Thursday Afternoon, in a random corner of the internet…
It was a period of great anticipation. In the midst of my countdown to the Star Wars premiere, my friend Kelli contacted me with a problem that I was uniquely suited to assist with: she had the once in a lifetime opportunity to attend a private screening of The Last Jedi, which was obviously too awesome to pass up, but kinda hadn’t really had much prior Star Wars experience. I determined the level of knowledge I was dealing with, flexed my typing fingers, and tried to unload a galaxy’s worth of knowledge on her in as short a time as possible.
Assuming that there are probably more people out there who need a primer before they get dragged to a space opera by a significant other, a friend who needs a movie-going buddy, or similar, I present to you my Episode VIII survival guide. After reading this, you hopefully won’t be sitting through the movie entirely clueless. So here: Star Wars, in 10 minutes or less.
May the Force be with you…
What you need to know, generally:
The Force is space magic.
The Jedi are space wizards.
The Sith are evil space wizards.
The Republic/Rebellion/Resistance are the good guys.
The Empire/First Order are the bad guys.
What you need to know from Episodes I, II, and III:
The Empire (bad guys) take control of the Republic (good guys), slaughtering nearly all the Jedi in the process.
Other than that, there’s really nothing else you need to know about these episodes, and frankly, it’s generally best that we never speak of them.
Episode IV: Where most of us start to actually care:
The Empire builds a planet-killing space station called the Death Star, but the building plans are stolen by a scrappy and well-organized bunch of rebels. Rebel spy Princess Leia (the chick with the hair buns) hides the plans in a droid (space robot) named R2D2 and jettisons him over a desert planet, with instructions to find and get help from one of the last living Jedi (space wizards), a guy named Obi-Wan. Leia promptly gets captured, and the Empire blows up her home planet for good measure.
R2D2 (the space robot, remember) gets picked up by junkers and sold to a very nice farmer couple who are raising their orphan nephew, Luke. R2 manages to drag Luke on his quest to find Obi-Wan the Space Wizard, and they find him. Obi-Wan tells Luke that Luke’s dead father was actually a Jedi too, who was killed by Darth Vader (an evil space wizard). He gives Luke his dad’s old lightsaber (laser sword) and asks him to come with to return the Death Star plans to the princess. When they discover that, in the intervening time, The Empire showed up and fried what was left of Luke’s family, Luke decides that, screw it, why not?
They hire a scruffy guy named Han (Harrison Ford) and his sidekick Chewbacca (the tall furry guy) to take them to the princess’s home planet, where they find it blown to bits, and their ship is immediately sucked into the Death Star (planet-killing space station, remember).
Obi-Wan (the space wizard) sneaks onto the space station to sabotage it so they can all escape, but Luke and Han (Harrison Ford, remember?) discover that Princess Leia is onboard too (she’s the chick with the hair buns, if you recall) and they go to rescue her. …Well, Leia pretty much rescues herself, really. Obi-Wan the Space Wizard does his job to prepare for their escape, but Darth Vader (the bad guy space wizard) shows up for a fight, killing Obi-Wan. The rest of the good guys escape in their ship, but they’re followed by the Death Star. Fortunately, they find a structural flaw when examining the smuggled plans (remember those?) and Luke manages to blow up the Death Star just before it blows up the rebel base, along with the planet it’s sitting on. There was much rejoicing.
Episode V: Now that you hopefully kinda know who everyone is:
It’s been a couple years. The Empire (bad guys, to refresh your memory) chase the Rebels (good guys) out of yet another secret base, and they’re evacuating and fleeing into space. Instead of going with everyone else, though, Luke (the orphaned former farmboy) sees the ghost of Obi-Wan the Space Wizard, telling him that he needs to go find another Space Wizarding teacher, the Jedi Master Yoda, instead of, you know, just kind of trying to figure out this Force stuff for himself. Luke goes to Yoda’s planet, but predictably sinks his spaceship in a bog, and this shriveled little green creature starts heckling him while he’s stranded. It turns out, that shriveled little green guy IS Jedi Master Yoda. He makes Luke do lots of meditating and levitating and space calisthenics, and sends him into a cave to have the galactic equivalent of a really bad acid trip, all in the name of Jedi-ing.
Meanwhile, Leia (the hair bun chick) had to evacuate the base with Han (Harrison Ford, if you’ll recall) in his spaceship, which winds up getting seriously damaged in the process. Luckily for them, Han knows a guy: his old buddy Lando is governor of a nearby planet, so after a quick make-out session, they head there for repairs.
Lando’s not a great friend. Not only does he hit on Han’s girl, he cuts a deal with the Empire in exchange for protection, and turns Han and Leia over to Darth Vader himself. Vader turns Han into statuary and sells him to a giant slug crimelord.
Luke’s space magic tells him that his friends are in trouble, so AGAINST EVERYONE’S BETTER JUDGEMENT BUT HIS OWN, he cuts his training short and goes to try and help them. While Lando (Han’s treacherous buddy) redeems himself by helping Leia escape, Luke winds up facing off against Darth Vader himself, who reveals that he didn’t kill Luke’s father…he IS Luke’s father.
Yeah, I know, Luke’s mind was blown too, but that meant he basically got his ass handed to him by Vader (speaking of hands, Luke lost one). Right before he was about to lose so badly that he literally falls off the planet, he reaches out to Leia with his space magic and she’s able to rescue him in Han’s ship.
