda summons a lightning bolt to destroy the tree. Unlike other instances of this trope, however, it's not about destroying forbidden literature; rather, it's Yoda teaching Luke that he can't bind himself to ancient dogma.
  Luke: So it is time for the Jedi to end.
  Yoda: Time it is...for you to look past a pile of old books.
  Luke: The sacred Jedi texts!
  Yoda: Oh, read them have you?
  Luke: Well, I—
  Yoda: Page-turners they were not. Yes, yes, yes, wisdom they held, but that library contains nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.

And then it's triple-subverted when it turns out that Rey stole the texts. Whether he meant it that way or not, the line about the library containing nothing that the girl Rey doesn't already possess could in fact be interpreted literally as Yoda knowing Rey actually has the books, meaning that Yoda merely destroyed an empty library just to troll Luke.

• Bookends:
  • Luke's journey begins with him contemplating under a binary sunset. It ends with him contemplating eternity under a binary sunrise.
  • Luke Skywalker begins the film by tossing his father's lightsaber over his shoulder in disgust, and ends the film by wielding that same lightsaber in combat against Kylo Ren to save the entire Resistance.
  • The film features space battles near the start and end of the film. Both battles feature overconfident attacking forces decimated through a mix of determined defenders and spectacular examples of Disaster Dominoes. Both battles also feature victory secured by a single remaining Resistance ship crewed by a single surviving crewman.
  • Luke's life of adventure begins with Leia's holographic request for help. It ends after he sends a spectral projection of himself to help his sister.
  • At the beginning of the movie, Poe engages in a pointless and self-destructive attack that gets most of his squad killed, ignoring orders from Leia to fall back. At the end, he recognizes the pointlessness of attacking the First Order's ram (Death Star tech) and orders Finn to fall back, which Finn ignores, only to be saved by Rose.
• Boom, Headshot!: An unusual example performed with a lightsaber by Kylo Ren, who briefly ignites the lightsaber Rey threw him while it's pointing straight at the head of the last standing Praetorian guard.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Amidst all of the turmoil between Poe and Holdo, both of them end up having some important points to make to each other. Holdo reiterates Poe's reasons for being demoted by Leia, namely his hubris and refusal to back down when necessary, which led to needless Resistance losses; this causes Poe to rethink his tactics and become a wiser pilot who knows when to retreat. However, she keeps a good fraction of the Resistance in the dark about the evacuation shuttles' cloaking devices that can keep these defenseless craft safe, which certainly doesn't win over Poe's trust and leads to a mutiny against her.
• Bottomless Fuel Tanks: An unusual inversion for Star Wars. During the Stern Chase, it's repeatedly noted that the fleeing Resistance ships are running out of fuel, and they can only go so long before their fuel supplies dwindle to the point that a hyperspace jump will be impossible. Their two support ships have to be abandoned because their fuel runs out completely, leaving only the command ship Raddus.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: As a last-ditch effort, the Resistance remnants sheltering inside the abandoned Rebel base on Crait use antiquated speeders in the hope of reaching the First Order's gigantic cannon before it destroys the base's massive door. The speeders barely function and lose parts when running.

• Broken Faceplate: Phasma's helmet is broken during her fight with Finn in the badly damaged Supremacy, revealing one of her eyes.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • After admiring Luke as a myth and looking forward to meeting him, Rey is more than a little shocked when he gives her the cold shoulder. At least at first.
  • Luke himself towards the Jedi Order, pointing out their numerous failings and actions of hypocrisy and hubris. His faith in what the Jedi tried to be and are supposed to be is promptly restored towards the end of the film, and his Last Stand in turn causes Rey to see him as a Hope Bringer, making for two cases of Rebuilt Pedestal for the price of one.
  • Rose practically starts squeeing over Finn when she meets him because, being a low-ranked mechanic, she never got to meet a Resistance hero before. When she realizes he's about to abandon ship, you can almost hear the pedestal crumbling into tiny pieces before she pulls out an electric tool and zaps Finn unconscious for his desertion attempt.
  • Implied as part of Kylo's backstory. He woke up one night to see his uncle and mentor Luke standing above him with a lightsaber, preparing to kill him. Terrified, he tried to kill Luke in self-defense and turned to the dark side.
  • Supreme Leader Snoke is an unusual villainous example. At first Kylo seems almost to worship Snoke, seeking the affection that he craved but didn't receive from either Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, but when Snoke repeatedly mocks Kylo, calls him weak in front of his enemies, and reveals that the bond between him and Rey was all Snoke's doing, Kylo's adoration turns to hatred and he replaces his master in Rule of Two fashion.
• Bullying a Dragon: General Hux continues to regard Kylo Ren with disdain and contempt and uses the authority that Supreme Leader Snoke endorsed him with as a safety net to keep belittling and insulting the dark warrior. This comes back to haunt Hux big time when he tries to order Kylo Ren around after Snoke's untimely death, prompting Kylo to immediately Force-choke him for his years of insolence, earning Hux's fear and complete obedience.

• Call-Back: A number of plot-important lines and character decisions reference previous Star Wars films.
  • The film opens with the First Order assaulting the Resistance's base on D'Qar, referencing their previous discovery and plan to destroy the hideout with Starkiller Base back in The Force Awakens.
  • The thing that ultimately convinces Luke to train Rey is a big one: Leia's message pleading Obi-Wan Kenobi for assistance from A New Hope.
  • When Rey decides to head right into what she knows to be the heart of enemy territory, despite only having days of training, in belief it's necessary to save her friends, Luke outright tells her "this is not going to go the way you think!", referencing his own decisions and their outcomes back in The Empire Strikes Back.
  • In The Force Awakens, Kylo told Han Solo "I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it", shortly before killing him. When Snoke orders him to kill Rey, Kylo again declares "I know what I have to do", before killing Snoke with Luke's lightsaber.
  • After Luke sacrifices himself to save the Resistance, his body slowly vanishes into thin air as he becomes one with the Force, leaving only a cloak behind, in a manner nearly identical to how Yoda died in Return of the Jedi to indicate Luke's Jedi Mastery. Luke also looks up at twin suns, as he looked on Tatooine's binary sunset before setting off on his journey all those years ago in A New Hope. Obi-Wan also "disappeared" and left his cloak behind in A New Hope.
  • In Return of the Jedi, when Luke wanted to kill Palpatine, Palpatine encouraged him to "strike me down with all of your anger, and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete." Kylo Ren strikes Snoke down with all of his hatred, and it completes his journey into the Dark Side.
  • It gets better: During their final confrontation, Luke does callbacks to Obi-Wan and Palpatine, with his warning on what will happen if Ben strikes him down in anger: He will be with him. Always. Just like his father.
• Call to Agriculture: Luke went back to a farmer's lifestyle during his exile on Ahch-To, fishing and milking what he needs to sustain himself on the planet's ecosystem.
• The Cameo:
  • Character-wise, Yoda appears to destroy the tree containing Jedi history when Luke hesitates.
  • Noah Segan plays an X-wing pilot named Starck.
  • Joseph Gordon-Levitt voices Slowen Lo, an Abednedian gambler in Canto Bight.
  • Justin Theroux appears briefly in Canto Bight as the "master codebreaker", while Lily Cole plays one of his companions.
  • Gareth Edwards, the director of Rogue One (the most-recently released film in the franchise at the time), and Gary Barlow appear as Resistance soldiers in the trenches during the Battle of Crait. Gareth can be seen behind the "Salt" trooper.^note This pays off a reciprocal cameo Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman received in Rogue One, where they played Death Star technicians.
  • Tom Hardy and Princes William and Harry play Stormtroopers, although the scene they were in may have been cut.
  • Carrie Fisher's dog Gary appears as an alien in Canto Bight.
  • Warwick Davis plays one of the three Suertons in Canto Bight.
  • Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have cameos in the film.
  • Michaela Coel plays the Resistance monitor who announces that the First Order know their location.
• Camera Abuse: Splatters of red salt end up on the screen when the fighters dash out to disable the blaster cannon on Crait.
• Cannot Kill Their Loved Ones: Kylo attacks the Resistance ship that has his mother, Leia, on it. Despite having killed his father in the previous film, when he has a clear shot at the ship where Leia is, he is unable to fire the shot. A moment later, another pilot does it instead. Luckily Leia survives.
• Canon Discontinuity: Poe and Rey officially met in The Force Awakens novelization (which is meant to be canon to the films), but their brief moment together near the end is treated as their first interaction. Word of God is that the novelizations are canon to where they actually agree with the films, but places that aren't necessarily specified on-film or by supplementary material can be overwritten, leading to small hiccups like this. The novelization of this film excises Poe and Rey's meeting entirely to stay in line with the previous novel.
• Cardboard Prison: DJ easily breaks himself, Rose, and Finn out of jail. Justified in that it was a jail cell in a casino.
• The Casino: Canto Bight is a casino city on the planet Cantonica.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: This has of course always been part of Star Wars, but official maps for this movie show that Crait and Cantonica are on opposite sides of the galaxy. Finn and Rose make the round-trip journey in what can't be more than one day.
• Cavalry Refusal: Leia's plan for most of the movie is to use cloaked shuttles to escape to Crait, which has an old Rebellion fortress that she believes would be impregnable, and summon those who are friendly to the Resistance in the Outer Rim to help them fight the First Order. None of them show up.
• Central Theme:
  • Failure. Numerous failures on both sides populate the movie — Finn and Rose's plan with DJ fails, the Resistance's emergency escape plan fails, Rey and Kylo both fail to get the other to turn, Snoke fails to get Kylo to kill Rey, the First Order fails to crush the Resistance, and so on. However, on a less bleak note, growing from failure also seems to be important, thanks to how this ties into the various cases of Character Development.
    Yoda: Heeded my words not, did you? "Pass on what you have learned." Strength, mastery, hmm... but weakness, folly, failure, also. Yes, failure, most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.
  • Balance. The balance of light versus dark, doing the right thing versus blind hope, and giving up the past versus killing the past.
• The Chains of Commanding: Leia is visibly pained every time members of the Resistance died under her command. It's also the lesson she tries to teach Poe throughout the movie. Although Poe has the respect of his men and they're all very willing to fight and die for the Resistance, he still has to learn that, especially in the situation they're in, every casualty matters in the long run, not every battle can be won, and a battle won can lead to a war lost. Sometimes he has to make difficult choices and sacrifice the chance of winning to prevent more losses of life.
• Character Development:
  • Poe Dameron goes through a particularly nasty Break the Haughty arc in this film. His Military Maverick attitude and Indy Ploy tendencies result in high casualties to the already dwindling Resistance, something his superiors constantly reprimand him for. In the climax, he finally realizes that the Resistance force stands no chance against the might of the First Order and stubbornly trying to take them head on would only result in needless casualties. He then makes the call to break off what would have been a disastrous suicide attack on the First Order's cannon and retreat in order to fight another day. It's fully set in when he realizes that Luke's return isn't to destroy the First Order forces at the gate, it's that he is trying to stall for time so they could leave. He puts his faith in Luke and instead of sending what few soldiers remain to help him, begins the steps for a full evacuation of what is left of the Resistance. With the call to finally get out, Leia finally looks at Poe with genuine pride, he's thinking like a leader who sees the larger picture.
  • Rey spends the film trying to work through her I Just Want to Be Special hangups, as represented by her search for her parents. First she turns to Luke, only to find he's a Broken Pedestal. Afterwards, she delves into a cave strong with the Dark Side, à la Luke back in Empire, hoping it will show her who her parents are, only for it to show her she is indeed alone. Then, Rey attempts to find a place with Ben/Kylo Ren as fellow young Force-sensitives, only to find that the place he envisions for her is not one she is willing to take. In the end, Rey finally admits what Kylo Ren claims she's always known: she's a nobody whose junker parents sold her for a bit of coin and died years ago. This leads to a final realization that she doesn't need a parental figure or special destiny to show her worth. It's instead her desire to help her friends and do what's right that makes her a worthwhile person, leading her to abandon Kylo and use her connection to the Force to save what remains of the Resistance instead.
  • Finn comes to learn more about the moral ambiguity of the universe, such as the Resistance doing business with the same amoral arms dealers as the First Order. He also continues his path from simply trying to escape the First Order in The Force Awakens, to trying to abandon the Resistance to protect Rey at this film's start, to boarding Snoke's flagship on a sabotage mission, before confronting Captain Phasma and proudly declaring himself "Rebel Scum". Essentially, Finn begins to learn the value of fighting for something/someone he cares about instead of just against someone/something he hates.
  • Kylo learns to let go of his obsession with living up to Darth Vader, smashing the helmet he wore to emulate him. He also comes to the realization that both Jedi and Sith doctrines are intrinsically flawed, and that the past should be let go of... by being destroyed completely. This leads to him seizing power after killing Snoke and continuing the war, with the goal of wiping out not just the Sith but the Jedi and the Resistance too, instead of returning to the light side like he was struggling with.
    • Played With: Kylo is ultimately unable to let go of the past, as it's his obsession with destroying Luke Skywalker that ultimately causes what remains of the Resistance to slip through his grasp.
  • Luke became jaded over recent years due to his inability to save Ben Solo from the dark side: his one great failure in life. He came to accept that the Jedi way is too inherently flawed and too rigid and unchangeable to be sustainable, and thus must come to an end. When Yoda appears to him and chooses to burn the sacred Jedi texts himself, Luke realizes the Jedi are capable of change; the good teachings of the Jedi and their protection of the light side should not be sacrificed when even Yoda, who is as guilty as anyone for the fall of the Jedi, can learn from his mistakes and move on.
  • Yoda himself, through his brief interaction with Luke, shows great development since his death in Return of the Jedi. He's accepted how flawed the ancient ways of the Jedi are, which is a night-and-day contrast from his rigid dedication to those old teachings in the Prequel Trilogy. He does not seem bothered by Rey's decision to rebel against Luke and fly off to rescue Ben, despite his actions when Luke did the same thing to him in Empire. And lastly, perhaps due to this growth, he seems more at peace than he did during his exile on Dagobah, being even more lighthearted and friendly toward Luke.
• Charged Attack: The First Order cannon used to break through the rebel base's gate on Crait takes some elements from the Empire's Death Star superlaser technology, slowly charging a beam that eventually blasts the door open. Poe launches a haphazard attack on it with outdated ski speeders while it's charging, but the wave of AT-AT and AT-M6 walkers prove to be too much to break through.
• The Chase: The Resistance's fleet is tracked through hyperspace by the First Order, then chased all the way to the planet Crait for a good chunk of the movie.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: One with a 40-year delay, both in- and out of universe. The hologram recording that R2-D2 took of Leia in A New Hope, calling for Obi-Wan's help, comes back meaningfully. It is used once again by the droid to guilt-trip Luke Skywalker, holed up as an hermit on a remote planet, with a blast from the past. It's lucky for R2 that he had never needed the memory space and kept it all these years.
• Chekhov's Gag: When BB-8 and DJ save Finn and Rose from the security forces in a stolen ship, Finn asks in comical disbelief if BB-8 is piloting it. Later, BB-8 pilots an AT-ST to save them again.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Played for laughs with the coins a drunk alien keeps putting into BB-8 thinking he's a slot machine. BB-8 later fires all these coins at a guard trying to hinder his escape.
  • Played with in Rose's necklace. DJ points out the value of the metal early, and he later uses it to crack open the door to the room containing the hyperspeed tracking system. Unfortunately, the whole endeavor fails anyway.
  • Subverted: On Ahch-To, Rey sees Luke Skywalker's X-wing underwater in a Call-Back to The Empire Strikes Back. As audience members, we see this as a sign that Luke will use it to fly back to the Resistance and fully expect Luke when he shows up to defend the Resistance. But it turns out he was astrally projected all along.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The stableboy on Canto Bight appears again at the end, hearing his fellow stablehand tell stories of Luke Skywalker and wearing Rose's Resistance ring, indicating that not all hope is lost in the galaxy. And in one of the last shots in the film, he pulls his broom to his hand with the force, with the moon shining on the handle evoking imagery of a lightsaber.
  • The vulptices are seen scurrying around the rebel base without anyone paying too much attention to them, until everyone wonders where they ran off to when they need to escape.
• Chekhov's Skill: When Rey starts using her experience with a staff to develop her swordsmanship, she reverses her grip on the hilt. In the battle with Snoke's guards she defeats one of them using this method.
• Clothing Reflects Personality: Additions to characters' wardrobes demonstrate how they have changed since their appearances in earlier movies.
  • Finn's iconic jacket has been stitched up where Kylo Ren wounded him, and his recovery is part of the story.
  • During the flashbacks to his confrontation with Ben, Luke is wearing a mix of black and white, suggesting the same struggle with the dark side he faced in Return of the Jedi. Later, Luke having his Force illusion projected not looking like a traditional Jedi Master as he did when was found or as his former Masters appeared, and instead wearing black and white robes similar to his suit in Return of the Jedi reflect Luke's newfound acceptance of what he has done and his renewed hope. He faces Kylo Ren as his own Jedi, not one bound by the old order.
  • Kylo Ren gets rid of his helmet after being chastised by Snoke, abandoning his pretentions of being the next Darth Vader.
  • Snoke wears what has been described as a "bathrobe", reflecting his casual belief in his own invincibility. And it's a gold lamé bathrobe, reflecting self-satisfied decadence.
• Color Motif: Red is a very prevalent color in promotional materials. Even in the trailers, the iconic title is in red instead of the traditional gold.
  • Snoke's throne room is covered in red fabric. In the battle following his death, the material catches fire and is largely destroyed by the fight's end.
  • When Kylo charges Luke, the camera focuses on the red streaks his feet leave in the salt, signifying that the blow hit home. Then he turns around...
• Combat Breakdown: The movie follows a running battle between the First Order and the Resistance. At the start, both sides each have a fleet of starships and fighters, by the end of the film, the battle is decided by a lightsaber duel between two people, both sides having lost their entire fleet of ships.
• Comforting Comforter: Towards the end we see Finn gently covering sleeping Rose with a blanket.
• Comic-Book Adaptation:
  • Gary Whitta wrote a six-issue one for Marvel.
  • Alessandro Ferrari wrote a graphic novel aimed at children for IDW Publishing.
• Compartment Shot: When Finn packs up to desert the Raddus, a scene has him open an overhead compartment which is shot from the inside of said cupboard.
• Conflict Ball: Poe and Holdo's clash, while ultimately providing Character Development for both, veers slightly into this considering that a calm, non-antagonistic conversation — which both Holdo and Poe are capable of having — likely would have at least kept the situation from escalating into a full-blown mutiny. Of course, Holdo tries to tell Poe why she's not reading him in, but that proves counterproductive.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Snoke's imperial guards at first are quickly taken out, but their opposition begins to struggle with them once only two to three remain.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Luke has (occasionally) taken to wearing a brown leather glove over his prosthetic hand — much like he did in Return of the Jedi — since the artificial flesh has long since been lost.
• Continuity Nod: Has its own page.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • When Finn and Rose are arrested on Canto Bright while trying to find a master code breaker, they are thrown into a prison cell with someone who just happens to also be a master code breaker who can do everything the first guy could do, and can break them out of prison.
  • Rey leaves Luke's planet to return to the Resistance at about the same time as their last ship depletes its fuel reserves.
  • Holdo decides to ram the last Resistance ship into the Supremacy just as Finn and Rose are about to be executed by Phasma, saving them.
• Conveniently Coherent Thoughts: Subverted. As Snoke reads Kylo Ren's mind, he notes that Kylo no longer feels conflict and sees him turning and igniting his lightsaber to kill his enemy. Snoke presumes this enemy is Rey and the lightsaber is the one Kylo is holding, failing to notice the Exact Words that Kylo used to sidestep the mind-reading.
• Cool Starship:
  • Kylo Ren's TIE Silencer, which is a mashup of a TIE Interceptor and Vader's TIE Advanced X1. Sleek, vicious and boasting fierce afterburners that other TIE Fighters would kill for, Kylo Ren puts the prototype starfighter to excellent use when chasing down the Resistance fleet.
  • The First Order Dreadnought, which is even larger than the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer and armed with two orbital auto-cannons capable of punching through planetary shields. The ship's red lights are for night vision and helping targeting for the gunnery crew, and makes the ship even more intimidating. It's so fearsome that seasoned Resistance members call it a "fleet killer".
  • Snoke's flagship, the Supremacy. A massive dreadnought shaped like a giant metal wing over 60 kilometers in width ^note For comparison's sake, the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer was 19 kilometers in length. which also serves as the First Order's de facto command center, mobile shipyard and supply depot. It's so big, up to 8 Resurgent-class Star Destroyers can dock with it, and it can even build one within its hull. It also has dedicated research facilities, a mining complex and Stormtrooper training grounds. Most relevant to the plot, however, is its ability to track fleets through hyperspace, making the Resistance's escape a doomed endeavour. It's telling when it's said that the ship's industrial capabilities are on par with the First Order's most productive worlds, and that its scale rivals Starkiller Base.
  • The Resistance command ship Raddus, a 3 kilometers-long Mon Calamari cruiser named after the admiral who sacrificed his fleet to help steal the first Death Star's plans 34 years ago in Rogue One. Not only is it large enough to house dozens of smaller transports, but its shields are durable enough to last several hours of Stern Chase against the Supremacy's long-range cannons.
  • The Resistance bombers (also known as the B/SF-17 heavy bombers) are from the same line as the A/SF-01 B-wing Starfighter-Bombers. Their design are clearly inspired by real life World War II bombers, including the use of turret gunners and a bomb bay that drops its payload vertically, along with a name that harkens back to the legendary B-17 "Flying Fortress".
• Cornered Rattle Snake: What Raddus becomes after its desperate situation becomes more desperate as the First Order starts shooting down lifeboats. Holdo's desperate measure in response (i.e., light speed ramming with their shields down) doesn't bode well for the much stronger Supremacy and the rest of the fleet.
• Costume Porn: Admiral Holdo's costume is reminiscent of the elaborate Naboo outfits from The Phantom Menace.
• Crapsaccharine World: Canto Bight. On the surface, it looks glamorous and high-class, and Finn agrees, before Rose points out that its citizens got rich profiting from the war, while also pointing out the abuse of the racing fathiers they enjoy betting on.
• Create Your Own Villain: Ben Solo didn't fall to the Dark side; he was pushed there when he woke up one night to find his uncle and mentor standing over him with an ignited lightsaber and a frightening look on his face. The darkness was already there, but until that moment Ben hadn't embraced it yet; if this moment hadn't happened, Kylo Ren might never have existed.
  Rey: [furious] Did you create Kylo Ren?
• Crew of One:
  • Paige has to manually activate the payload since she's the only crewman left alive by that point.
  • Admiral Holdo is the only person aboard the Rebel cruiser when she uses it to ram the First Order command ship at light speed. Slightly downplayed shortly beforehand, when Poe tries to relieve Holdo of command and is seen piloting the cruiser with only a couple other people anywhere on the bridge.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The First Order Dreadnought focuses its strength on its dual autocannons, and not much of everything else; the defensive guns on its surface can be picked out by a lone starfighter, and its own TIE Fighter complement is not enough to overwhelm a small fleet of bombers. As such, the Dreadnought only had time to decimate D'Qar's (mostly evacuated) Resistance base, and bites the dust before even firing at the Resistance fleet.
• Cue the Falling Object: After Snoke's death and Rey's escape from the throne room, the first thing the camera shows before Hux enters is a close-up of the top half of Snoke on the ground, wearing a wall-eyed expression. Then the other half of the body slides off the throne and flops on the ground while Hux stares, appalled.
• Cue the Sun: Luke Skywalker watches a sunrise in one of the last scenes, indicating that hope is returning to the galaxy.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The Battle of Crait. Already outnumbered and outgunned, the Resistance is faced with a wave of First Order Walkers escorting a massive artillery piece, to use in blowing down the gate of the Resistance base. The Resistance needs to blow up the cannon, after which the Order will not have the firepower to crack the base open. However, infantry and light speeders are no match for a horde of Walkers and TIE fighters. The First Order easily cuts through the defenders and blasts through the gate. If not for the timely arrival of Rey, Chewie, and Luke, the Resistance would have died right there.
  • Rey vs Supreme Leader Snoke. Rey isn't even able to get close to him, due to Snoke pushing her around with the Force like a ragdoll. It's only with Kylo's help that she is able to come out of it alive.
  • Kylo Ren vs. Luke Skywalker. Not so much a fight, but Luke seemingly trying to get one last lesson into Ben Solo's head while stalling for time, you get very a brief glimpse of what Luke may have been like at his prime. Luke's composure and form make Kylo Ren look like he's never wielded a lightsaber before this. Even more impressive when you find out it's actually Luke's Astral Projection — he had to make the fight seem real to Kylo Ren while unable to physically interact with him, and he so totally avoids all of Ren's swings that it is clear that if he really were there and able to fight back, Ren wouldn't have stood a chance.
  • Similarly, Luke and Rey's very brief sparring match, in which Luke dodges and deflects every one of Rey's angry swipes with her staff before quite casually disarming her, forcing Rey to use the force to grab her own lightsaber. Again, Luke isn't the aggressor, but it's very clear that, if he were to attempt to harm Rey or Ren, both fights would be short, fatal affairs.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Luke's failure with Ben broke him and caused him to run away to a remote part of the galaxy and hide for years. He tries to pass this cynicism on to Rey, but she insists that Ben can be saved, steals the sacred texts, and leaves, inspiring Luke to take up the Force onece more and save the Resistance one last time.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: When Rey and Kylo Ren first experience the Psychic Link, Kylo seems to mistake it for Astral Projection and comments that Rey can't be doing it because the strain of it would kill her. Later, Luke uses this technique to fool Kylo into thinking he's actually on Crait, and the strain of it does kill him, though he ascends as a Force ghost.
• Darker and Edgier: The state for the good guys is somehow bleaker than it was in The Empire Strikes Back. The New Republic is in absolute chaos following the destruction of their capitol and much of their fleet, cutting the Resistance off from potential reinforcements for quite some time. The First Order despite losing Starkiller Base moves all its big guns and shows off new state-of-the-art tech, and the Resistance are reduced to their weakest point since Order 66. And Luke Skywalker, who the Resistance finally found and is the one person who could easily turn the tide of the war on his own, is completely disillusioned and wants nothing more than to be left alone. And aside from funny moments and a few hopeful ones (that aren't negated afterwards), everything that follows has the Resistance having their people being on the brink of death or downright being killed, and a lot of cynicism. Although the finale still shows them with their morale renewed as a result of Luke's final act.
• Darkest Hour: The Resistance ships are all destroyed and as a group are whittled down to a mere few dozen people, are stranded on a long abandoned rebel base on Crait with seemingly no way out, and are armed only with barely functional, decades-old speeders that are falling apart, with the First Order armed with several AT-M6s and a ramming cannon that can tear down the only thing standing between them and victory, the base's massive shielded door. Fortunately, several things happen in quick succession that allow them to escape to fight another day.

• Deadly Graduation: Snoke demanding Kylo Ren to finish off Rey in the throne room.
  Snoke: Complete your training!
• Demoted to Extra: Chewbacca, R2-D2, and C-3PO all have minimal appearances in this movie. Maz Kanata also has only one scene in this film after having a central role in The Force Awakens, and it's to set Finn and Rose off on a side story.
• Description Cut: Rose describes Canto Bight as a Wretched Hive full of the worst people in the galaxy. Cut to a ritzy yacht full of well-dressed people carrying fancy drinks. Rose's description, however, turns out to be accurate; she had a different class of wretchedness in mind.
• Designated Bullet: One of the bombs in Paige's bomber has, in Aurebesh: "Han says hi." The one next to it has a giant smiley face.
• Didn't Think This Through: Snoke's plan to locate Luke Skywalker. He creates a Force Bond between Rey and Kylo Ren, hoping to extract the information from her mind and lure her into a trap. While he does successfully retrieve it, he doesn't seem to realize that he created an emotional connection between his violently unstable apprentice and a young woman whom Kylo has already displayed attachment to. Once he orders Kylo to kill Rey, Kylo reacts predictably.
• Disappointed by the Motive: The reason for Rey's Parental Abandonment; they sold her off for some drinking money. Rey already knew this, but has spent her whole life in denial over it until The Reveal.
• Disappointing Heritage Reveal: Rey has been searching all her life to find out who her parents were and why they left her alone on Jakku. In their final confrontation, Kylo forces herself to admit that she already knew who they were: No one at all, except for the obvious, junkers who sold her for petty cash and are probably long dead.
• Disaster Dominoes: The attack on the Fulminatrix almost fails when a burning TIE Fighter crashes into one of the Resistance bombers, prematurely detonating its armed payload and spreading the explosion's debris to other bombers flying in close formation, destroying them all. Only Paige's bomber escapes the chain reaction, and even then, she has to manually activate it since she's the only crewman left alive by that point.
• Disney Death: In the first act, Leia is seemingly killed by a direct blast to the control room from the First Order. Although she's blown into space, she manages to propel herself back onto the main ship and survives, though she remains unconscious until the final act.
• Disney Villain Death: Captain Phasma is seemingly killed when the floor collapses out from under her, and she falls into a blazing inferno. "Seemingly" is key — Word of God is still there is a very real possibility that she has survived.
• Dodge by Braking: Poe takes out two pursuing TIE fighters by doing a hard 360° U-turn and ending up behind them.
• Dope Slap:
  • During Rey's training with Luke, he instructs her to close her eyes and reach out to the Force, and she reaches out with one arm. After looking annoyed for a moment, Luke messes with Rey by tickling her with a blade of grass, and when she continues to assume she can feel the Force, Luke slaps her hand with it.
  • During the confrontation in Supreme Leader Snoke's throne room, Rey tries to grab her lightsaber with the Force, only for Snoke to easily overrides her pull and claim it back with his own power, smacking the back of Rey's head with it on the return trip.
• Double-Meaning Title: Like Return of the Jedi could be read as referring to Luke Skywalker's ascension to Jedi Knight and/or Darth Vader's Heel–Face Turn from Sith Lord to Jedi once more, The Last Jedi can be read as referring to the last Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, his apparent new pupil Rey, his former pupil who turned to the Dark Side Kylo Ren, or some combination of all three. In fact, director Rian Johnson says he meant it to specifically refer to Luke, though even Disney itself didn't always treat it that way.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Leia slaps Poe, who is under her command, for his stunt at the beginning while demoting him. This blatant abuse of power would not fly if the genders were reversed.
• Downer Beginning: The movie opens right away with the Resistance having its base bombarded by the First Order, with everyone escaping in the nick of time... and then the villainous fleet appears to start shooting the ships used for evacuation, and it just keeps getting worse.
• Dragons Up the Yin Yang: The Tico sisters' medallions are two halves of a taijitu. The Ahch-To Jedi mosaic is split in the middle, half black and half white, signifying balance. Rey and Kylo, champions of the Light and Dark respectively, spend most of the movie understanding each other, trying to pull the each other to their side, and fight together to defeat Snoke and the Praetorian Guards.
• Dramatic Necklace Removal: Rose rips her necklace off and hands it to DJ.
• Dramatic Space Drifting: After the First Order attacks the Resistance, Leia's body is shown drifting among the debris in space. She is able to bring herself back to the survivors.
• Draw Aggro: Piloting the Millennium Falcon, Chewie and Rey draw away all of the First Order fighters at the Rebel base on Crait, thanks in part to Kylo Ren's hatred of that ship. They then proceed to splash all of them by winding through the planet's crystal caverns.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought:
  • The Fulminatrix, a Mandator-IV-class Siege Dreadnought that the First Order deploys in the opening battle to bombard D'Qar and decimate the evacuating Resistance fleet. Poe describes it as a "fleet killer", and considers losing almost his entire fighter complement to destroy it Worth It. Leia disagrees.
  • The Supremacy, a Mega-class Star Dreadnought that measures 60 kilometers from wingtip to wingtip and is also a Mobile Factory for building war machines, including other dreadnoughts. It takes a lightspeed ramming by the Raddus to stop this behemoth.
• Dream Sequence: Rey's experience in the mirror cave on Ahch-To, with its bizarre combination of recurring images and out-of-synch movements.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Finn dons a First Order uniform at one point, alongside Rose and DJ. What do they disguise BB-8 as? An imperial trash can.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: While showing off his awesome force powers, Snoke is unceremoniously killed off because he loses track of a light saber that he placed on his own throne.
• Dwindling Party:
  • The fleeing Resistance members, who keep being gradually slaughtered during their desperate escape; by the end they have lost all their ships, and so few of them are left that they can all fit aboard the Millennium Falcon. There are just more than 400 left on the Raddus and its escorts at the start of the film, and less than a dozen at the very end.
  • Also a rare villainous example: at the beginning of the film, the First Order has Snoke's massive dreadnought, the Supremacy, with its leadership consisting of General Hux, Captain Phasma, Kylo Ren, and Supreme Leader Snoke and his Praetorian Guards. By the end of the film, the Supremacy has been cleaved in twain, and Snoke, Phasma, and the Praetorian Guard are all dead. Only Kylo Ren and Hux remain, with their leadership shaky at best.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • Paige Tico manages to unload the bombs of her critically damaged bomber just in time before the Dreadnought can fire on the Raddus, sundering the First Order ship in a spectacular explosion that engulfs Paige.
  • Admiral Holdo hyperspace-ramming the Raddus into Snoke's ship to save what's left of the Resistance, racking up a kill count that's only beaten by the two Death Stars' explosions. The audio cuts off, and the scene slows down and is repeated from different angles the moment the Supremacy is cut in two and the surrounding Star Destroyers are being shattered by shrapnel, visually emphasizing the catastrophic damage caused by the collision.
  • Subverted with Finn's attempted suicide run on the First Order's superlaser siege cannon to save what's left of the Rebellion — Rose intercepts his speeder and saves him just in time.
  • Luke Skywalker sacrificing himself to save the remaining rebels, all while trumping and humiliating Kylo Ren in battle with an Astral Projection from halfway across the galaxy, and then finally becoming one with the Force, knowing he is not the last Jedi.
• Enemy Mine: Rey and Kylo team up against Snoke's personal guard. Granted, Rey thought she had Kylo on her side.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • The way the movie re-introduces Luke Skywalker is extremely notable: seeing that Rey has his old lightsaber with her, he reaches out, hands shaking, and takes it from her. Then he throws it over his shoulder and walks away without a word.
  • We first see Rose when Finn finds her alone in the maintenance sector, crying over the death of her sister. When she sees Finn and realizes who he is, she freaks out and starts fangirling over his achievements. Upon seeing that Finn has left his rucksack in an open escape pod and is planning to flee, she immediately stuns him and has him dragged to the brig.
• Establishing Series Moment: That very same scene of Luke tossing the lightsaber away like it was trash helped emphasize an overall theme of The Last Jedi: throw away your expectations.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Rose and Finn have one in tandem when he mentions that the First Order is capable of tracking ships through hyperspace, deducing how it functions and how it might be disabled.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
  • Kylo Ren hesitates when he has the chance to directly kill Leia by blowing up her ship. His wingmen don't, although it doesn't kill Leia.
  • General Hux is clearly annoyed at Poe's Prank Call at the beginning. He reaches his breaking point when Poe turns it into a Your Mom joke.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: The First Order's Praetorian Guards wear Samurai-themed armor◊ simply for Rule of Cool.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: When Rey reaches out into the Force, she senses a cold part of the island that turns out to be a manifestation of the Dark Side of the Force. Later, Rey goes to this evil part of the island only to find ice solid enough to be mistaken for glass, imagery reminiscent of the Ninth Circle of Hell.
• Evil Knockoff: The First Order has a dark counterpart for BB-8.
• Evil Overlooker: Inverted. In many of the posters, the overarching head is Luke's, who is the resident Hero and widely considered a Hope Bringer to the galaxy. (It hints at his less-than-heroic behavior for most of the film.)
• Exact Words:
  • Luke vows to never leave the planet he exiled himself to. When he finally decides to help the cornered Resistance, it seems like he goes back on his words at first, but turns out it is only his Astral Projection.
  • Snoke reads Kylo Ren's mind and sees him thinking about how he no longer feels any conflict, and his decision to turn his lightsaber and cut his true enemy down. Snoke thinks he's going to kill Rey, but he's actually about to cut down Snoke himself.
  • When Yoda brings down the lightning and incinerates the reliquary tree, he tells Luke that there is nothing in the tree Rey does not already possess. It's later shown that Rey took the sacred texts in the tree with her when she left.
  • Rey and Kylo Ren do it both ways. Rey sees a vision of Kylo "turning", while Kylo sees the same thing. The issue is that Kylo turns completely to the Dark Side instead of being conflicted, while Rey turns to the Light to stop him.
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • When Rey falls into the waters of the Dark Side cave, her three-bun hairstyle becomes mostly undone. She keeps it that way even when it dries, however, signifying her evolution in her pursuits.
  • When Luke shows up for the finale, his shaggy hair and beard have been replaced by a shorter, neater style, without the grey. It's an illusion intended to distract Kylo and the First Order.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The film takes place over the course of a few days. Much of the climax takes place over the course of only a few hours.
• Eye Open: A close-up on Paige as she opens her left eye after falling down the shaft of her bomber.
• Eye Scream: Kylo takes out the final Praetorian Guard by igniting Anakin's lightsaber directly into his eye socket.
• Face Death with Dignity: Captain Canady of the Fulminatrix stands calmly and stares his death in the face as the explosions from the Resistance bombs rip his dreadnought apart in front of him.
• Failed a Spot Check: When the Resistance fleet emerges from hyperspace, Poe says they're "in the middle of nowhere." Why doesn't anybody in either the Resistance or the First Order notice that they're in the Crait system and heading towards the planet until Holdo points it out on the viewscreen?
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Hux tries to give a gloating You Have No Chance to Survive speech, but Poe acts like Hux is being placed on hold, buying enough time for the extra boosters to propel Poe's X-wing towards the Dreadnought and making a fool out of Hux as the latter goes from hammy bluster to more normally-toned and genuinely confused, "I can hear you, can you hear me?" that sounds more like a casual phone call.
• Fantastic Foxes: The vulptex, a crystalline fox native to the mineral-rich planet of Crait. They appear benevolent and play a minor but important role in the final act, leading the Resistance remains out of the base.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The glitzy, glamourous casino and maritime location, as well as its fantastically wealthy clientele, peg the city of Canto Bight on the planet of Cantonica as a direct counterpart to Monte Carlo in the Principality of Monaco.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Downplayed. Rey and Kylo Ren's story amounts to this; she shows compassion to him, which inspires him to finally defy and destroy his evil master — but at the end, he still chooses the Dark Side and assumes control of the First Order, while offering her a place at his side.
• Fauxshadowing: The question was raised how the First Order could track their enemies through hyperspace. The way they kept putting focus on the locator beacons that Leia and Rey were wearing made it look like a possible answer but nothing came of it.
• Finish Dialogue in Unison: Finn and Rose start bonding when they realize they have the same idea about the tracker.
  Rose: Hyperspace tracking is new tech but the principle must be the same as any active tracker. They're only tracking us...
  Rose and Finn (together): ...from the lead ship.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • When Rey grabs Kylo Ren's lightsaber with the Force, the Praetorian Guard instantly snap into attack position with their weapons pointed at Rey, demonstrating just how dangerous these guys are and how they won't hesitate to spring into combat against an armed Force-wielder despite having no powers of their own. Sure enough, they prove themselves to be absolutely brutal in combat a few minutes later, quickly overwhelming and almost killing two lightsaber-wielding Force users working together.
  • When Snoke tosses Kylo Ren's lightsaber back to him, it slides on the ground, spinning and coming to a stop with the hilt pointing at him. Kylo looks at it for a moment before picking it up, clearly considering something. When Snoke orders him to kill Rey with it, Kylo turns the lightsaber beside Snoke in the exact same way and ignites it, cutting Snoke in half.
  • Snoke says he has a vision of Kylo Ren aiming a lightsaber to strike true and igniting it to kill his true enemy. As he speaks, Ren is aiming Rey's lightsaber to kill Snoke. Yup, a Prophecy Twist delivered less than five seconds after the prophecy is made.
  • There are subtle details that point to Luke being an illusion on Crait. He has shorter hair and a brown beard like he had on the night of his confrontation with Ben, rather than the white-streaked one he had on Ahch-To; he's using Anakin's blue-bladed lightsaber, which he lost on Cloud City, as opposed to the green one he replaced it with and which he wielded against Ben in aforementioned Start of Darkness flashbacks; and his costume is more reminiscent of the one from Return of the Jedi than the Standard Jedi Robes he's been wearing up until now. Once they fight, he evades Kylo's attacks instead of parrying; his lightsaber doesn't leave a trail of incinerated ash behind it the way Ren's does; and while Kylo's footsteps leave angry red trails on the surface of Crait as they scuff away the salt, Luke's feet leave no marks at all. There are even close-ups of both men's feet to hammer the point home.
• Flanderization: Luke's characterization in The Last Jedi as mentioned by Rian Johnson in the commentary is based on The Empire Strikes Back rather than the figure at the end of the OT. Luke's inaction is explained by Johnson as stemming from Luke feeling that his intervention at Cloud City ultimately hurt his friends, and they would be fine without him, even if eventually that failure led to him freeing Han Solo and destroying the Hutt family ruling in Tatooine. Luke's constant moping and self-pity is him regressing to the whining figure he was during his early training with Yoda, while his attack on Ben Solo is based on him reacting similarly to a vision of Darth Vader at Dagobah. Yoda in his return appearance also lapses back to his Empire era characterization, with his first meeting with Luke having him allude to his "always looking at the horizon" speech.
• Foe Romance Subtext: To such an extent that it can be considered straight-up text. This film takes the latent sexual tension already present between Kylo Ren and Rey and cranks it up to eleven to the point where it's not even subtle anymore.
  • They spend a good chunk of the movie confiding in each other via Force bond.
  • They exchange many Held Gazes and Rey at one point feels uncomfortable when she sees Kylo shirtless.
  • They stare into each other's eyes and touch hands in a very intimate scene (complete with romantic music), which Luke interrupts.
  • Rey takes to empathising with him, even calling him Ben, and tries to repeatedly convince him to make a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Kylo kills Snoke after seeing him torture Rey and they both team up and kill the Praetorian Guards together.
  • He pleads with her to join him with phrasing that evokes a marriage proposal.
• Forced to Watch: Snoke forces Rey to look out a port hole and watch as his ship picks off the escape ships in a scene a little similar to another Star Wars movie.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Watch the holographic display onboard the bridge of the Raddus. When Leia uses the Force to propel herself back to the ship, she passes through a holographic model of the Supremacy in exactly the place that Holdo will lightspeed-jump the Raddus through.
  • Pay attention to what Luke tells Rey at Ahch-To. The Force is more than just mind tricks and lifting rocks? His greatest feat is projecting an illusion from at least half a galaxy away, then in the climax, Rey uses the Force to clear a landslide. Luke mentions that he's not just going to step out on the battlefield with a laser sword and change everything? Well, that illusion of his more or less does exactly that. Rey even acknowledges the irony that she's ultimately just moving a whole lot of rocks to save the Resistance survivors from the cave.
  • Luke tells Rey that he came to Ahch-To to die, and will never leave the island. He never does — not physically, at least — and he does die there.
  • When Finn and Rose are about to be captured on Cantonica, Finn remarks that they had at least allowed the fathiers to wreck the casino and much of Canto Bight, which owed its wealth to war profiteers. Rose takes the saddle off the fathier they were riding and allows it to join its herd, pointing out that freeing the oppressed, not hurting the oppressors, is what makes the experience worth it. Later, on Crait, when Finn demands to know why Rose prevented him from throwing his speeder into the First Order's battering cannon, she responds with the same sentiment, "That's how we're gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate, but by saving who we love."
  • During one of Kylo Ren and Rey's conversations, he explicitly tells her that her parents didn't care who she was and threw her away like garbage.
  • As Rey retrieves the lightsaber Luke tosses away, she spots his old X-Wing sunken in the water. This foreshadows Luke going to the island with no intention of leaving after the Kylo Ren disaster, which is why he was so hard to find in the last film. This also serves, at once, as foreshadowing for Luke's appearance on Crait—of course he could show up, he had a spaceship!—and the reveal that at the climax, Luke didn't actually leave Ahch-To—of course he didn't leave, the thing was sunken under water for a decade!
  • Kylo Ren mentions that the strain of using Astral Projection would kill Rey. Later, Luke doing so to distract the First Order leads to his death.
  • When Rey confronts Kylo Ren over killing Han, she demands to know how he could do that when Ben had a father "who gave a damn" about him. Rey admits later that she knew all along that she can't say the same about her own parents.
  • After Leia slaps and demotes Poe, Leia tells him he can't expect to always save the day by hopping in a ship and blowing things up. Then the Order shows up and Poe asks for permission to hop in a ship and blow things up. Later on, he accidentally gives the Order the information they need to blow up most of the remaining Resistance.
  • Yoda's appearance on Ahch-To gives us two within the span of a few seconds. He visibly smacks Luke on the forehead with his cane, indicating that non-physical Force entities can still have a physical impact, as Luke demonstrates in the climax. Secondly, he describes him as "Young Luke Skywalker, still looking to the horizon..." Luke dies while gazing at the horizon underneath a binary sunrise.
  • A very subtle meta-example for viewers who did their homework: the Resistance flagship is named the Raddus after the Mon Calamari admiral from Rogue One whose claim to fame was pulling off a particularly spectacular example of Ramming Always Works. Guess what Holdo does with the flagship named after him in the film's climax?
  • When en route to the Supremacy during lightspeed, Poe contacts Finn and Rose and informs them about Holdo's plan of loading up the transports to abandon the Raddus. The camera briefly cuts to DJ, who's making a thoughtful face after overhearing the conversation, like he's planning something. Later, after the plan goes south on the Supremacy, DJ informs the First Order about the transports, selling out Finn, Rose, and the entire Resistance to save his own skin.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When the Medical Droid was stitching-up Kylo Ren's scars from his battle with Finn and Rey, the slash and stab wound that both warriors respectively left on his right arm and left shoulder with Anakin's lightsaber are still clearly visible.
• From Bad to Worse: What the Resistance goes through in the film. Their only base got bombarded. The only victory they scored cost them their bomber squadron. They escape through hyperspace only to find that the First Order can track them to anywhere with their special tracking device. A long stern chase occurs with the Resistance ships slowly running out of fuel one by one and getting picked off by the vastly superior First Order fleet. Poe, Finn, and Rose's attempt to remedy this ends up making things even worse when the slicer they hired to disable the tracking device betrays them and reveals Admiral Holdo's plan to use the flagship as a bait while the rest of the Resistance evacuates in small shuttles to hide out on a nearby planet, causing numerous casualties. Even worse, none of the Resistance's allies in the galaxy responded to Leia's distress call (meaning that the destruction of the Hosnian system succeeded in cowing them into submission, unlike the destruction of Alderaan, which pissed off enough people that it was beginning of the end for the Empire), meaning that they are on their own with only a handful of troops, outdated weapons, and nowhere to run. If not for Luke, Rey, and Chewie's timely arrival, the Resistance would have been all but wiped out and The Bad Guys Win.
• Funny Background Event: Rey attempts to Force pull Anakin's lightsaber away from Snoke, who lets her appear to succeed for a moment just so he can just whip it around and hit her on the head with it before placing it back on his armrest. Behind Rey, Kylo Ren, still kneeling and looking down, nonchalantly sways to avoid the lightsaber as it flies past his head.