Luke pats Leia comfortingly on the shoulder with his brand new replacement robot hand as they stare out into the vastness of space, and…
The movie ends.
Episode VI: This stuff happened too:
Despite the fact that they’re fighting a war of insurmountable odds against an enemy with seemingly unlimited resources, Luke (space wizard in training), Leia (the hair bun chick, again) and Lando (worst. friend. ever.) decide that priority one is getting Han (Harrison Ford) back from the space slug crime lord, who is currently using him as wall decor. Once they do that, Luke heads back to Yoda (shriveled green space wizard), because, naturally, he has a few questions. Yoda and the ghost of space wizard Obi-Wan confirm that, yes, Darth Vader (the big bad guy) is in fact Luke’s father, and–surprise!–Luke has a sister too. Guess who it is.
It’s Leia. His sister is Leia. You should have guessed that. Your choices are kinda limited.
Anyway, the Empire (bad guys) have built ANOTHER Death Star, and while it’s under construction, they’re protecting it with some kind of invisible shield that probably flies in the face of known science and is being projected around it from a nearby forested moon. While everybody else goes down to the moon to destroy the shield–which they do, with the help of the tiny, cute, furry natives–Luke realizes that Vader (his evil dad) is onboard the Death Star, and goes to confront him.
While a space battle rages around the Death Star, Vader takes Luke to the Emperor himself. The Emperor thinks he can get Luke to join the forces of evil, but when it becomes clear that that’s not happening, he starts frying Luke with lightning. And it’s said Vader’s heart grew three sizes that day, and he picked up the evil Emperor and threw him bodily into space, redeeming himself and proving that there was still good in him after all.
…Unfortunately, he gets lightning-fried in the process, and father and son get to share a touching moment before Vader dies.
Luke escapes, the Death Star gets blown up (again) and there is much rejoicing.
Episode VII: Getting to where we are now:
So, at this point, it’s been a couple decades. Han (Harrison Ford’s character) and Leia (princess formerly with the hair buns) got together, had a kid, split up. Luke started a jedi training school, and Han and Leia’s kid went there, but he went evil and killed everybody and changed his name to Kylo Ren, and now he’s with the bad guys. Luke was so upset about his failure that he went into hiding and had been missing for decades-ish.
Luke made a map so that people could find him when they needed him, and at the beginning of the movie Poe (a good guy fighter pilot) and his droid (again, space robot) BB8 (the little round orange one) are going to retrieve it and bring it to the rebels (they call themselves the Resistance now, but they’re still the good guys), but Poe gets captured by the First Order (bad guys, by another name) and BB8 takes the map away to safety and kind of gets adopted by Rey, an orphan girl that lives in the desert.
Finn is a stormtrooper (bad guy meat shield) that starts having second thoughts about his job. He helps Poe escape the bad guys, but they crash on Rey’s planet and Poe is nowhere to be found in the wreckage when Finn recovers. Finn runs into Rey (desert orphan girl, remember) and BB8, and they escape the planet (and the bad guys) in Han’s old ship, which just happens to be sitting in a junkyard.
Han (Harrison Ford, much older and grouchier now) and Chewbacca (the tall furry guy) have been tracking their old ship, and show up to reclaim it. They offer to take Finn (the ex-bad guy), Rey (desert orphan girl) and BB8 to the rebels to give them their map. But first, they stop at a cantina. It turns out, Luke’s old lightsaber (laser sword) is there, so now they have that too. While they’re there, the bad guys and Kylo Ren attack, and kidnap Rey because they think they can extricate the map from her brain. Poe–he’s alive!–flies in with his fighter pilots and saves the day–too late for Rey–and takes Finn, Han and Chewie to the Resistance (good guys, as you’ll recall) where Leia, our princess of ever-awesome hair, is now a general.
Turns out, the bad guys turned an entire planet into an even BIGGER death star called Starkiller Base. They fry a couple planets with it. Everyone freaks out. The Resistance launches an emergency mission to destroy Starkiller Base before it hits them too. Finn (ex-bad guy) volunteers because he was super into Desert Orphan Rey and wants to go rescue her. Han goes too, because Leia asks him to talk their son out of his bad guy phase.
Kylo Ren (the aforementioned son) is interrogating Rey, and she realizes that she can fight back against him–she’s a space wizard too! She uses her powers to escape custody just in time to run into Finn and Han. Han tries to talk Kylo Ren back over to the good side. Kylo straight up kills him. Rey is sad because she liked grouchy old Harrison Ford. She and Finn the Ex-Bad Guy fight off Kylo Ren and escape starkiller base, but Finn is badly wounded. Rey manages to give Kylo a nice scar, though. Kylo escapes too, just before the Resistance blows up Starkiller Base.
At the end of the movie, Finn is still unconscious, and Rey leaves the rebels in Han’s old ship, and follows the map to the island-filled planet where Luke (remember him?) has been hiding. Luke is standing by himself on a cliff. Rey walks up to him. They lock eyes. She holds out his lightsaber, offering it to him, and…
The movie ends.
So there–assuming you caught all that, you should at least know enough about Star Wars now that you don’t look like a hopeless dork when you are inevitably forced to watch The Last Jedi.
..Or maybe I have a warped perception of what makes someone a dork.
Laura Writes 