Tropes G to L

• Gaslighting: After defeating Snoke and the Praetorian Guards together, Kylo decides to claim the title of Supreme Leader and calmly asks Rey to join him. When she voices reluctance and begs him not to do this, he gets angry before calming down again, then makes her say that her parents were nobodies who sold her for drinking money (which makes it seem more like he was making her say her fears about who her parents were aloud rather than the actual truth) and tells her that "you're nobody, you're nothing... but not to me." When Rey rejects him, Kylo turns against her.
• Gender Incompetence: The Poe/Holdo plot falls squarely into this. The idea is that Poe needs to learn to think more rationally and not just blindly charge in. In the end, he and some fellow males try to mutiny and end up looking like idiots. Meanwhile, the females are the ones shown to have a solid plan that saves the day.
• Glass Smack and Slide: During the battle of Crait, when Chewbacca has the Millennium Falcon do a sharp turn, one of the stowaway porgs he picked on Ahch-To is thrown against the side window of the cockpit and flattened on the glass.
• Going Down with the Ship:
  • Admiral Holdo stays behind in the last Resistance ship after it has been evacuated, drawing First Order fire to her instead of the escaping Resistance members. Once the First Order starts shooting down the supposedly cloaked transports, Holdo realizes to her horror that her evacuation plan has been foiled and her decoy is made irrelevant, so to prevent further casualties, she turns the Raddus around and fires it up in hyperdrive towards the Supremacy, destroying both ships in the ensuing collision. She indeed goes down with the ship, but not before inflicting major damage to the First Order fleet.
  • The medical frigate captain similarly goes down with his ship after evacuating after the ship runs out of fuel.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: The very first thing the Resistance intends to do once they reach a base with a transmitter powerful enough to get the signal out. Subverted. The signal goes out, but nobody comes.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors:
  • The Force Awakens has the "Star Wars" logo outlined in bright yellow (signaling optimism), while the dark red coloring for The Last Jedi's logo fits in line with its Darker and Edgier tone.
  • Finn switches from his black Stormtrooper undershirt to a white open collar shirt to signal his completed Mook–Face Turn.
  • Rey has gone from her tan/white outfit at the start of The Force Awakens to a grey outfit in the opening of this film, to a grey and dark brown version as the film goes on, signaling her continuing loss of innocence as she delves deeper into the ways of the Force.
  • Luke plays with this. He spends much of the early part of the film looking like his first Master, Obi-Wan — garbed in classic Jedi colors; in the final act (via Force illusion) he reappears similarly to the way he did in, fittingly enough, Return of the Jedi — dressed in black outer robes over white. This signals his acceptance of what he's done and embracing the kind of Jedi he once was/always has been at heart.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Played with. Despite Rey cutting a large wound into his face with a lightsaber in the last film, the conflicted Kylo Ren has a clean, thin scarline going from his brow to his jaw and down around his right chest, rather than a large ugly one — at least after the medical droids are done with the giant burn we see early on. This is in contrast to the outright evil Big Bad, Supreme Leader Snoke, who has large disfiguring scars all over his face and body. Subverted when Kylo winds up supplanting Snoke.
• Go Out with a Smile: Luke becomes one with the Force, content with his life and legacy after stalling the First Order and making amends with Leia, spending his last moments looking at the twin suns of Ahch-To.
• Gory Discretion Shot: After being skewered and sliced through by the lightsaber, Snoke tumbling from his chair in four pieces is shown from a very distant and blurry view.
• G-Rated Sex: When Rey and Kylo Ren touch hands. It helps that both Rian Johnson and Mark Hamill referred to the scene as the sexiest thing in a Star Wars movie.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Supreme Leader Snoke is cleanly bisected, with emphasis given on each half falling over.
• Hate Sink: For all his mystery and gravitas, it slowly but surely becomes clear that Supreme Leader Snoke is little more than a vile Smug Snake who emotionally manipulates and abuses Kylo Ren for his own selfish gain. Later on, he arrogantly toys and tortures Rey, making her watch the destruction of Resistance fleet, before forcing Kylo Ren to kill her to complete his training. His sudden Undignified Death at the hands of Kylo Ren all but cements him as a Big Bad Wannabe who has all of Emperor Palpatine's cruelty but with none of the charm or intelligence that the Sith Lord was best known for.
• Headbutt of Love: Poe gives one to BB-8 when they are reunited on Crait.
• Heel–Face Turn: Throughout the film, Kylo Ren and Rey communicate with each other through a Force bond. Both try to turn the other to their side, though Kylo is clearly more affected by it than Rey. While they do eventually join forces to destroy Snoke, their strong convictions and differing opinions about what to do afterwards ensure that neither actually turns.
• Held Gaze: Kylo and Rey do this a lot, whether it be talking through their Force Bond to locking eyes immediately after Rey arrives aboard Snoke's ship to pleading the other to join their side. The camera particularly likes zooming in on their faces and/or eyes at these moments.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic:
  • The Resistance pilots don't wear any eye protection on Crait, even though they're piloting open-cockpit speeders and deliberately kicking up a sandstorm.
  • Paige Tico is introduced wearing a helmet with visor and breathing mask, which she pulls off in shock after witnessing the sudden destruction of the rest of her squadron, leaving her bomber, and soon only her, to press the attack.
• The Hero Dies: Luke, the definitive hero of the Star Wars franchise as a whole, becomes one with the Force after stopping the First Order from finishing off the Resistance. He dies content, though, knowing that new heroes like Rey will take up his mantle and end the First Order's oppression.
• Heroic Ambidexterity: During the battle in Snoke's throne room, Rey dispatches her last opponent — who has her arm restrained and has her in a sort-of headlock — by dropping her lightsaber to her other hand as she ducks away to deal the final blow to the royal guard.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • The events between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens appear to have done quite the number on Luke, for him to lose faith in the Jedi Order. He's even suffering from PTSD as a direct result of the actions of the Knights of Ren.
  • After Kylo forces Rey to face the truth about her family, she is reduced to tears.
  • When Holdo sees the First Order picking off the Resistance transports, she freezes in panic for several minutes before making her move.
• Heroic RRoD: Occurs twice in the film.
  • Firstly, when the bridge of the Resistance ship is shot to pieces, spacing most of the Resistance's leadership including Leia. She is able to use her innate connection to the Force to survive in the vacuum and pull herself back to the bulkhead door. She remains comatose from the trauma and her inexperience in using the Force for the majority of the film.
  • Secondly, when Luke arrives on Crait as a Force Illusion, it takes everything he has to maintain the projection; once he dispels the illusion, he promptly keels over, before fading into the Force.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Only one Resistance bomber makes it to the First Order Dreadnought's weak point, and Paige Tico has to arm and drop the bombs manually. She dies engulfed in the blast that also takes out the Dreadnought.
  • Admiral Holdo, in order to prevent any more transports from being destroyed by the Supremacy's long range guns after DJ decrypts the transports' cloaking, points the Raddus towards the First Order fleet and activates its hyperdrive, ramming the Supremacy at FTL-speed and causing a spectacular chain reaction that cuts Snoke's flagship in two and spreads debris around, destroying most of the escorting Star Destroyers.
  • Subverted by Finn when facing the battering ram cannon. He seems primed to sacrifice himself to destroy the cannon, but Rose bumps his craft out of the cannon's way Just in Time.
  • Luke dies after facing down the First Order. Subverted in that it doesn't happen the way the film initially suggests it will — Kylo Ren tries to cut him down at the end of their duel, but finds out that what he's actually been battling is a Force projection of Luke, who isn't even on the same planet — but rather the effort of doing this ultimately costs Luke his life, although he "merely" becomes one with the Force.
• "Hey, You!" Haymaker: Just when Phasma thought she had knocked Finn off a platform with her staff, she's distracted by Rose and turns around to fire at her... before Finn comes back up the elevating platform, quips "Hey" to a surprised Phasma, and smashes her helmet with his riot baton.
• History Repeats:
  • Like Palpatine before him, Snoke is utterly convinced that he has his apprentice's complete loyalty and devotion, leaving him incapable of seeing Ren's betrayal coming. And like Darth Plagueis before Palpatine, he becomes a stepping stone to the true big bad of the series, an apprentice who was a far better student than he expected.
  • Luke takes a page from Obi-Wan's playbook during his Heroic Sacrifice. He goes to confront the Darth Vader expy, who is his former apprentice, who killed the mentor's best friend, (Metaphorically True) and killed their own father figure(s), to draw attention away from the Rebels' escaping, his dare to his nephew is very similar, and while Kylo's slash does nothing, as he's just a Force projection, it does cause both it... and his real body to fade away, Luke joining his mentors and father in the Force.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: At the end of the film, Luke Skywalker is revered as the great hero, with his actions in enabling Kylo Ren's and the First Order's rise not made public by Rey or anyone to either Leia or others, nor his inaction for the bulk of the resistance against the First Order's atrocities held against him.
• Holding the Floor:
  • In the opening battle, Poe stalls by hailing Hux and pretending to not hear Hux's replies until he's in position to begin his attack run.
  • Later Luke faces the First Order to give the Resistance time to escape.
• Hollywood Tactics:
  • The Battle of D'Qar features tactics from both sides that wouldn't make any sense from a military perspective, but are done anyway for the sake of drama.
    • The Dreadnought's design makes it clear that it's more of an artillery platform than a warship, making it reliant on an escort fleet to protect it while it performs its duties. Yet, at no point during the battle does Hux order the three Resurgent-class to provide cover for the Fulminatrix when Poe leads a counterattack, and the small starfighter predictably clears the Dreadnought's surface cannons and turns it into a sitting duck for the incoming Resistance bombers. The Dreadnought could also have targeted the Resistance fleet first instead of the mostly evacuated base (thus ending the movie straight away), but it doesn't happen, and the plot unfolds from then on.
    • The Resistance bombers are nearly a literal example. The scene was clearly a throwback to various B-17 scenes from World War II movies. But they're attempting to act it out using unguided gravity-dropped bombs against a ship in space, instead of the more sensible missiles used against capital ships by small craft in previous films and side stories. Unsurprisingly the entire fleet is wiped out in the process. (That said, the Visual Dictionary indicates that the bombers launch the bombs relative downward, and momentum does the rest in space; and that a single bomber is able to destroy a dreadnought implies the yield of a payload is much higher than earlier fighter generations.) In a kind of irony, the Resistance's own lack of fighters to properly cover their bombers is what leads to them clustering, which is what leads to the chain reaction that wipes them out.
  • During the battle on Crait, the Resistance attacks the First Order's AT-M6 walkers head on with ancient ski speeders that are barely functional, instead of going sideways and avoiding the firing arc of the walkers. This at least makes sense in context: the target explicitly has to be shot from straight on to be destroyed, the firing arc is very wide, and they're very short on time before the target is fully charged (down to a matter of seconds). Trying to attack from the flank would have them in the wrong position for the shot, probably still under fire, and far too late. It's also implied that, under-equipped as they are, they didn't really have any other options.
  • Holdo's entire command as an Admiral despite the intended message and warning against insubordination and maverick soldiers, is far too indecisive, secretive, and arbitrary to qualify as sensible leadership in times of crisis. Her withholding her plan for a secret evacuation from most of her senior officers and failure to read the morale of a significant portion of her sub-command are significant leadership flaws. Likewise, Poe Dameron getting lightly slapped on the wrist for mutiny and insubordination rather than court martial and/or execution is way off from real military practise in both the recent past and the contemporary world. That his superiors allowed the mutiny to take place instead of removing him from command on the spot and recalling his forces directly is also an example; of course, so was trying to cancel the attack when they were already irretrievably engaged in the first place.
• Homage Shot: The opening scene on Canto Bight is a direct reference to the famous tracking shot from Wings.
• Hopeless War: Despite the destruction of Starkiller Base, the war against the First Order is this for the Resistance. They no longer have the support of the New Republic as it seemingly collapsed following the Hosnian Cataclysm, much of their leadership including Admiral Ackbar are killed during the evacuation from D'Qar while Leia is left incapacitated, resulting in a fractured chain of command as Poe and Holdo repeatedly butt heads over strategy. Finn and Rose's mission to disable the First Order's tracking device on their fleet ends in failure resulting in heavy casualties and Holdo is forced to sacrifice the Resistance's last cruiser to buy them time to escape. When what's left of the Resistance reaches Crait and Leia broadcasts a call to arms across the galaxy to fight the First Order, no one responds as everyone believes the war is now hopeless while the First Order prepares to assault the planet and complete their conquest of the galaxy. Thankfully, Luke's intervention enables the Resistance to escape and spark inspiration across the galaxy for a new Rebellion against the First Order's tyranny.
• Hope Spot: Kylo Ren kills Snoke and joins Rey in fighting the Praetorian Guards as Back-to-Back Badasses, a moment which seems to be the payoff for all the times throughout the movie where Rey tries to convince him to return to the Light. But that hope is dashed as soon as we see him eyeing Snoke's throne. He has no intentions of turning good and fully intended to take power over the First Order for himself.
• Hope Springs Eternal: The ending sees Luke dead, and the very last of the Resistance escaping on the Millennium Falcon while Kylo Ren and the First Order still appear to have control of the galaxy. Despite this, Luke's exploits are inspiring people around the galaxy (some of whom are Force-sensitive), the Resistance can still regroup with their allies, and Rey has the original Jedi texts in her possession. Luke alludes to this earlier in the film, though he comes from the opposite direction.
  Luke: And this is the lesson: [the Force] does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the Light dies, is vanity.
• Horse of a Different Color: The fathiers, long-eared quadrupedal mammals that could be tamed and used for riding. Fittingly enough, the inhabitants of Canto Bight have bets revolving around fathier-racing.
• Huge Holographic Head: After the rebels escape, Snoke is not pleased. Hux tries to go to his quarters so he can at least get chewed out in private, when a holographic Snoke appears in his path and he's Force-Slammed into the deck.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • One that happens at the very end of the movie, at the end of a series of events that make up what otherwise would have been a character's finest hour. Within an hour of taking leadership of the First Order by killing Snoke and framing Rey for it, Kylo Ren humiliates himself as an impulsive and incompetent military leader in front of the might of the First Order's armies, leaving him an overpowered joke and laughingstock not one inch of the grandfather he admired. He doesn't get the satisfaction of killing Luke and destroying the Jedi or the Resistance, as the hero explains that — military victory aside — the seeds have been sown for a greater Resistance to grow. Luke then reveals that he appeared only as an illusion on Crait, meaning that Kylo Ren's failed military maneuver was all a complete waste, little more than him flailing at nothing on an empty salt flat, and wasted enough time to allow the Resistance to escape in the end.
  • Poe also gets one, with the film ruthlessly deconstructing the Military Maverick trope. Every plan he makes either fails or backfires spectacularly. His attack on the dreadnought above D'qar is a Pyrrhic Victory, resulting in heavy losses that are unsustainable for the Resistance. When the First Order strikes the Raddus again, his fighter is destroyed before he can even board it. His plan to save the Resistance Fleet completely fails, and only succeeds in tripping up Vice Admiral Holdo's more plausible evacuation plan. Finally, the sally he leads to delay the First Order's assault on the Crait Resistance Base is completely ineffectual.
  • The First Order as a whole suffers from this. They lose their leader, their largest ship, and several other capital ships through the course of the movie, with total losses around the hundreds of thousands of people at the very least. Their assault on Crait, while successful, ends up sparking a new wave of rebellion against their rule once people learn what happened there.
    • General Hux should also garner at least an Honorable Mention consideration, as the film starts with Poe Dameron mocking him in a very public communication designed to distract him from a military strike, followed up by Supreme Leader Snoke Force-thrashing him like a ragdoll in full view of his bridge crew for his failure. Later, Kylo Ren Force-chokes him to assert his dominance and newly assumed position as Supreme Leader of the First Order, and also Force-thrashes Hux (again, in front of the rank and file) during the Crait assault.
• Humongous Mecha: The AT-M6 (All-Terrain Megacaliber Six), the First Order's brand of walker, which is used in the attack on Crait. It's much larger than the AT-AT, built like a gorilla and armed with a megacaliber six laser cannon on its back. The First Order also have slightly sleeker versions of the Imperial AT-AT with them — just to give you an idea of how big the AT-M6 is, the First Order AT-AT peers slightly above the legs of its successor.
• Hypocrite: Hux calls the Rebels war criminals. The only thing they've done that might count as a war crime is blowing up Starkiller Base, and that's really stretching the definition; even then, the First Order used that same base to blow up multiple planets. It's pretty clear that Hux is just labeling his enemies war criminals to justify exterminating them. He on the other hand oversees attacks on the unarmed Resistance transports, not to mention said wholesale destruction of civilians in the first film, which are both war crimes on Earth, and very probably the Star Wars universe too (not that the First Order are likely to care).
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • After Poe's unauthorised assault on a Dreadnought results in a lot of casualties for the Resistance, Leia slaps him, demotes him to captain and lectures him that he can't solve everything by hopping in an X-wing and blowing stuff up. Once the First Order catches up to the Resistance, Leia gladly and immediately approves Poe's request to hop in an X-wing and blow stuff up.
  • Luke tells Rey that Jakku "is pretty much nowhere" — this coming from a guy who spent his whole childhood complaining that Tatooine is nowhere.
• If I Can Only Move: Paige Tico is incapacitated in a Resistance bomber inches away from the remote that will blow up the First Order Dreadnought. All it takes to blow up the spaceship is to kick that remote to where she can detonate it...
• Immediate Sequel: The movie picks up right after the end of The Force Awakens. This is in contrast to the other films in the main series^note Rogue One ends shortly before the beginning of A New Hope, so there is precedent within the wider Star Wars Universe, which were always separated by a Time Skip^note I–II: 10 years (32 BBY–22 BBY); II–III: 3 years (22 BBY–19 BBY); III–IV: 19 years (19 BBY–0 BBY); IV–V: 3 years (0 BBY–3 ABY); V–VI: 1 year (3 ABY–4 ABY); VI–VII: 30 years (4 ABY–34 ABY); VII–VIII: A few seconds (34 ABY).
• Important Haircut:
  • Before the climactic battle on Crait, Finn shaves the sides of his head and Rey ditches her buns.
  • Also for Luke: when appearing as a Force projection at the end, he has a much neater haircut to live up to his hope-bringing legend, compared to his longer and more ragged island hobo appearance.
• Infernal Background: When Kylo Force-chokes Hux and makes it pretty clear he's the Supreme Leader now, there is a dramatically fitting backdrop of sparks and flames behind him.
• Informed Obscenity: Luke scolds R2 for swearing on a sacred isle. We have to take his word for it.
• In-Series Nickname: Admiral Holdo twice calls Poe "Flyboy".
• Insert Cameo: In the close-up shot in the Millennium Falcon where Luke takes Han's dice, the gloved hand is Rian Johnson's.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Luke, after greeting his "old friend" R2-D2, tells him that he's not coming back, and that "Nothing can change my mind." That is, until R2 displays to him the holographic recording of his sister Leia asking Obi-Wan Kenobi for help, from all the way back to A New Hope.
  Luke: That's a cheap move.
• Insult Backfire: Phasma tries to undermine Finn by calling him "scum," but since this identifies him with the rest of the Resistance, Finn can only smile and repeat it.
  Finn: Rebel Scum.
• Internal Deconstruction: The film deconstructs and plays with some of Star Wars's signature tropes. Albeit affectionately, if such a thing is possible.
  • Dangerous, spur-of-the-moment plans? Finn, Rose and Poe's dangerous plan to save the Resistance fleet ends up causing more harm than good, not only failing to work at all, but tripping up Leia and Holdo's more realistic plan. Even if the plan had worked (i.e. if they had not gotten captured and DJ wouldn't have betrayed them, or if they'd found the right codebreaker who would presumably not have given them up) it would have been entirely superfluous and unnecessary with Leia's and Holdo's plan.
  • A charismatic, roguish criminal who aligns with the good guys to make a quick buck? Poe, Finn, and Rose recruit one of these for their aforementioned plan, leading to its failure when he sells them out to the First Order — to make a quick buck.
  • Individuals fated for greatness? Rey never came from a special bloodline or ancestry, but wanted to believe in a Changeling Fantasy for herself given her parents are long dead drunks who sold her into slavery as a child for booze money.
  • The strict dichotomy between light and dark? Kylo Ren becomes so sick of being belittled and screwed over by masters and traditions on both the light and dark sides of the Force, he decides to become his own Big Bad, adopting a self-serving ideology of the irrelevance of the past. It's clear from his interactions with his uncle Luke he's even more selfish and vindictive than Snoke as a result though.
  • Villain redeeming himself through love? Kylo Ren's affection for Rey only convinces him that they can only count on each other. He kills Snoke not because he has turned to the Light, but because he wants to co-rule with Rey as his Empress and as Supreme Leaders of the First Order.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Resistance transports are cloaked against being detected by the First Order, allowing them to depart the Raddus without being noticed. Unfortunately for them, DJ tells Hux how to See the Invisible.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Luke tells Rey at Ahch-To that the Force is more than just mind tricks and lifting rocks. Then in the climax, Rey repeats the line "Moving rocks!" half-sarcastically and uses the Force to clear a landslide.
  • Luke echoes himself, first to Rey: "Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong," then at the climax to Kylo Ren: "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong."
• It Has Been an Honor: The captain of the Resistance's medical frigate says this to Holdo right before his ship's destroyed by the First Order.
• It's All Junk: Luke is tormented about whether he should burn the last copies of the Jedi scriptures. He can't quite seem to do it, but Yoda's Force ghost does it for him. Subverted when it turns out Rey grabbed the texts on her way out, so they just burnt down an old dead tree.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: When Rose and Finn get to Canto Bight, in a serious rush to find a particular codebreaker, they just leave their shuttle on the beach where they land. Unfortunately for them, the authorities take that sort of thing seriously, and they end up getting arrested before they can complete their mission. They end up recruiting a different codebreaker who happens to share a cell with them, but he ultimately betrays them, leading to the loss of most of the Resistance fleet.
• Jedi Mind Trick:
  • Rey brings it up when Luke asks her if she knows what the Force is.
    Rey: It's a power the Jedi have that lets them control people and... make things float.
  • Kylo Ren tries a particularly unsubtle one on Rey. ("You WILL bring Luke Skywalker to me.") Rey, not being Weak-Willed, is completely unaffected.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • While Luke is full of self-loathing and Took a Level in Cynic over the years, he is completely right about some of his views, primarily about how the Jedi order fell because of hubris, and that the Jedi were just an organization that upheld and defended the power of the light side but are not the light side itself. You don't need to be a Jedi to use the force nor do you need to be one to use it to help others while furthering the cause of good.
  • Poe gets grounded, busted down in rank, and slapped across the face for disobeying Leia's orders to disengage the assault on the First Order Dreadnaught. However he also notes during his attack that the thing was a "Fleet Killer", and considering most of Poe's plotline involves the Resistance fleet trying to stay just far enough out of range of the rest of the First Order's turbolasers, the movie could have been a lot shorter if it was still in play after the First Order tracks them through hyperspace.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: It briefly seems that DJ will be a new Han Solo, only taking Rose's pendant for use in the escape scheme. Unfortunately...
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk:
  • DJ turns out to be a consumate thief and liar, only out for himself. While he returns Rose's pendant, he sells out the Resistance by revealing their plans to the First Order in exchange for a crate of cash.
  • Kylo Ren. His reveal that his uncle Luke tried to kill him convinces Rey that he isn't all that bad and might be a valuable ally to the Resistance. She reaches out to him and they work together to kill Snoke and his Praetorian Guards. But then it's shown that Kylo never planned to leave the First Order and was only using her to depose Snoke and become Supreme Leader himself.
• Job Title: Appropriately enough, the Jedi Order's legacy is integral to the film's plot.
• Jump Scare: A comatose Finn is in a medical pod, the camera lingers on his face — and Finn very suddenly wakes up screaming Rey's name. The shot even gets used in a TV spot as a Call-Back, since a Jump Scare involving Finn was the very first scene audiences saw of The Force Awakens in its debut teaser.
• Just in Time:
  • Paige Tico manages to unload the bombs of her critically damaged bomber just in time before the Dreadnought can fire on the Raddus.
  • Holdo decides to ram the last Resistance ship into the Supremacy just as Finn and Rose are about to be executed by Phasma, saving them.
• Just Toying with Them:
  • Snoke's entire "fight" with Rey consists of him taunting her with the Force, as he's barely scratching the surface of his powers while she's fighting for her life. It's made abundantly clear that the only way that Kylo Ren could kill him was by catching him off-guard, which is exactly what happens.
  • Luke's entire duel with Kylo is this, not least because Luke isn't actually there.
• Killer Gorilla: Invoked by the new Walkers (AT-M6), who are even referred to as "gorilla walkers" due to their front legs and overall walk.
• Kinda Busy Here: When Finn and Rose call Maz Kanata for help, she's in the middle of a blaster shootout.
• Klingon Promotion: After Kylo Ren kills Snoke (then blames Rey for it), Ren assumes the role of Supreme Commander of the First Order. General Hux tries to pull one by attempting to shoot a collapsed Kylo Ren, after the flagship got rammed. Didn't work as Kylo Ren quickly woke up and Hux had to sheathe his blaster pistol before Ren could notice.
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: Finn and Rose initially plan to get in touch with a hacker to get them into the First Order flagship through connections in Maz Kanata's space pirate network. The plan falls apart when they get thrown in prison for crashing their shuttle on a beach, but they still end up meeting a different slicer, DJ.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Even Yoda believes that it's time for the Jedi to end, having seen more of its failures for himself in person than Luke, who first voices that sentiment, had.
• The Last Title: The film is titled The Last Jedi, which according to the director refers to Luke Skywalker after the purge of Luke's new Jedi by the Knights of Ren. Luke was previously called the last Jedi back in Return of the Jedi, as well as by the opening crawl and Snoke in The Force Awakens.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The trailers themselves focus around The Reveal from The Force Awakens that Rey is Force-sensitive, as she starts this movie trying to convince Luke Skywalker to train her to be a Jedi. Official Japanese marketing leaflets for The Last Jedi spoil even more of The Force Awakens, including Han Solo's death as well as Kylo Ren being Han and Leia's son.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The very first line of the first trailer is Luke saying "Breathe. Just... breathe." While in-universe this is likely him training Rey, it also serves as a message to excited fans.
  • Many have taken Luke's "This is not going to go the way you think!" line in the trailer as a meta statement suggesting that the trailers are being misleading or that the movie's got a handful of plot twists up its sleeve. This is correct.
  • Kylo forces Rey to admit something she knew all along, deep down; her parents were just random nobodies who aren't relevant to "this story".
  • When R2-D2 plays back the iconic "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" message from A New Hope, Luke calls it a cheap move, as though accusing R2 of Pandering to the Base. It gets another double meaning in the German dub: here, Luke calls it a "billiger Trick", which (besides being the accurate German expression for a "cheap move") can also be read as "a cheap special effect", i.e. making fun of the now-dated A New Hope-era visuals.
• Let the Past Burn:
  • A flashback shows the First Order and the Knights of Ren finishing off Luke Skywalker's school by lighting the building on fire.
  • Luke plans to burn down the tree holding the sacred Jedi texts but hesitates. Yoda helps him out by bringing lightning down on the tree, igniting it.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Luke Skywalker is shown floating above the rock he's meditating on when doing Astral Projection.
• Like a Son to Me: Leia has this dynamic with Poe in deliberate contrast to her relationship with Kylo Ren, and which directly mirrors Leia's relationship with her fathers Bail Organa and Darth Vader.
• Lip-Lock Sun-Block: After Rose saves Finn on Crait, she kisses him just as the First Order's ram cannon breaks through the door of the rebel base, and the framing has their faces silhouetted right in front of the bright light of the resulting explosion.
• Literal-Minded: When Luke does his first lesson with Rey, he has her sit cross-legged then tells her to reach out, meaning use the Force. She instead uses her hand, so he tickles her hand with a blade of grass to mess with her a bit before whacking her with it. Rey then realizes what he meant.
• Little "No":
  • Captain Peavey gasps "... No!" in when he realizes to his horror that Admiral Holdo turned the cruiser around not to jump into hyperspace like a coward, but to ram the First Order ship at light speed. Next to him, Hux starts panicking and orders every gun to fire in vain.
  • At the end of the movie, Kylo Ren realizes that the Luke he has been fighting all along was a mere Astral Projection meant to distract him, and the illusion promptly vanishes once the Resistance has evacuated. He then lets out a barely audible "No..." in disbelief, before screaming "NOOOOOOOO!" in rage.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Deconstructed; Holdo doesn't tell anyone what the plan is to save them from the First Order ship following them, even refusing to say that she actually does have a plan. This not only leads Poe to send off Finn and Rose on an unauthorized mission to hack into the enemy ship to destroy its tracking system (one that completely failed and almost got them executed by the First Order because they trusted the wrong codebreaker), but he and several others end up convinced that Holdo is a traitor and they mutiny against her. These two events combined kickstarted the chain of events that wiped out 95% of the Rebels. Long story short, if Holdo reassured everyone that she did have a plan, the escape would have been successful and most of the good guys could have survived the movie. It gets worse when Poe states that he would have gladly gone along with Holdo's plan if he had known she actually had one.
• Lonely Together: Rey and Kylo Ren end up empathizing with each other due to a shared sense of loneliness.
• Losing Your Head: An explosion sends BB-8 flying and knocks his head clean off. His body rolls over and magnetically draws it back into place.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • During the fight with Snoke's Praetorian Guards, one guard is knocked into a machine that pulverizes him, spitting out...chunks of armor. (The armor is red.)
  • On Crait, the First Order spots Luke Skywalker walking towards their formation, and Kylo Ren orders them to fire at him. Due to the mineral on the ground, the first shot appears to blast Luke into a spray of red chunks.
• Lured into a Trap: Snoke's plan to get Rey onto the ship.
• Lying by Omission: Kylo Ren manages to fool Snoke's Mind Probe like this. Reading his thoughts, Snoke sees Kylo "turning the lightsaber to strike true, and now... he ignites it, and kills his true enemy!" Kylo is holding one lightsaber to Rey's chest, but the lightsaber he ignites, telekinetically, is the one resting at Snoke's side, pointing straight at Snoke.

Tropes M to R

• The Main Characters Do Everything: Unfortunately, Poe's belief that he has to be involved in everything and informed about everything, despite only being a squadron captain, means he puts the kibosh on Holdo's plan by blabbing about it on an open comm line.
  Holdo: A stormtrooper and a who-now are doing what?
• Make an Example of Them: Hux plans to have Finn, the traitor, executed in front of hundreds of stormtroopers. It was his way of saying "see, this is what happens when you turn on the First Order". Of course, the plan fails Just in Time.
• Malicious Misnaming: During Poe's Prank Call to Hux to stall for time, he calls Hux "General Hugs" throughout the conversation.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Rey seeks Luke's help to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi, and Luke is paid a visit by his own mentor, Yoda, who gives him another lesson on teaching.
• Meaningful Background Event: Chewie roasts some Porgs over a campfire to eat but is halted by an audience of horrified Porgs. He roars and scares them all away, but he loses his appetite. While Chewie is distracted, Luke can be seen sneaking aboard the Millennium Falcon.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • Kylo tells Snoke "I know what I have to do," moments before killing his own master, much like he told Han Solo "I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it," shortly before killing his own father in The Force Awakens. The circumstances of the lines are inverted, in the previous film he was visibly struggling with the decision to murder his morally pure father, in this movie he is calmly resolute in murdering his cruel and tyrannical master.
  • "Strike me down in anger and I will always be with you, just like your father" (Luke to Kylo Ren) mirrors Obi-Wan Kenobi's "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" to Darth Vader in A New Hope, as well as a subtle nod to Palpatine's urging for Luke to strike him down with all of his hatred in Return of the Jedi.
  • "Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong." Previously said by Luke to Rey during their training session when she tries to describe what the Force is, later repeated when Kylo Ren claims that the war has been won in the First Order's favor and Luke is the last Jedi. This shows Luke's renewed sense of hope in Rey and the Force.
  • Not word-for-word, but Kylo Ren's philosophy of "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to" which informs his goal of murderously severing all ties to his past life, is paralleled in a less violent way with Yoda's "We are what they grow beyond". Ren's philosophy is a refusal to accept any responsibility of the past. Yoda's philosophy acknowledges change while accepting that responsibility. Yoda's philosophy, so far, seems ultimately more successful.
• Meaningful Look: Rey and Kylo share an extended one before taking on Snoke's elite guards.
• Meaningful Name: The Raddus, the command ship of the Resistance. Named after the guy who (among other things) came up with the idea to use a ramming maneuver to get out of a tight spot. Guess what Admiral Holdo uses this ship for?
  • Ahch-To, the planet where Luke went into self-exile prior to The Force Awakens, sounds a lot like "Act Two" and is where the second film of the Sequel Trilogy begins.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Luke, who had previously trained Rey in the ways of the Jedi, becomes one with the Force and dies near the end of the film.
• Merlin and Nimue: Luke and Rey have this dynamic, he being the older male mentor, and she the much younger female apprentice. Unlike many examples of this trope, there's definitely no romantic relationship there; Rey seems to view Luke as a potential father figure more than anything else. His nephew on the other hand.... As for the betrayal aspect that often accompanies this trope, Rey never really turns against Luke, but she does suffer a case of Broken Pedestal towards him, outright attacks him at one stage in a fit of anger (though she did not intend to do him serious harm), swipes the Jedi texts from under his nose and runs off to face Snoke against his advice. But when it comes down to it, Rey refuses to join the Dark Side and remains loyal to Luke, who ultimately names her his successor.
• Metaphorically True: While in the elevator to Snoke's throne room, Rey tells Kylo that she saw a Force vision of him refusing to bow before Snoke, instead turning against his master with her help. Kylo replies that he, too, had a Force vision, of her turning, and standing beside him in the coming fight. Neither is wrong... but neither of them quite has the whole picture either.
• Mile-Long Ship: Most of them. Ships have gotten bigger in the 35 years since Return of the Jedi.
  • The Resurgent-class Star Destroyers are just under 3 km long.
  • The Raddus is about 3.4 km long.
  • The Mandator IV-class Dreadnought at the beginning of the movie is over 7.6 km long.
  • Snoke's flagship, the Mega Star Destroyer Supremacy, puts the Super Star Destroyers to shame. For comparison, a Super Star Destroyer like the Executor is 19 kilometers long, or eleven miles, making it almost as long as Manhattan from bow to stern. Supremacy is 60 kilometers, or thirty-seven miles, from port to starboard, meaning it would span the width of Rhode Island.
• Mind Rape: Unlike Kylo's failed attempt due to inexperience and Rey's hidden abilities in The Force Awakens, the much more experienced Snoke easily extracts information regarding Luke from Rey in torturous fashion. While Rey clearly found Kylo's attempts to read her mind uncomfortable, when Snoke does it she's screaming in agony. Snoke is visibly gleeful at the thought of torturing her and even Kylo looks disturbed by it.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • Luke considered killing a sleeping Ben Solo out of fear of what he might become. While he quickly changed his mind and was ashamed by his actions, Ben didn't know this and attacked Luke. It's outright stated that this is what caused Ben to embrace the dark side and become Kylo Ren, although it is also stated that Snoke had already warped his mind. This was the turning point which radicalized him.
  • Snoke also treats Kylo like crap, leading to Kylo seizing the opportunity to cut Snoke in half and become the new Supreme Leader. General Hux (a frequent target of Kylo Ren's scorn and intimidating behavior), upon spying a prone and presumably unconscious Ren, slowly draws his pistol with the intent to take Ren out, but Ren recovers and Hux swiftly and surreptitiously re-holsters his weapon.
• Mistress and Servant Boy: Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo and her subordinate Captain Poe Dameron have a bit of this dynamic between them. She is an eccentric older woman who acts condescendingly towards her younger subordinate (with a hint of flirtatiousness, which is especially prominent when she jokingly calls him "flyboy"), and he is a young and impulsive pilot who is annoyed that he has to obey Holdo's orders. The flirtatious subtext was more prominent in the original version of the script, but was significantly toned down in the final version.
• Mobile Factory: The massive Supremacy isn't just some ordinary warship, it is also the effective capital of the First Order, and its sheer size allows it to house several research and mining facilities, as well as hangars large enough to manufacture Resurgent-class battlecruisers.
• Mobile Shrubbery: BB-8 moves around hidden under a box when he, Finn and Rose infiltrate the Supremacy.
• Moment Killer: While Rey and Kylo Ren touch hands via Force Bond, Luke, having sensed something amiss, walks in on them yelling "STOP!"
• Moment of Weakness: How Luke describes Ben's fall. He sensed the darkness within his nephew and suffered such a moment due to the fear that Ben would destroy everything he cared about. He drew his lightsaber and briefly contemplated killing Ben. It was indeed "a moment", but it was enough for Ben to see his uncle tried to kill him.
• Mood Whiplash: The opening scene. It begins with Poe mocking General Hux by calling him "Hugs" and pretending the comm isn't working to stall for time and swiftly destroying the defenses of his imperial starship, but the opening ends with the Poe disobeying orders, leading to the destruction of the majority of the rebellion's fighting force and the death of Rose's sister.
• Mook Chivalry: When Snoke's Praetorian Guards fight Rey and Kylo, many of them spin away after one move for no reason except to prevent Rey and Kylo from facing too many opponents at once.
• More Insulting than Intended: Poe makes a Your Mom joke to the Imperial commander Hux, pissing him off fiercely. Hux actually is illegitimate, as revealed in other material.
• Motif: Halves and division feature prominently as images in the film. Ironic, given the fans' own split upon seeing it.
  • Paige and Rose Tico's necklaces. These are forever separated upon Paige's death.
  • Supreme Leader Snoke is cut across the middle via remote lightsaber activation.
  • Kylo Ren and Rey themselves are torn apart when they fight for control of Anakin's lightsaber, which is split by their opposing pull, and they part ways soon after.
  • The Supremacy Star Destroyer, along with other members of the fleet, are sliced in two by Admiral Holdo's sacrificial hyperspeed jump.
  • The First Order Stormtrooper Executioners have black paint dividing their white helmets.
• Mundane Utility: The stableboy on Canto Bight picks up his broom. Without touching it.
• My Greatest Failure: Luke clearly blames himself for not realizing just how dangerous Kylo Ren could be. When Rey demonstrates the same level of power, he doesn't take it well. It's revealed that Luke, in a moment of weakness, sensed Ben's darkness and contemplated killing him. Although he immediately decided against it, Ben saw the ignited lightsaber and came to his own conclusions.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Rey and Leia sense Luke merging with the Force after using an Astral Projection to buy time for the Resistance to escape from Crait aboard the Millennium Falcon.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Force Bonds are a carryover from the games Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Luke sealing himself off from the Force is similar to the protagonist of the second game.
  • Likewise, Kyle Katarn had rejected the ways of the Force at the beginning of Jedi Outcast, and had also turned into a grouchy, well, outcast.
  • The tree containing the ancient Jedi texts is shaped like the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, or vice versa more likely, given that the island was previously stated to be the site of the first Jedi Temple.
  • In Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Luke says his "best trick" is taking some simple action that causes people to die — thousands of them, usually (e.g. destroying the Death Star). In this movie, we learn he just considered one such action with Ben — but whether he had decided against it or was still considering it when Ben found out, as a result Ben turned to the Dark Side, and since then the First Order, with Kylo Ren's assistance, has killed billions. And then in the climax, Luke pulls out a very complicated trick, and saves what's left of the Resistance... which is not very many people. In addition, we see a jaded, bitter Luke seriously questioning the entire point of the Force and the Jedi after encounters with the Dark Side.
  • Luke sarcastically refers to his lightsaber as a "laser sword". This was the original name for lightsabers in the original drafts of the original trilogy (and most prominently seen in The Star Wars), and used by Lucas himself in a few behind-the-scenes interviews. It's also a phrase Anakin uses in The Phantom Menace.
  • A spaceship similar to Boba Fett's Slave I, often mockingly compared to a clothing iron, turns out to be an actual clothing iron.
  • Luke's trick at the Battle of Crait is a re-canonization of the advanced Force technique "Doppelganger" (or "Similfuturus"), from the Legends reference book The Jedi Path. Rian Johnson acknowledged it by posting the relevant excerpt on Twitter.
  • Canto Bight's guards take inspiration from the Corporate Sector's police force. In Legends, the Corporate Sector were just like Canto Bight — a playground for the rich and powerful on neutral territory, built on slave labor, police brutality, and gaping class divides. According to supplementary material, Canto Bight is part of the Corporate Sector.
  • Continuing the trend from The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren takes on more aspects of his Legends equivalent, Darth Caedeus — namely, trying to assume control of an Imperial remnant to prove himself, and failing horribly.
  • The Legends novel Dark Force Rising also had the heroes in a casino to find an individual who was vital to their mission, with both similar and different outcomes between that book and this film. While the novel's Grand Admiral Thrawn intercepted the person in question and simply paid him to obtain what was needed, the heroes found alternatives who became crucial to their victory later. But here, the heroes also miss the person they were instructed to find and settle on an alternative who sells them out instead, and leads to the heroes near-total defeat.
  • A scene where a medical droid with spider-like arms tends to Kylo's wounds is somewhat reminiscent of this one in Knights of the Old Republic.
  • The Falcon's chase through the crystal caves is staged identically to the attack on the second Death Star. The caves even duplicate the interior of the space station, with rock structures instead of metal.
• Narrating the Obvious: This exchange:
  Lieutenant Connix: Our distress signal's been received at multiple points, but no response.
  Commander D'Acy: They've heard us, but no one's coming.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: From the novelization:
  Crossing the tree-lined piazza in front of the Canto Casino and Racetrack, Finn nearly got hit by two luxury speeders — muscular, powerful street machines with growling engines. One after the other, organic chauffeurs leaned out of their windows to make unlikely anatomical suggestions.
  Rose responded to the second chauffeur with a counter-suggestion that would have demanded a lot more privacy, and made BB-8 hoot in admiration.
  • In the film we get an exchange between Luke and R2 that ends with Luke admonishing his buddy, "Hey, sacred isle, watch your language."
• Negated Moment of Awesome: During the Battle of Crait, Finn ignores Poe's order to break off given the ski speeders are getting decimated by the First Order walkers, instead suicidally charging at the superlaser siege cannon in hopes of ramming it while it's about to fire. The music swells up, and Finn looks fully committed to his sacrifice. Then Rose comes along and rams his speeder with hers, putting them both out of commission and allowing the First Order to break open the Resistance base's front gate. At the very least, Rose spared Finn from needlessly sacrificing himself, reasoning that true victory comes about as a result of protecting loved ones, not destroying the enemy.
• Never Tell Me the Odds!: This time it's Poe saying this to C-3PO. As usual, C-3PO persists in telling him the odds.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Rey's "I need someone to show my place in all this" line isn't spoken to Kylo Ren, but to Luke Skywalker when she asks him to teach the ways of the Force. The scene where Kylo extends his hand to Rey actually happens after the fight with Snoke's Praetorian Guards when Kylo offers Rey to join him in his conquest of the galaxy.
  • In her lightsaber practice, the trailer shows Rey stopping the lightsaber perfectly before hitting the notch in a rock formation. In the movie, she swings it perfectly once, but when using the saber over-swings so far that she slices the rock in half. On a related note, in the trailer we see Luke watching, implying he is overseeing her training. Rey started on her own and Luke was simply watching after noticing what was happening.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Although Ben was already falling victim to the Dark Side, Luke's brief contemplation of pre-emptively murdering Ben is what drove him to kill the Jedi. It's worth noting Luke actually regretted the thought as soon as he considered it, but all it took for Ben to believe Luke was gonna kill him was to see Luke's ignited saber.
  • Finn and Rose's plan to disable the tracking system on Supremacy actually makes things worse; Leia and Holdo's plan was to use the Raddus as a decoy to draw First Order attention so that they could sneak the survivors off in transports to an abandoned Rebel base and call for help. When Finn and Rose are captured onboard the Supremacy, DJ sells them and the plan out and most of the survivors are easily picked off. Also, if Holdo told the Resistance at the bare minimum that she actually did have a plan, Poe wouldn't have gone behind her back in the first place.
  • Rose interrupts Finn's (possibly futile) suicide run on the First Order battering ram cannon. This allows the cannon to destroy the Resistance shield door, and if not for the intervention of Luke's Astral Projection, everyone in the base would have been killed.
  • Rey goes to the Supremacy hoping to turn Kylo Ren back to the light. This only gives Kylo the help he needs to kill Snoke and the Praetorian Guard and take over as the new Supreme Leader.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Rivals!: Rey and Kylo both try to use the Force to take ownership of the Skywalker lightsaber and end up snapping it in half. Rey ends up with the pieces, though it's unclear if repairs will be possible.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Hux's order to Captain Canady not to launch his TIE fighters on time to "give the Resistance a lesson" enables Poe to clear out The Fulminatrix's defense cannons and ensure her destruction in a bombing raid. Likewise, the captain's own choice to destroy the already evacuated base first is what deprived him of the time necessary to destroy the cruiser everyone was evacuating to.
  • If Snoke hadn't taunted Kylo Ren over his desire to be like Vader, he would not have abandoned the past. And if he hadn't mocked Kylo Ren's weakness to Rey while right in front of him, Kylo Ren wouldn't have decided that Snoke is his true enemy. These two acts together let Kylo Ren overpower Snoke, kill him, and usurp his position as Supreme Leader.
  • Snoke managed to extract Luke's location from Rey's mind once she was brought to him and intended to destroy Luke and the entire island on Ahch-To (including the civilian caretakers and all those cute little porgs) once the Resistance had been dealt with. Kylo's assassination of him and the subsequent events were the only things that prevented this happening.
  • Kylo Ren's fixation on killing his former mentor during the assault on the mining base allow the Rebels to escape. Had he ignored Luke or quietly dealt with him personally instead of calling the attack to a halt so that he could showboat in front of his troops, the base would have been overrun before the Rebels were able to get away.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Johnson commented that the story does not feature a Han×Leia type of romance in the film. Downplayed as this does not exclude the possibility of Ship Tease or tension-filled moments between the characters, nor does it rule out a full-blown romance in the Grand Finale. The finished movie then averts this by showing quite a bit of platonic hugging and an unambiguously romantic kiss between Rose and Finn. (Well, unambiguous from her end. Finn is just confused.)
• No Name Given: In a similar manner to the Ewoks, the Porgs are never identified by name onscreen.
• Noodle Incident:
  • When Finn and Rose contact Maz for help, they find she's under heavy fire, apparently dealing with a "union dispute".
  • In the same scene there is a rather uncomfortable moment where she mentions the codebreaker. C-3PO says the codebreaker sounds like he can do anything, and Maz replies with a rather suggestive sounding "Ohhh yes, he can". Finn and Rose exchange nervous glances and we never hear about this bit again, probably for the better.
• No OSHA Compliance: Of all the things to model after Palpatine's throne room on the second Death Star, why does the Supremacy's throne room have an unmarked and unguarded reactor?
• Nose Art: One of the bombs in Paige's bomber bears a giant smiley face, the one next to it a slogan in Aurebesh reading "Han says hi."
• No-Sell:
  • Kylo Ren tries to use a Mind Trick on Rey, who is not fazed for a moment.
  • Rose shoots at Phasma, but the shot bounces off her armor, and Phasma barely reacts to it.
  • When Luke confronts Kylo's army alone, Kylo orders him shot with everything they got, seemingly obliterating Luke, only for the smoke to clear and Luke being completely unharmed, apparently showing astonishing Jedi powers. Subverted in that it later turns out that Luke wasn't there at all in the first place.
• Not What It Looks Like: The final straw that leads Poe to mutiny was when he attempted again to get an explanation from Holdo about how she plans to keep the Resistance alive, he sees that she is fueling up transports. Since Holdo is still refusing to provide any explanation for what those transports are for, Poe concludes that Holdo is fleeing with her command crew and leaving everyone else behind as a distraction.
• Obligatory Swearing: The movie contains slightly harsher and more frequent language than in previous Star Wars films ("ass", "bastard", etc.), on par with most contemporary blockbusters and some older Expanded Universe material.
• Oddball in the Series: The movie is this not only the sequel trilogy but Star Wars as a whole, an intentional creative choice by director Rian Johnson. It is the only film in the series to not feature a traditional lightsaber duel (neither duel in the movie features two lightsabers clashing), the only film to not have the line "I have a bad feeling about this" spoken out loud, and the only one to follow three simultaneous subplots instead of one to two. It also features noticeably more overt humor than the other films, and has by far the fewest screen wipe transitions of any film in the series. Even the usual series tropes it follows will often have a strange new spin put on it, such as the requisite "seedy cantina scene" taking place in an extravagant, lavish Vegas-style casino full of respectable looking types in suits and dresses.
• Offhand Backhand: Kylo Ren gives the lightsaber equivalent of this trope during his and Rey's joint fight against Snoke's Praetorian Guard after Ren assassinated Snoke. Rey tosses her lightsaber to Kylo, who is in a chokehold, and without looking, he ignites the lightsaber through the skull of the guard holding him.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • BB-8 is confronted by a trio of guards and spits coins at them. When we next see BB, he has managed to tie up and gag all three guards by himself.
  • Later, BB-8 somehow manages to get into a First Order AT-ST cockpit and hotwire it, allowing Finn and Rose to escape.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • At the beginning, the Resistance personnel still on D'Qar have this reaction when they hear the sonic boom that heralds the First Order's fleet coming out of hyperspace.
  • Paige Tico is taken aback when she witnesses the destruction of her entire bomber squadron during the attack run on the dreadnought Fulminatrix, leaving her bomber alone to press the attack.
  • Luke has a look of horror on his face when, during Rey's training ritual, she cracks the ground beneath her while her mind wanders the island. He has another one when he's fighting Rey in the rain and disarms her, then she Force Pulls Anakin's lightsaber to her.
  • Both Finn and Rose get a long moment of terror once they're caught trying to disable the Supremacy's tracking device, face execution by Phasma, and learn that DJ double-crossed them for weapons and tipped off the First Order about Holdo's escape plan.
    • Hearing all of the turn of events over communication devices, Poe is similarly horrified.
    Poe: ... They didn't make it.
  • When Snoke reveals to Rey that he created the force bond between her and Kylo Ren to lure her to him, so that he could in turn extract Luke's location from her, Rey, realizing she's played right into Snoke's hands, has this look written all over her face.
  • When the First Order starts shooting down the transports they shouldn't have detected at all, Holdo's cool behavior turns into horror and is practically in tears while frantically ordering the plan to continue. When she realizes that the massacre isn't going to stop, she steers the Raddus around, turning the Oh, Crap! on the First Order instead; Hux, meanwhile, is gleefully shooting down the Resistance's unarmed, unshielded transports one after the other with his customary smug sadism, until he notices Holdo's cruiser turning around and firing up its hyperdrive towards the Supremacy. The look on his face is priceless.
    Peavey: ... No!
    Hux: [screaming hysterically] FIRE ON THAT CRUISER!
  • Kylo Ren loses it when his attempt to kill Luke Skywalker with More Dakka falls completely flat, forcing him to face his old teacher himself. He later gets another when he realizes Luke is merely a projection.
• Old Master: Luke has to rediscover hope thanks to Rey badgering him. Yoda plays the trope straight for Luke.
• Old Soldier: Luke is older, and he's very bitter and cynical due not only to his failures but that his failures are just part of the legacy of the failures of the Jedi Order.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Luke (older hero) and Kylo Ren (younger villain), where the former is the latter's uncle.
• Once per Episode:
  • Poe and BB-8 get their X-wing blown up again.
  • As usual, new Force powers are introduced. Force Bond and Astral Projection.
  • Someone gets a limb cut off and/or has their body bisected by a Lightsaber. In this case, Snoke experiences both at once.
  • The Millennium Falcon shows up at a crucial moment to save the day.
  • BB-8 gets to deliver the obligatory "I've got a bad feeling about this." The only indication given to the audience is Leia agreeing with the droid and Poe responding with "Happy beeps."
• One Hit Poly Kill:
  • The Millennium Falcon makes its entrance on Crait blasting three TIE fighters at once with one shot.
  • During the attack run on the Dreadnought, most of Cobalt and Crimson Squadron's bombers are wiped out in a chain reaction when a burning TIE Fighter crashes into one of them after they armed their bombs.
  • The Raddus takes out an entire fleet of First Order Star Destroyers when Admiral Holdo rams the Supremacy. The debris from the Mega Star Destroyer spreads out at a large fraction of light speed, shredding the accompanying ships in a single moment.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Luke Skywalker's first action in the movie after taking the lightsaber? Tossing it off the cliff and coldly ignoring Rey's protests. A clear sign that something is not right with our hero.
• "Open!" Says Me: Luke initially refuses to train Rey and shuts her out of his hut. He relents when Chewie breaks the door down.
• Orbital Bombardment: The Dreadnought's first action is to fire two massive cannons at the Rebel base, obliterating it from orbit. Fortunately, it's already been evacuated.
• Out-Gambitted: The First Order think Holdo is just trying to distract them. They regret it.
• Out of the Inferno: Captain Phasma and her Stormtroopers are shown walking out of the flames after the Supremacy is rammed by Raddus.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: To reach the Supremacy's hyperspace tracker, Finn, Rose, and DJ wear First Order uniforms and disguise BB-8 by upending a cubical garbage bin and putting it over him. He rolls through the halls, making mouse droid noises and bumping into objects. The humans look believable in their disguises, but as soon as a patrolling BB-9E unit spots the zigzagging trash can, it alerts the First Order.
• Passing the Torch: The theme of a new generation of heroes taking the reins from the prior generation continues. Luke is inspired to overcome his cynicism by Rey's ideals and Poe learns patience from Leia. Meanwhile, Rey and Ren destroy Anakin's lightsaber during a Force duel. Not only that, a nameless slave?-boy uses the Force to pull a broom into his hand at the end of the movie while wearing a ring with the emblem of the Rebellion.
• The Paralyzer: To counter Poe's mutiny, Holdo and her troops use blasters set on stun, thus firing blue circles instead of the usual red trails. It's something that wasn't seen in the series since Leia being stunned by Stormtroopers at the beginning of A New Hope. General Leia shoots Poe himself this way, stunning him and throwing him against a wall.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: When their capture on Cantonica seems imminent, Finn remarks to Rose that it was Worth It to let the fathiers stampede through Canto Bight because it made the rich war profiteers hurt. Rose disagrees with this.
• People Puppets: Snoke telekinetically spins Hux's body all around his bridge when Snoke's not even in the same ship.
• Percussive Maintenance: A First Order officer assumes the monitor showing the status of Supremacy's shield is on the fritz, and taps his finger on the display to restore it to normal. In reality, this was caused by DJ lowering the shield in that area, allowing Finn, Rose, and himself to board Supremacy.
• Pet the Dog: By the First Order of all people. Despite being an organization that had never shown any redeeming policies and whose members routinely executed even people who were still useful to them, their commanders are here willing not only to allow a spy like DJ to go away in exchange for circumstantial information, but also to pay him a boatload of money as a bonus. Unless DJ was in the First Order's payroll all along and was just deceiving Finn and Rose, which the film doesn't imply and the expanded materials outright deny, it is surprising that they decided to strike and fulfill an expensive treat with a random rascal they had at their mercy, instead of just torturing him for the info and killing him afterwards.
• Plagued by Nightmares: In the novelization, Tallissan Lintra has nightmares about the deaths of her comrades, hearing their dying screams as she tries to protect the bombers.
• Playing Both Sides:
  • It turns out the Resistance and First Order buy fighters from the same arms dealer, who either had been successfully hiding this fact or both sides had been too desperate for weapons to care.
  • DJ does this, too. He's more than happy to help Rose and Finn in their ill-conceived hacking mission, but he doesn't think twice about turning right around and selling them out to the First Order after they're caught.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Rey trails off in the middle of a conversation when she sees Kylo Ren shirtless.
  Rey: Have— have you got a cowl or something— anything you can put on over that?
• Plot Armor:
  • Despite successive attacks by the First Order that pick off a lot of Resistance ships, Poe and Leia survive the film. So does Lieutenant Connix, who is played by Carrie Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd.
  • Played with when Luke survives several high-power point-blank attacks without a scratch so he can have a dramatic final battle with Kylo. Turns out he's only there psychically — but he becomes one with the Force afterwards.
• Plummet Perspective: When Rose and Finn reach the edge of a cliff while running from the authorities of Canto Bight, a few rocks are seen plummeting down.
• Point Defenseless:
  • The First Order's dreadnought has point defense guns, but they're all taken out by Poe in his X-wing so the Resistance bombers can attack. He needs to use a booster to fly at the speeds necessary to dodge the incoming fire.
  • The Resistance fleet's starships prove to be just as vulnerable to starfighter attack, with a flight of TIE fighters, led by Kylo Ren, able to get in close and begin blasting defensive emplacements before making a pass through an open hangar bay as well as destroying the bridge, causing the loss of everyone inside except Leia. Several of the TIEs do get splashed by defensive fire during their approach.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • If Admiral Holdo had only told Poe what her plan was, or that there actually was a plan, things would have gone a lot better. He takes matters into his own hands, supporting Finn and Rose's plan, because he wasn't sure she even had a plan. Someone with her level of experience in leading rebel fighters should have known that keeping people in the dark about such things is terrible for morale, and that low morale in a disorganized band of rebels is a recipe for desperate, rash, and even insubordinate behavior.
  • Speaking of, if Poe had gone to her for support on Finn and Rose's plan, she could have sent Resistance help and coordinated things so that their plans wouldn't horribly collide. Lack of trust on both ends ultimately creates needless, massive casualties for the Resistance.

• Post-Victory Collapse: Luke collapses after his Astral Projection has succeeded to buy the Resistance time.
• Power Dynamics Kink: The relationship between Poe Dameron and Amilyn Holdo was originally intended to have flirtatous subtext. Downplayed in the final version of the movie, but some subtle hints are still there (especially in the scene when she condescendingly calls him "flyboy").
• Practical Effects: Yoda's brief appearance as a Force Ghost uses an actual puppet instead of a CGI model to match how he looked in the Original Trilogy.
• Prank Call: Poe stalls for time as his ship's booster charges by calling Hux and pretending the comm channel isn't working. Throughout the exchange, he calls Hux "Hugs" and finally says he's relaying a message from Leia about Hux's mother.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Poe Dameron gets the honor of being the first person to saying the word "ass" in a Star Wars film, using the term "big-ass gun" to describe the First Order's miniaturized Death Star cannon.
  • The word "bastard" is used by Finn.
• Pre-Explosion Buildup: When Holdo destroys the Supremacy by ramming the Raddus into it, there's a moment of eerie silence before the sound of the explosion is heard.

• Pride: The reason Luke believes that the Jedi should end, as he explains to Rey, is that at the height of their power, their hubris in believing that only Jedi should use the Force and that if they die then the Light side dies made them complacent, allowing the Sith to rise and all but exterminate the Jedi Order. And indeed, Snoke is killed by Kylo Ren while boasting about how he could read his thoughts and knew his every intent. The rest of the First Order's overconfident forces similarly suffer massive losses while trying to run down three fleeing Resistance ships.
• Prized Possession Giveaway: Rose's last remnant of her dead sister is a Haysian ore medallion she wears. When she and Finn hire the shady hacker DJ, he demands her medallion seemingly as payment, and she grudgingly reneges. However, it turns out later he only needed it to disable a lock and he returns it as soon as he's done, subverting the trope.
• Prophecy Twist:
  • Both Snoke and Rey claim to have seen visions of Kylo Ren turning to their side completely. Both are right, in a sense. Rey is right that Ren will turn against Snoke, but it's only because Ren plans to usurp Snoke. He did embrace the darkness as Snoke thought he would, just not in the way Snoke expected.
  • A rapid-fire variant where the audience is aware of the twist, but the person making the declaration is not. Snoke correctly predicts that there is conflict in Kylo Ren's heart, and foresees that he is activating a lightsaber and making a decision. Snoke thinks he's raising his red one to kill Rey, when in fact Kylo Ren covertly uses the Force to activate the blue one next to Snoke to kill him instead.
• Protagonist Title: Luke is the titular last Jedi before passing on the title to Rey after his death.
  • It should be pointed out that, in languages with more inflection than English, the title is translated as a plural: The (multiple) Last Jedi.
• Psychic Link: Invoked by Snoke, who set up a link between Rey and Kylo Ren with the goal of bringing Rey to him. The recipients use it to communicate throughout the film, unaware of its origin or purpose.
• Psychic Strangle:
  • When Hux fails to intercept the Rebels at their base, Snoke calls in then tosses him about the bridge just to make sure everyone knows that he disapproves of failure.
  • Done more conventionally by Kylo Ren, again to Hux, when Hux questions his command after the recent death of Snoke. Hux falls in line.
• Pulling Themselves Together: After the blast into the fighter launch bay sends Poe and BB-8 flying, BB's head separates from his sphere body. The body quickly rolls over to his upside-down head, and magnetically draw back together.
• Pyrrhic Victory: A major theme of the film is that victory can sometimes be the most effective sacrifice if it keeps the fight alive, and we see cases of damaging wins, successful avoidance, and a properly meaningful sacrifice.
  • The opening attack on the Dreadnought, which Poe carries on past Leia's orders to pull out of the assault. It succeeds, but the Resistance loses all of its bombers and numerous ships, and it is all for nothing as the First Order makes easy work of them afterwards, though not as easily as they would have if they still had the dreadnought. As Poe whoops about the destruction of the massive ship, Leia only sees the ships going out on her command monitor and demotes him for his actions.
  • While Poe learns that keeping numbers can be more important than winning, Finn doesn't understand, attempting to sacrifice himself to destroy the First Order's battering-ram cannon. Fortunately, Rose, who has always understood (especially after her sister's loss in the opening battle), crashes into Finn's vehicle, saving him from a useless sacrifice that would have only hurt the Resistance.
  • By the end of the film, the First Order has shattered the core of the Resistance militarily and, with the collapse of the New Republic, has now become the dominant power in the galaxy. However, they did so by taking heavy losses (costing them a fleet of Star Destroyers, a Dreadnought, and a Mega Star Destroyer) in exchange for a single Resistance star cruiser and three escorts, and thanks to Luke's sacrifice, they failed to capture or kill General Organa, the remaining members of the Resistance are able to escape, and the Resistance's unnamed allies in the Outer Rim remain at large, from which they can rebuild their forces. In addition, the First Order is now under the leadership of the inexperienced Kylo Ren, who not only failed to completely wipe out the Resistance but was also humiliated by his uncle in front of his army, if not the galaxy. (Keep in mind: no one in the Resistance was present to watch Luke's "duel" with Kylo; the story spreading, as it is revealed to in the last scene, must have been spread by a member of the First Order.) As a result, he has neither their respect nor loyalty (both of which still firmly belong to General Hux) and may face internal strife regarding this down the line.
  • Holdo's sacrifice directly contrasts these, as she is one loss saving the lives of every surviving Resistance member. Because she is acting solely to preserve her endangered cause instead of to fight the enemy, her death is portrayed as a meaningful sacrifice that saved the Resistance.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Averted.
  • The first Jedi temple is being maintained by the Caretakers and it's clearly falling apart.
  • The structure of the abandoned Rebel base on Crait is still quite intact, but most of the equipment inside is obsolete and falling apart.
• Raised Hand of Survival: Luke in the flashback to the massacre of his Jedi temple, having woken up after Ben brought the ceiling of the hut down on him. His mechanical hand is seen pushing through the rubble.
• Ramming Always Works:
  • Well, when you ram something — anything — with a huge object at FTL speeds, you're bound to do some serious damage, as Snoke's gigantic flagship and most of the Star Destroyers can attest to once Vice-Admiral Holdo is finished with it.
  • This concept is later explored when Finn attempts a similar suicide strike against the First Order's battering ram cannon. Unlike Holdo's shielded cruiser, his skimmer was an old, obsolete deathtrap that was falling apart merely from the friction of flying, let alone the pressure inflicted by the cannon's focusing beam. It's made very clear that, if Rose hadn't rammed him out of the way with her own skimmer, he would have splattered pointlessly against the cannon like a bug on a windshield.
• "Rashomon"-Style: Kylo Ren's description of his fall differs a bit from the two times Luke tells it. First, Luke implies that he was empty-handed and simply entered the hut to confront Ben before the latter collapsed the structure around them. Next, Kylo tells Rey that Luke betrayed him by trying to murder him in his sleep, with the flashback showing Luke with eyes red with rage. When a furious Rey confronts Luke, he admits the true story: in a lapse of judgment, he considered killing Ben when he sensed the darkness in his student. He immediately regretted it, but it was too late — Ben saw Luke standing with an ignited lightsaber. His eyes weren't full of rage, but tears of regret.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: A lot of people criticized a scene where Leia is sucked out into the vacuum of space, uses the Force to pull herself back inside, and seems to suffer no lasting harm. NASA tests on rapid decompression to vacuum in the 1960s, however, had a 100% survival and full recovery for up to two minutes of exposure once the subjects were repressurized, and Leia was only out there for about one minute fifty seconds of screen time.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Leia gives one to Poe when she demotes him (along with a slap), berating him for the heavy losses he caused the Resistance to take down the Dreadnought and telling him to "get [his] head out of the cockpit".
  • Snoke berates Kylo Ren for losing to Rey in a lightsaber duel and for wearing a "ridiculous" helmet.
  • Luke later gives Kylo a pretty powerful one while astral projecting, tricking Kylo into coming down and attempting to physically fight him while the Resistance escape. It causes Kylo to have a minor Villainous Breakdown.
• Red Herring:
  • Rey's parents turn out to be nobodies. They were a couple of ne'er-do-well junkers who sold her for "drinking money" (in Kylo Ren's words) and presumably died on Jakku long ago. Kylo Ren tells Rey as much, and she acknowledges this as accurate.
  • Snoke ends up neither confirming nor Jossing a great many of the fan-theories about his identity. For this movie's purposes, he's just an extremely powerful Force user and Emperor-like figure who corrupted Kylo Ren, and Ren unceremoniously dispatches Snoke despite his immense power.
  • Within the film itself, a man wearing a red floral symbol on his lapel that Maz Kanata recommends as a master codebreaker is seen at one of the tables in Canto Bight, but the audience never finds out if it really was him or if he could have helped the heroes, since they hire DJ as a codebreaker instead.
  • The submerged X-wing. Anybody who figured out that Luke was going to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment on Crait would assume that he would arrive with it. But then it's shown he's merely projecting his image and is not on Crait at all, with the X-wing still presumably underwater.
• Red Is Violent: The dominant color of the film is red, to highlight its Darker and Edgier nature compared to The Force Awakens. On the last poster alone, we see trails of blood that extend vertically to become like geysers of blood. Kylo Ren's lightsaber, the red armor-clad Praetorian Guards, the throne room's background, the red dirt beneath the salt and the crystal caves on Crait are all red and they're the most visually striking elements of the movie.
• Reestablishing Character Moment: The Force Awakens ends with Rey finding the elderly Luke Skywalker and holding out his father's lightsaber. The Last Jedi shows what he does next: he tosses it over his shoulder, revealing that he's become disillusioned with the Jedi and has no interest in continuing the Order.
• Refusal of the Second Call: When Star Wars: The Force Awakens begins, Luke Skywalker is missing and one of the subplots revolves around trying to find him. He finally shows up in the last scene, where it is revealed that he has been living as a hermit on a secluded planet in a remote part of the galaxy. He spends most of The Last Jedi being chased around his island by Rey, whom he is actively trying to avoid mentoring.
• Remember the New Guy?: Holdo is both a prominent member of the Rebellion and Resistance and a lifetime friend of Leia's, but has somehow just never been mentioned before now, similar to Mon Mothma in the Original Trilogy.
• Retcon: The scar Kylo Ren now has was changed from what the wound he received from Rey would have given him, for purely aesthetic reasons.
• Retroactive Idiot Ball:
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan’s ghost tells Luke that he cannot interfere if Luke decides to confront Darth Vader. This film and the next one show Force ghosts interfering with the physical world, so Obi-Wan could have done a lot to help out Luke during his fight with Vader. Presumably, having become one with the Force, Obi-Wan now knows the true fight is to redeem Anakin, and knows that his history with Vader would hinder rather than help. Still, Luke ends up losing a hand.
  • One of the major sub-plots of The Force Awakens hinges on finding the map to Luke's location to get him back into the fight (the heroes) or to destroy him and prevent him from coming back or training anymore Jedi (the villians). This film establishes Luke came to this world to die forgotten about and has no interest in fighting to save the galaxy or even training anymore Jedi. So what exactly was the point of leaving a map to your location behind if you didn't want to be found, Luke?
• The Reveal: Rey and Kylo Ren's bond throughout the movie exists for a reason. It was made by Snoke for the purpose of leading the First Order to Luke Skywalker.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • There are quite a few clues that point to Luke not being physically present on Crait. For one, he ignites his blue lightsaber — the one Rey took with her, and was broken in her tug-of-war with Kylo. His beard and haircut are noticeably different, and in fact match the earlier flashbacks with Kylo, not the grey beard and longer hair he had on Ahch-To with Rey. He doesn't leave footprints. And he fights entirely by dodging; not once does he or his lightsaber ever make physical contact with Ren.
  • Luke manages to survive a near-literal No One Could Survive That! attack, without getting a scratch on him. Or, for that matter, any of the many shards of red crystal flying around. He even calls attention to it by sarcastically flicking his lapel clean. We saw something similar in Rogue One, but never with firepower of this magnitude, and we saw what looked like a direct hit earlier.
  • In the final scene, as the young boy heads out to sweep up, he doesn't pick up the broom from the wall; he opens his hand and it floats to him, indicating he is Force-sensitive.
  • When Poe says to BB-8 "Happy beeps, buddy! Happy beeps!" in the opening scene, it was in response to BB-8 saying (in droid beeps) "I've got a bad feeling about this" (according to Rian Johnson).
  • When they're in the elevator going to Snoke's throne room, Rey tells Kylo he won't bow to Snoke. She's right, but her assumptions about why he won't are incorrect.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: After Luke shows up on Crait to give the Resistance a chance to escape, Poe reasons that there must be a back way out of the base because the main door was sealed shut when Luke arrived. The group manages to find it by following a fleeing pack of Vulptices, but Luke didn't come in that way — he's not physically present at all.
• Robo Cam: The movie switches to the vision of First Order astromech droid BB-9E when he scans BB-8, Finn, Rose Tico and DJ as they infiltrate the Supremacy to shut its hyperspace tracker down.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • When Yoda burns the tree that allegedly contains the Jedi books, the flames take on the shape of the starbird, the symbol of the Rebel Alliance.
  • The final battle takes place on a plain made of red crystal, covered with a thin layer of white salt. By the time the engagement's over, it looks exactly like it's covered in blood.
  • The broken lightsaber. Anakin Skywalker's blue-bladed lightsaber was the first Star Wars Laser Sword depicted on-screen, and has appeared in most of the franchise's numbered episodes. Anakin wielded it when he rescued Chancellor Palpatine; Darth Vader used it to slaughter the Jedi padawans; it passed to his son Luke and was lost at Cloud City along with Luke's hand; and in the Star Wars Legends continuity as well as this one it has become the signature weapon of new central characters. This lightsaber has been present for the best and worst of the Jedi Order, the Sith, the Force, the EU, the movies — why, it's not too great an exaggeration to say that this lightsaber is Star Wars. And now it's been ripped in two, by two different people with two different opinions on what the future of the galaxy should be. If that's not symbolic, not just of the conflict between Rey and Kylo but also of the new directions the franchise is branching out into and fan objection to same, nothing is.
  • Rey and Kylo's final force-bond interaction ends with Rey turning around and closing the door of the Millennium Falcon, literally and metaphorically shutting the door on her relationship with Kylo.
• Rule of Three:
  • As noted under "Rashomon"-Style, Kylo Ren's fall is shown from differing perspectives. Notably, it's shown three times: the first comes from Luke and it has him simply gazing into Ben's mind before the latter collapses the room they're in, the second comes from Kylo and depicts Luke with a raw killing intent; the last version (which is assumed to be the truth) shows that Luke did draw his lightsaber as Kylo remarked but the killing intent quickly vanished, only for it to be too late to take back.
  • Luke promises to teach Rey no more than three basic Jedi lessons. Subverted, as she leaves Ahch-To before she (and the audience) can learn the third lesson. The third lesson ended up a deleted scene.
• Running Gag:
  • Someone makes fun of Jakku like in the previous film.
    Luke: Where are you from?
    Rey: Nowhere.
    Luke: No one is from nowhere.
    Rey: Jakku.
    Luke: All right, that is pretty much nowhere.
  • Finn is again mistaken for a big Resistance hero by a starry-eyed young woman. Admittedly by this time he is a member of the Resistance and he did heroically contribute to the destruction of Starkiller Base, but he is trying to leave the ship in an escape pod in the eyes of Rose (even though he only did so to try to get to Rey).
  • Finn once again tries to escape to a ship with a woman, only for the ship to blow up. He even lampshades it this time.
    Finn: Oh, come on!
  • Once again, C-3PO calculates dire odds, and once again, he is soundly disregarded.
  • The Millennium Falcon gets called a "piece of junk" once again.
    Kylo Ren: Blow that piece of junk OUT OF THE SKY!

Tropes S to Z

• Sacred Scripture: Luke keeps the Jedi's ancient texts in a sacred tree on Ahch-To. Yoda mocks their continued importance and calls down lightning to burn down the tree with the texts in it. He even dryly comments that they were hardly page-turners and notes that at the end of the day they're just a "pile of old books." It turns out, though, that Rey had already stolen the books and has them with her at the end of the movie. Luke also (rather defensively) admits he never actually read them when Yoda directly asks.
• Saved by the Platform Below: During his fight with Phasma, Finn is kicked down an abyss, presumably falling to his death. But the next scene reveals he landed on a moving platform which lifts him back up.
• Screaming Warrior: Rey in the throne room battle. She comes out with some downright visceral noises.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Rose spots Finn about to board an escape craft with a packed bag, she assumes he's about to abandon ship and tasers him. Before that, she mentions that she had to stun several deserters.
• Seal the Breach: When Poe's X-wing gets hit, knocking the weapons offline, BB-8 tries to bridge the circuit, only for another short to appear. After bridging multiple shorts, he gives up and jams his head into the circuit, fixing the short.
• Secret Message Wink: Before going out to confront Kylo, Luke gives a wink to C-3PO. As a droid, it's implied that 3PO can tell that Luke is not really there, but plays along.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In the past, Luke sensed that his nephew, Ben Solo, would turn to the Dark Side. He briefly considered killing Ben to prevent his turn, but even after he caught himself, it was already too late. Ben woke up to see his uncle looming over him, lightsaber in hand, and so Ben attacked to defend himself, solidifying his turn to the Dark Side and becoming Kylo Ren.
• Senseless Sacrifice: During the battle of Crait, the Resistance find out that none of their allies are coming to their aid, making the soldiers that died trying to buy them time meaningless.
• Sequel Escalation: Inverted. The film is much smaller in scope than The Force Awakens, and is more personal and character-driven rather than grandiose and epic.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The military effort of The Force Awakens is this. The goal of the Resistance was to spur the New Republic into recognizing the First Order for the threat that it was and to take action. We know how that went with the destruction of the Hosnian System and most of the New Republic's military, as they are now in such a sorry state that they are left to fend for themselves. The First Order are said to be unconcerned with their devastating losses at Starkiller Base and that they more or less think they've already won the war (hence why Snoke wasn't too concerned with losing Starkiller Base), with the Resistance and Luke Skywalker being loose ends to tie up before the Galaxy is theirs.
  • In the film, Finn and Rose are unsuccessful at disabling the tracking system and Poe's mutiny is ultimately quelled by Leia herself, who forces him to go along with Holdo's original plan of abandoning the Raddus. To make things worse, the codebreaker Finn and Ross recruited betrays them and gives the First Order advice that ruins the Resistance's escape plan. Worse still, Poe states that he would have gladly gone along with Holdo's plan if he had only known that there was one.
• Shipper on Deck: Rey ships Finn×Rose, judging by her small smile when she sees Finn hovering anxiously over Rose's bedside.
• Ship Sinking:
  • Poe and Finn. At first it's because Finn still seems interested in Rey (he said her name the second he woke up from his coma) but then he develops a connection with Rose, culminating in a kiss. After that, Finn hovers by her bedside while she recovers from her injury.
• Shock and Awe:
  • Snoke is able to use a brief burst of Force lightning to send Kylo Ren flying when Kylo gets angry at him.
  • Yoda nonchalantly calls down lightning to burn down the tree housing the ancient Jedi texts.
• Shoe Slap: While escaping from jail, DJ hits a couple of police officers with his boots, which he has slung over his shoulders.
• Shot/Reverse Shot: The film shows characters communicating with the Force by cutting between two characters in different locations and allowing the actor's expressions to change as the film cuts between them. The characters generally look straight into the camera simultaneously, letting the audience know they can see each other before they start their conversation.
• Shout-Out:
  • Vice-Admiral Holdo is an acting commanding officer whose crew mutinies against her, and who ends up ramming her ship into the enemy, similarly to Commodore Decker in Star Trek's "The Doomsday Machine".
  • Kylo Ren's tactic of destroying the launch bays so the Resistance fighters can't launch is similar to Baltar's own strategy in Battlestar Galactica's "The Living Legend". Poe and Holdo's animosity also echoes the conflict between Adama and Cain in the episodes.
  • The device the First Order uses to track down the Resistance ships even during hyperspace flight kind of looks like a gigantic flux capacitor.
    • In the audio commentary, Johnson has stated that Finn raising up with the elevator platform at the end of his fight with Phasma is meant to be a nod to Back to the Future Part II when Marty rises up on top of the DeLorean in front of Biff after seemingly falling to his death.
  • The busybody who directs the police to Finn and Rose is called Slowen Lo, a nod to the Beastie Boys song, "Slow and Low".
  • During Finn and Rose's escape from Canto Bight, there's a quiet scene where a lone cup of water on a table ripples from vibrations due to the fathiers rampaging.
  • The sight gag involving First Order uniforms getting ironed is a reference to Hardware Wars, a Star Wars parody film where starships and droids are all represented by household appliances.
  • At the end of the movie, the stableboy on Canto Bight casually Force-pulls a broom into his hand, like the Stalker's daughter does with a glass of water at the end of Stalker.
  • When Finn and Rose get thrown into jail on Canto Bight for parking illegally, the police claim that they've violated "Parking Law 27-B-stroke-6". In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, "27-B-stroke-6" was a government form that was frequently mentioned as a Running Gag.
  • This article runs down a host of Shout Outs to classic movies in The Last Jedi. Among them are the scene where Rey sees her reflections, which is a Shout Out to Citizen Kane, and a dolly shot across casino tables at Canto Bight, which is a Shout Out going all the way back to 1927 and the first film to win Best Picture, Wings.
  • Phasma's mask gets struck and cracked, leaving a hole from which one eye is revealed and peering out at her opponent, similar to a scene in RoboCop (1987).
• Showdown at High Noon: Subverted. Kylo Ren prepares to have the standard climactic saber fight with Luke that comes at the end of nearly every Star Wars movie, but instead he finds out that he is facing Luke's Astral Projection and that Luke is still light-years away.
• The Siege: The Stern Chase that serves as the movie's fundamental premise is treated like one. The First Order can't attack the Resistance directly, but they can prevent them from escaping, and eventually the Resistance will run out of supplies.
• Silence Is Golden: A few important scenes are left completely silent in order to emphasize the importance of the visuals.^note  Which is apparently confusing to some people, as AMC actually felt it necessary to post a sign at some theaters letting people know the silence is intentional, due to people complaining.
• Sink the Lifeboats: Once the First Order learns that the last members of the Resistance are escaping the Raddus in tiny, unshielded transport ships and are attempting to get to Crait, they don't hesitate to shoot these down.
• Sitting Duck: Kylo Ren flies through the hangar bay of the Raddus and destroys all remaining Resistance starfighters before any of them can launch.
• Smash the Symbol: After Snoke mocks Kylo Ren's helmet as him playing at being Darth Vader rather than being a proper successor, Ren smashes it in anger. Furthermore, it's a sign he wants to completely abandon the past and move ahead.
• Smoke Shield: In the climax, the First Order fires every one of their walkers' guns at Luke Skywalker for a few seconds. Hux even sarcastically quips "Do you think you got him?" But when the smoke clears, Luke is completely unscathed. Justified, as Luke is using Force Projection; he isn't actually there.
• Smoking Barrel Blowout: BB-8 does this, insofar as a mouthless ball droid can, after taking out several guards with his improvised coin gun.
• So Last Season: An all-knowing Force user who manipulated all the major events of the last few decades, you say? Supreme Leader Snoke is chopped in half by a lightsaber, while proclaiming his invincibility in grand Smug Snake fashion.
• So What Do We Do Now?: After much back-and-forth about their past and their feelings for one another, Kylo and Rey decide to join forces and destroy Snoke... but never consider what to do afterwards. This is ultimately what drives them apart — Kylo wants to embrace the dark side, take over the First Order, and rule alongside Rey, while Rey wants to bring Kylo back to the light and destroy the First Order.
• Space Friction: A large portion of the movie revolves around the Resistance's ships fuel concerns as they're fleeing the First Order through space. True enough, the moment a ship runs out of fuel it slows down and starts drifting for no discernible reason.^note While certainly done for the drama rather than accuracy, the chase is actually fairly realistic. Spacecraft must expend propellant (burn fuel) to accelerate. What is going on in the movie is more akin to an extended drag race rather than a classical fixed-speed pursuit. When the rebels' support ships run out of fuel they aren't actually stopping in space, they are simply no longer accelerating. From the frame of reference of the still-active ships, the craft appear to slow and fall behind. The last-second rotation can also be easily explained by the engines flaming out at different times from lack of fuel, such as the engines on one side having slightly longer fuel lines from the tanks, and the brief asymmetric thrust causing the craft to turn.
• Space Is Air: The bombers' deployment mechanism requires that gravity, in space, carry the bombs to their target. If there was Artificial Gravity or magnetism involved, neither was lampshaded.
• Space Is Noisy: Usually Played Straight, since this is Star Wars we're talking about, but Averted when Vice Admiral Holdo rams the Supremacy dreadnought with the Raddus by jumping to light speed. We are shown the awesome flash of light as the Supremacy is split into two pieces and several star destroyers are outright destroyed by the crash, but there is no sound, and it's breathtaking.
• Space Is an Ocean: The Fulminatrix is attacked from above, like an aircraft carrier would be by bomber jets, by dropping unguided bombs to its dorsal surface. The rebels completely ignore its defenseless ventral side, possibly because of the bombs somehow being affected by gravity in a way that's unrealistic for outer space, which is its own can of worms.
• Spark of the Rebellion: Frequently mentioned. And given how much the Resistance is suffering, Cassian/Jyn's words that "Rebellions are built on hope" couldn't be any more accurate.
• Spectacular Spinning: The huge blaster cannon on Crait features spinning elements.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • It's modeled on The Empire Strikes Back, and features elements like splitting up the main cast into multiple plot-lines. Introducing new characters who fit right in with the regulars (Lando/Rose Tico), albeit with Serial Escalation, instead of a single star destroyer chasing the Falcon, we have a mammoth one which is in fact a floating mobile castle hunting down the entire Rebel Fleet. The Jedi hero finds an eccentric mentor who has become a hermit with an entirely ragamuffin lifestyle (Yoda/Luke), and there's a detour to a neutral territory (Cloud City/Canto Bight). The villain tempts the hero with offers to rule together which they reject, and the hero loses the lightsaber.
  • In addition, it's one for Revenge of the Sith in that it shows the ascension of the overarching villain to complete control (Palpatine/Kylo Ren). It features multiple casualties among the Republic/Rebel Alliance, with them losing the bulk of their army, resources, and ending with them reduced to a single ship (Yoda, Obi-Wan, Bail Organa/Leia, Poe, Rey, Finn and the rest of the crew), and ends on a "Ray of Hope" Ending hinting that despite the failures of the older generation, the next generation will carry on.
• Spoiler Cover: The back of the North American Blu-ray box features a large image of Luke and Kylo Ren's showdown. Not only that, it spoils that Luke "de-ages" himself for the apparent battle. The 4K version isn't much better, in which the back shows the scene where Rey and Kylo Ren team up against Snoke and his Praetorian Guards.
• Squick: invoked Luke invokes this to try to make Rey stop following him during his morning route. He extracts milk from one of the large animals on his island; said creatures have four teats which look uncomfortably like human breasts (but placed low on the beast's body, like the udders of a cow). After an unpleasant look at how he milks them, Luke then takes a swig from the bottle, sloppily splashing the milk all over his face and beard.
• Standard Female Grab Area: Utilized when a praetorian guard loops their arm around Reys upper arm and pulls her down. Rey goes limp during this, even though that arm is holding her lightsaber and still in position to swing it back into the guards head.
• Static Stun Gun: Rose uses a taser-like weapon on any deserter that would try to leave with a capsule. That includes Finn when she gets suspicious about his intents. Even after waking up, he complains that he can't move his arms or legs, and at one point can't feel his teeth.
• Stealth in Space: Resistance transports and DJ's stolen ship have the ability to mask themselves from sensors. The latter is important, as it allows DJ to expose the Resistance transports when they attempt to covertly evacuate the Raddus.
• Stealth Pun: Probably inadvertent: Kylo Ren and General Hux are arguing about who gets to be Supreme Leader after Snoke's death. Kylo Ren makes Hux submit to him with a Force-Choke... in other words, an Appeal to Force.
• Stern Chase: A large portion of the film involves one. After the Resistance escapes D'Qar, the First Order tracks their ships through hyperspace, leading to a swift starfighter attack that ends up killing most of the Resistance's leadership and remaining starfighter corps. Afterwards, the Resistance ships decide to simply pull range and stay beyond the effective range of the First Order guns, though they eventually run out of fuel until only the Raddus is left.
• Stock Ness Monster: There's a glimpse of a sea monster in the background on Ahch-To as Rey stalks Luke.
• The Stool Pigeon: Slowen Lo snitches to the Canto Bight cops that Rose and Finn parked illegally on the beach, which gets them arrested before they can reach the master codebreaker.
• Story-Breaker Power:
  • Up until Holdo rammed the Supremacy at lightspeed, which is weaponizing infinite kinetic energy thanks to FTL acceleration, nobody in the movies has ever thought about such an overwhelmingly effective strategy. Sure, Holdo's maneuver was out of desperation, but the ensuing devastation on the First Order fleet speaks for itself, and could make space battles irrelevant by having suicide ships pull the same maneuver in other movies.
  • The reason Luke doesn't get involved with the plot until the end of the film, where even close to death Luke manages to make an astral projection of himself across the Galaxy and make a fool of Kylo Ren before becoming one with the Force.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: At the end of the first act, the First Order's starfighter attack on the fleeing Resistance ships kills off the Resistance's leadership (sans Leia), and Ackbar is among the casualties.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: During the climactic battle, the tense background music cuts out completely as Holdo rams her cruiser into the First Order Mile-Long Ship Supremacy at lightspeed, cutting it in half. This is a visually stunning moment that also buys the rebels critical time.
• Suicide Attack:
  • The Resistance bombers sacrifice themselves to destroy the First Order Dreadnought that was about to obliterate the Resistance's command ship.
  • Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo buys time to the Resistance remnants in spectacular fashion by turning her command ship's hyperdrive on... right in the face of the Supremacy, Supreme Leader Snoke's monstrous flagship, and ramming it at lightspeed. The resulting blast cuts said ship in half and destroys most of the surrounding First Order fleet.
• Surpassed the Teacher: Luke is ashamed of his failure with Ben and says that he can't be what he thinks Rey needs, which is the perfect teacher to set her on the right path. With some help, he realizes that his failures provide Rey something to surpass. Yoda points out no teacher can be perfect and that failure and weakness are essential learning experiences for a master to pass on. More importantly, however, it is the curse of a master to be surpassed — in effect, Yoda says that if the student does not surpass the master, the master wasn't very good at their job.
  Yoda: We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.
• Surprise Vehicle: The stolen ship emerges from below the cliff on Canto Bight to rescue Rose and Finn.
• Sword Limbo: Luke performs one under Kylo's lightsaber when they face off. While Luke is in no immediate danger, it allows the fight to continue, giving the Resistance more time.
• Symbolic Blood: The final battle of the film takes place on Crait, on a plain of red crystal covered by a thin layer of salt. After the engagement, the surface appears to be covered in blood due to the red gashes. When the First Order walkers fire on Luke, chunks of those same red crystals fly out of the explosion. For just a few seconds, it looks for all the world like Luke has been reduced to bloody chunks. Finally, when Kylo refuses Luke's wisdom and attacks, the camera cuts at the moment he strikes to the tracks his feet leave — blood red.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Poe Dameron. The Stern Chase arc is told from his point of view, wherein he disagrees with and eventually leads a mutiny against Admiral Holdo over what turns out to be plan to sacrifice the Resistance's capital ships to conceal transports carrying their personnel and whatever equipment they can fit aboard to a hiding place; she initially refused to even tell him there was a plan. However, if you analyze Holdo's actions from her perspective as acting commander, they all actually make perfect sense:
  • The Resistance's odds aren't good against the First Order fleet in a head-on attack, and she declines to send her troops on a Suicide Mission.
  • She doesn't know for certain how the First Order is tracking them, so she compartmentalizes sensitive information to the bare minimum number of people needed to carry out the plan for as long as possible.
  • She especially doesn't trust Poe in particular, because Leia relieved him as commander of the fighter wing for getting most of it killed attacking the Fulminatrix against a direct order, and then got mouthy and grabbed her arm while arguing with her.
• Tagline: "Darkness rises... and light to meet it." Also, Luke's line to Rey that "This is not going to go the way you think" has become a sort of unofficial tagline after being heavily featured in the trailers and viewed as a sort of meta-statement about the nature of the film.
• Take a Third Option: A major theme in the film. Luke suggests that the light side, dark side and the balance between them, are only a few choices among many. The Force, like the life it binds, has an endless multitude of forms.
• Taking You with Me: Having already decided to go down with the ship, Admiral Holdo rams the last Resistance ship into Snoke's ship at hyperspeed, throwing everything onboard into chaos and destroying both ships.
• Talking Is a Free Action:
  • While the Supremacy collapses around them, Kylo and Rey find time to discuss if they want to rule together or not.
  • Later on Crait, the First Order blows open the front gates of the cave but don't advance until Luke and Leia have finished their Big Damn Reunion.
• Tantrum Throwing:
  • Poe assumes Admiral Holdo's plan is to flee using the transports, which he believes to be cowardly and risky, and he kicks over a nearby chair and terminal in anger. It looks like she might be sympathetic to his frustration and explain the whole plan to him, but he turns around and starts shouting that she's not just a coward but a traitor, so instead she has him removed from the bridge.
  • Kylo Ren, self-professed successor to Darth Vader and master of the Knights of Ren, is also a master tantrum thrower. That includes throwing Hux against a wall with the Force at one point.
• Taught by Experience: One of the points Yoda makes to Luke is that masters are taught by failure, folly, and weakness more than they are by success.
• Tear-Apart Tug-of-War: Rey and Kylo Ren get into a Force-powered tug-of-war over the Skywalker lightsaber. It breaks in half.
• Temporary Substitute: Lando Calrissian was originally going to be the codebreaker that Finn and Rose meet and he would either screw up their quest by accident or betray them intentionally. It was decided that this would be disrespectful to the character.
• Tempting Fate: Snoke's boast "I cannot be betrayed, I cannot be beaten." comes back to bite him badly.
• The Only One: The hottest pilot has taken over the bridge of the last cruiser? Send in the only person he won't shoot on sight.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Kylo Ren orders every available gun to fire at Luke when he appears on Crait. Every assault walker opens up with its main cannon, with Hux looking disgusted by the excess, only for Ren to scream "More!" Hux finally halts the barrage with an angry; "That's enough... THAT'S ENOUGH!" And even that doesn't do it.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave:
  • Luke. The island on Ahch-To is occupied by creatures called Caretakers. Rian Johnson says they "tolerate" Luke's presence but aren't happy about it. (In the novel, it's because he does his own chores and doesn't bother them.) When Rey and Chewbacca arrive on the island, the former quickly becomes unpopular with the Caretakers due to accidental property damage, but they can't do much aside from angrily ranting at their misfortune.
  • Luke initially sees Rey as one, following him around the island and refusing to take "no" for an answer.
  • The Millennium Falcon is turned into a Porg nest overnight, and Chewbacca is understandably annoyed. He can't do much about it, though, even when they get in his way of piloting the ship.
• Third Act Stupidity: Snoke's impressive psychic powers surprisingly fail on him when the plot requires him to misinterpret Kylo's thoughts.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Canady when after he sees that his cannons are taken out, and now the Resistance bombers are approaching.
  Captain Canady: Of course they are.
• This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself: On Crait, when concentrating all firepower on Luke doesn't work, Kylo Ren goes outside to fight Luke himself.
• Three Lines, Some Waiting: The movie settles into a Closed Circle Race Against the Clock to sabotage the First Order's tracking systems so the Resistance fleet can escape. To accomplish this, Finn and Rose take a detour to a nearby planet to recruit The Cracker so they can get around their security, and Poe stays behind to convince the upper leadership to go along with this plan. Finn and Rose end up having a mini-adventure getting arrested and starting a stampede to escape, but while all this was happening Resistance ships are being shot down. Add to that how Rey and Luke's story is also divorced from the consequences of the main plot. The only thing keeping the story from Four Lines, All Waiting is that the core goal of escaping the First Order is established early on, so it's easy to keep up with what they are trying to accomplish even though they are doing nothing to further that goal in the moment.
• Title Drop: Twice, in the same conversation. When Kylo Ren finds Luke, he claims that he'll finally be able to kill the last Jedi. Luke then turns right around and says that he isn't the last Jedi anymore.
• Token Romance: The romance between Finn and Rose is superfluous to the overall plot; they could easily have kept the bond between them platonic without changing anything about their quest to find a codebreaker, nor is there much build-up to it (they only know each other a few days and Finn is more fixated on reuniting with Rey). The Rise of Skywalker retroactively makes it feel even more pointless given the subplot is dropped between movies.
• Tragic Keepsake: Aside from Leia's ring from Han which she had at the end of The Force Awakens, this movie introduces two: the pair of necklaces Rose shares with her sister, and the dice from the Millennium Falcon (which were first seen in A New Hope). The dice are especially meaningful as Luke takes them as a memento after visiting the Falcon, gives them to Leia in memory of Han, and then they are left behind in the ruined base and act as a painful reminder to Kylo. Although in the latter two cases they aren't really there, but merely part of Luke's Astral Projection. They also function as a nod to Solo, the next movie in production order after this one.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • The marketing campaign did a remarkable job of not spoiling the movie in the ad campaign... up until eight days out from the premiere, in which they revealed a shot of Rey using Kylo Ren's lightsaber. Though this turned out to be thoroughly removed from its proper context, there were a number of fans who said they wished they hadn't seen this before they caught the movie.
  • The final trailer has a scene where Leia is standing inside a bunker on a planet. In the movie, this scene happens when she and the rest of the Resistance are hiding on planet Crait after temporarily escaping the First Order pursuit near the end of the film, so when we see Leia blasted into space earlier in the movie, we know she's going to survive it somehow.
  • The home-release trailer revealed in February 2018 is spoils a lot of pivotal scenes like Snoke's throne room fight, Yoda's surprise appearance, Phasma seemingly falling to her death, and Kylo Ren's duel with Luke on Crait.
• Training Montage: Rey has one on Ahch-To with her testing her lightsaber skills and her Force powers while Luke watches from a distance.
• Trauma Button: Luke's PTSD is triggered when he sees Rey's power for himself and observes that it looks almost like that he saw when his nephew killed the other Jedi.
  Luke: I've seen this raw strength only once before, in Ben Solo. It didn't scare me enough then. It does now.
• Troll: Several characters get some decent troll moments in the film.
  • Poe acts as a messenger acting on Leia's behalf at the start of the film. Hux gives a grand speech about destroying the Resistance, but Poe acts like the comm channels were never opened and he never heard a word. This fools Hux and completely takes the wind out of his sails. This act lasts long enough for him to charge his booster and assault the Dreadnought, clearing the way for the bombers. As the cherry on top, Poe calls him "Hugs" throughout the conversation, finishing with a Your Mom joke at Hux's expense before beginning his attack run.
  • Luke messes with Rey continuously while she follows him around the island on Ahch-To trying to convince him to train her. When he agrees to give her some lessons starting at dawn the next day, he actually shows up at mid-morning. When Rey uses her hand to "reach out", Luke playfully tickles it with a blade of grass before slapping her wrist. Even later, Luke messes with Kylo Ren and the First Order by sending himself to Crait as an astral projection, goading them into wasting precious time and resources to take him down while the Resistance escapes. And he gets in even more mockery in his "fight" with Ren before vanishing completely.
  • Yoda is back in top troll form when he visits Luke after Rey's departure. He sets the original Jedi temple on fire with a burst of lightning after Luke hesitates to torch it, then mocks him for thinking the Jedi texts were sacred when they were just dry philosophical notes, and whacks him in the head with his walking stick for still failing to keep his mind on the present. He also doesn't mention that Rey already stole the texts, meaning that Luke was all riled up over nothing.
  • Luke ends the film with a badass awesome troll of the entire First Order. He comforts Leia, then casually strolls out the destroyed front door of the abandoned base, only to casually shrug off the combined firepower of every bit of the First Order's attack force. Then he mocks Kylo, dodges the boy's every attack, and then reveals he was never there, it was only an illusion, and disappear.
  Luke: Amazing. Every word of that sentence was wrong.
• Try and Follow: In the opening attack, Poe is pursued by TIE fighters. In order to lose them he steers his fighter through a narrow passage which a following fighter shatters on.
• Uncanny Valley: This case is most definitely invoked because it worked out so well in the film's favor and foreshadowed the plot twist as well. Luke's younger, black bearded face looked particularly unsettling. This served to highlight the Unreliable Narrator nature of the flashback to Luke and Ben's fallout: Ben saw Luke as a monster when Luke showed only fear. The second time it is used to foreshadow the twist that Luke used Force Vision to fight Kylo.
• Uncertain Doom: DJ is not seen after betraying the Resistance. It isn't made clear whether or not he departed the Supremacy before the Resistance's command ship tore through it at lightspeed, or if survived and managed to escape afterward if he was still aboard, or was killed.
• Unexplained Recovery: The film never really explains how the First Order recovered so quickly, as in the previous film they have their main base destroyed and seem to be almost beaten, yet in this film (which takes place at most only days later) they seem to have some new toys (such as the Fulminatrix and Supremacy) and are implied to have destroyed what was left of the resistance except for one ship.
• Unfriendly Fire:
  • Kylo Ren gives himself a Klingon Promotion by murdering Snoke, then blames the murder (and the subsequent murder of all his guards) on the rebel Rey.
  • This trope also appears to be what Hux intends when he finds Kylo Ren unconscious after the battle. However, Kylo comes to before he can make his move, so he quietly slips his gun back in its holster.
• The Unreveal: We never find out what Luke had in mind for Rey's third lesson. She left Ahch-To to try to bring Ben Solo back to the light side before Luke could complete her training. It apparently showed up as a cut scene, part of which appeared in the trailer.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Rose's spoken plan of finding the tracking device fails, while Holdo's unspoken plan of escaping to Crait works... until she explains the plan, and soon after the First Order learns of it, too.
• Use Your Head: BB-8 is trying to repair the weapons on Poe's X-wing, but each time he bridges a circuit, another overloads. Finally, he loses his patience and headbutts the panel, getting the weapons back online and giving himself a nice shock.
• Vertigo Effect: Used when Finn and Rose are at the edge of a cliff near Canto Bight.
• Villainous Crush: While still somewhat ambiguous, Kylo's feelings for Rey are heavily implied to be romantic in nature.
• Villain Respect: While Snoke may have feared Luke for his power, Rey's determination and courage made her the only Jedi that he admired and respected.
• Visual Innuendo: When C-3PO remarks to Maz that the master slicer sounds like a guy who can do anything, Maz lasciviously says, "Oh, yes... He can..." while she strokes a blaster.
• War for Fun and Profit: The wealth of Canto Bight's casinos comes from weapons merchants, and DJ reveals in one scene that weapons are being sold to both the First Order and the Resistance.
• War Is Hell: The Resistance is able to destroy the First Order dreadnought Fulminatrix, but only at the cost of most of their fighters and all of their bombers, with Paige Tico, the last remaining crew member on the last bomber, effectively lighting her own funeral pyre when she releases her ship's payload on the dreadnought. Rather than play a victorious march, the soundtrack instead settles on a funeral dirge as the dreadnought is blown to pieces while Poe watches in horror. Most of the rest of the film follows the Stern Chase as the Resistance Fleet, reduced to a handful of starships, tries to flee the pursing First Order, and by the end of the film, the two fleets have been destroyed, save for the Mega Star Destroyer Supremacy, which is still left broken and in flames. The Resistance is left with few enough people that they can all escape aboard the Millennium Falcon.
• Watching Troy Burn: Luke in a flashback, helplessly watching on as his Jedi Temple is burning down.
• Wave-Motion Gun:
  • The First Order Dreadnought is defined by the two massive orbital autocannons on its underside, capable of punching through planetary shields (creating large surface explosions in the process) and decimating entire fleets with ease. The latter scenario fortunately doesn't happen as the Dreadnought is destroyed right before it can open fire on the Resistance fleet.
  • On Crait, the First Order deploys a siege cannon that's a tad bigger the escorting AT-M6, capable of firing a superlaser that can only be described as miniaturized Death Star tech and compared to as a Battering Ram to break open the Resistance base's front gate.
• A Way Out of a Cave-In: Holed up in a cave surrounded by the army forces of the First Order, the Resistance seems to be cornered. Then they see the Vulptex herd fleeing towards the back of the cave, so they follow them and find another exit. Played With in that Poe first suspects that there's another exit after Luke walks in, not yet realizing that he's not actually there, being an Astral Projection from Atch-To.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • Poe and Admiral Holdo don't get along despite being on the same side. He disagrees with her on the Resistance's next course of action, thinking her plan makes them sitting ducks.
  • Hux and Kylo Ren still can't stand each other.
• We Can Rule Together: As is proving remarkably common for this franchise, Kylo Ren makes this offer verbatim to Rey after killing Snoke, in much the same way as his grandfather did with Luke. Except that while Vader wanted to rule with Luke as father and son, Kylo wants to rule with Rey as husband and wife, again, much like his grandfather did with his grandmother. Rey refuses the offer just like Luke did, and just like Padmé, she tearfully pleads with him to reconsider the path he is taking.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Paige Tico makes a Heroic Sacrifice in the opening battle. We find out shortly afterward that she was Rose's sister.
  • Tallie Lintra, the A-Wing pilot leading the fighters during the bomber attack on the Dreadnought, seems like she will be an important character. She dies when Kylo Ren launches missiles into the Resistance Cruiser's fighter bay.
• Wham Line: "They were nobody." Rey finally admits to herself (and the audience) that her parents were nobodies instead of important people.
• What If?: The novelization starts off with depicting an alternative storyline where the aged Luke dreams of what would've happened if he hadn't followed Obi-Wan on that "damnfool idealistic crusade". In this version of events, he stays on Tatooine and marries Camie, and they take over the moisture farm after Owen and Beru die. He becomes so good at it that the boy formerly known derisively as "Wormie" is now "Lucky Luke". On the downside, Princess Leia is executed for treason, Darth Vader never had his Heel–Face Turn, Mon Cala and Chandrila are obliterated along with Alderaan, and The Empire still rules the galaxy.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Poe gives one to Holdo after he finds that her plan is to use unarmed and unshielded transports to escape the First Order, even going as far as to call her a "coward" and a "traitor".
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • Kylo Ren hesitates to shoot at the ship carrying Leia, giving off the impression that while he may have killed his father, he may not be as willing to kill his mother this time.
  • It's revealed that Luke went through one of these during Ben's training — fearing how far the Dark Side has corrupted him, and failing for only a moment by igniting his lightsaber, is what started Ben's turn to Kylo Ren.
    Luke Skywalker: I saw darkness. I sensed it building in him. I'd seen it in moments during his training. But then I looked inside, and it was beyond what I ever imagined. Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction, pain, death and the end of everything I loved because of what he would become, and for the briefest moment of pure instinct I thought I could stop it. It passed like a fleeting shadow, and I was left with shame... and consequence.
  • Hux is on the brink of drawing his blaster to kill Kylo before the latter awakens and uses the force to declare himself Supreme Leader.
• Whip Sword: One of the many Praetorian Guards carries a weapon like this. He even manages to lock blades with his foe and reel them in with his weapon.
• White and Red and Eerie All Over: In keeping with the film's Darker and Edgier themes, Red Is Violent contrasts with white during the Battle of Crait. The Resistance's Darkest Hour is only highlighted by the eerie, desolate landscape, where their speeders unearth the red dirt underneath the white salt.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Zigzagged.
  • Averted when Luke walks out to confront Kylo Ren and his army single-handed, the latter orders every gun they have to be fired at Luke. When that doesn't work, only then does he realise This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself.
  • On the flip-side, Phasma could have been done with Finn and Rose if she had just had them shot. Instead, she tried for an elaborate execution because she felt shooting would have been too good for them and wanted them to feel some pain. Doubles as Bond Villain Stupidity.

• Women Are Wiser: Though understated, this trope defines a number of character arcs.
  • Poe is focused on blowing up whatever's in front of him — which, to be sure, he is good at — but both Leia and Holdo want him to think about more than just winning whatever fight happens to be in front of him.
  • Subverted somewhat by Holdo refusing to act as a leader for many of the surviving Resistance members, leading to a mutiny.
  • Finn starts out focused solely on saving Rey, but learns from Rose to care about something bigger than himself. She also stops him when he is about to make what she believes to be a Senseless Sacrifice.
  • D.J. betrays Finn and Rose late in their mission while Maz Kanata offered indirect assistance before they set off.
  • Kylo Ren fully commits to evil and offers Rey the chance to co-lead The First Order — which she rejects. Rey needed his help to survive her confrontation with Snoke, but ended up saving him during their battle with the Praetorian Guard.
  • Luke has given up on ever being The Paragon, (understandably) frustrated that just one moment of weakness on his part became Ben's Start of Darkness — and, by extension, doomed the galaxy to yet more war and destruction. Rey gets him to see that he can still do good in the world.
    • Reversed by the movie's end. At first Luke is in despair and loses his fight with Rey, while Leia continues to fight the good fight and survives Kylo Ren's assault on her ship. By the time they're reunited, Leia's given up and Luke's arrived to save the day.
• World's Strongest Man: Luke Skywalker has become this, when Kylo Ren orders the First Order's entire AT-AT attack force to fire on him for upwards of thirty seconds and all that happens is him getting a little dusty. It's subverted when it turns out he's not really there, then double subverted when it turns out he's been astral projecting himself from across the entire galaxy.
• Worth It: After Finn and Rose's mission to find a master code-breaker on Canto Bight goes badly south, they are locked up and then escape on creatures called Fathiers, leading the local law enforcement on a mad-cap chase and wrecking much of Canto Bight and its casinos in the process. They end up at the edge of the cliff, seemingly having failed, but Finn says it was worth it to wreck this city, which owes its wealth to the First Order's war-profiteering. Then Rose un-saddles the fathier, setting it free, and says that now it's worth it.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Captain Canady of the First Order Dreadnought Fulminatrix seems to regard the crew of Paige Tico's (Rose's sister) bomber as such; rather than terror or rage, his expression was one of silent respect and admiration for the courage of the bomber that obliterates his ship through their sacrifice.
  • Snoke was positively delighted with admiration when Rey not once but twice draws a sword (first Anakin's, then Kylo's) to defy him, complimenting her courage with sincere respect before ordering Kylo to execute her.
    Snoke: Ooh. And still that fiery spit of hope. You have the spirit of a true Jedi! And because of that... you must die.
• Wrecked Weapon: Thanks to some Force tug-of-war, Anakin's lightsaber is ripped in half. Rey keeps the pieces, though, suggesting she'll reforge it.
• Wretched Hive: Double Subverted with Canto Bight. Rose hypes it up as home to some of the worst people in the galaxy to Finn, but when they arrive, it's shown to be glitzy and glamorous, with the latter falling in love with it. However, it's soon revealed to him and the audience that it's just home to a different type of scum and villainy.
• Wuxia: The finale, wherein Luke's Spiritual Enlightenment utterly demolishes the comparatively shallow physical mastery of Kylo Ren, is a classic indication of true Grand Mastery as a warrior in Wuxia fiction.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Both Rey and Kylo Ren do this toward each other. Rey towards Kylo Ren, because she feels he is capable of redemption, she pleads with him to abandon the First Order and his lust for power. Ren returns this to Rey, as he feels she can be powerful if she becomes independent of her past and her idols.
• You Are Not Alone: This logic is how Rey and Kylo Ren begin their kinship through their Force Bond, by taking solace in each other's presence.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: After Rey's departure, a freshly embittered Luke sets out to destroy the sacred founding texts of the Jedi and finally put the failed order out of its misery. As he approaches the tree-shrine they're stored in, Yoda's ghost appears, and Luke expects his old teacher to try to talk him out of it... only for Yoda to casually destroy the texts himself. He then laughingly tells Luke that the Jedi creed had long outgrown a few boring old scrolls on philosophy, and in any case copies of them were common.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Maz Kanata asserts that Finn et al. do not want to hear about the union dispute she's participating in offscreen. It involves gunfire so she's probably right.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Poe, twice:
  • When The First Order tracks them through Hyperspace and keeps up with them.
  • The remnants of the Resistance drive out antiquated speeders in an attempt to destroy the First Order's cannon before it can break down the Rebel base's door. Poe reacts with angry disbelief when a panel underneath his foot falls away.
    Poe: What the hell?
  • This is also Finn's reaction when his and Rose's transport is destroyed on the beach before they can reach it.
• You Rebel Scum!:
  • Played straight by Hux in the opening, when he dismisses the Resistance as criminals and pirates.
    Hux: This is General Hux of the First Order. The Republic is no more. Your fleet are Rebel scum and war criminals.
  • Later, Finn proudly appropriates Phasma's insult and calls himself "Rebel scum."
    Phasma: You were always scum.
    Finn: Rebel scum.
• Your Mom: Poe tells Hux that he's trying to relay an urgent message about his mother (as a stalling tactic).
• Zen Slap:
  • During Rey's first lesson, Luke tickles her with a leaf (pranking her that it's the Force), then slaps her with it when she doesn't catch the ruse.
  • Later he's on the receiving end when the ghost of his old mentor, Yoda, strikes Luke with his cane.

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"The Rebellion is reborn today. The war is just beginning. And I will not be the last Jedi."

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