The Last Jedi Teaser Trailer Breakdown

What's up Star Wars Fans, My Name is Prince, and I am an Urban Acolyte. I know we're all waiting for the new trailer to be released very soon, and I apologize if you thought that I was going to be talking about that trailer--sorry, I accidentally predicted the title for Episode 8, The Last Jedi, in a tweet to Mark Hamill this time a year ago--but the Force isn't strong enough with me to know what's gonna be in tonight's trailer. What I AM going to do in this video is take a look back at the teaser that we saw back in April during Star Wars Celebration Orlando. I want to look back at those images, based on what we think we know, at this point, and give me thoughts. Before I get to my teaser trailer breakdown, I just want to say that if you're new here, I talk about Star Wars, the underlying themes in Star Wars, and how to incorporate Jedi teachings into your daily life. I usually make videos about Star Wars Episode 8, The Last Jedi about 3 times a week, and I run a live stream about Star Wars news at least once day, so if this stuff sounds good to you, make sure to subscribe to the channel and enable notifications so that you'll know when I'm posting new videos or going live to talk about all things Star Wars related. Let's travel back in time to Star Wars Celebration Orlando, last April. It's the panel for The Last Jedi, and we're seeing the trailer for the first time...but knowing what we know right now. So things open up with Rey. She's gasping for breath. She's wearing the same clothes that she was wearing at the end of The Force Awakens when we last saw her extending the lightsaber out to Luke Skywalker. So this is what we know about Rey--Daisy Ridley said that we're going to go deeper into Rey's story. Rey had a certain expectation of what she was going to get from Luke. She's familiar with the Legend of Luke Skywalker, and even though, at one point in time, Rey was unsure if the things she'd heard were true, she's now looking this person she's admired in the face, and she's experiencing this difficulty because when you meet your hero, you might not get whatever it is that you were expecting. Rey initially goes there expecting to simply give Luke his father's lightsaber and recruit him into Leia's Resistance, but obviously something more happens. So I want you all to reflect on the Epilogue from The Force Awakens Junior Novel: Once there was a girl who called herself Rey. She had lived alone for years, until she recognized the value of family and friends. With two of these friends, she piloted a starship to a remote world. She landed on an island surrounded by a blue-green sea. Stone stairs carved into the island�s mountain led her to a clearing. Here waited the hermit she had come to find. Once there was a man who was born with the name Luke Skywalker. It was not a name he had been called in a long, long time. He lived alone, inhabiting this peaceful island on this lost planet. He allowed the girl to stare at him before he removed his hood. His robes were simple, his hair was white. A beard separated him from his youth, just as the remoteness of this planet separated him from his past. But now he had been found. Once there was a lightsaber that had passed from one hand to another. Its blade was bright, its color blue. The girl who possessed it now held it out to the man who had possessed it long before. He looked at her and then at the hilt in her hand� as if it were a memory he had tried to forget. Once there was great knowledge of the Force, an energy field created by all living things that bound the galaxy together. The Force was what gave the Jedi their power. It had allowed them to accomplish great physical and mental feats and to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Yet when the Jedi were hunted down and destroyed, knowledge of the Force seemed to die with them. For many years afterward, individuals sensitive to the Force possessed neither the instruction nor the insight to properly call on it. Its true power remained dormant in their lives, a potential never tapped. Eventually, scarce evidence of its presence led few to believe that the Force had ever existed at all. Yet within the girl and the man and the lightsaber held between, the Force stirred anew. So this idea-- of the Force being present in this interaction between Luke and Rey-- this is going to set the stage for the events moving forward on Ach-To. Luke has tried to forget about his past in this place of his hermitage, but a tremor in the Cosmic Force has brought about an Awakening...and here this girl is with this lightsaber pulling Luke back into events going on in the galaxy that he played a part in starting. And so Rey's training begins--which is what we see in this teaser. We're seeing Luke training Rey to step in and deal with everything going on as a result of what took place in The Force Awakens--and that's really what the teaser is all about. So Rey's training commences with the first thing Obi-Wan taught to Luke. The first thing Luke taught to Leia. Likely the first thing Luke taught to Ben and his other new apprentices--now he's teaching it to Rey. That's how to focus on the breath. How to calm everything to sense the Force. So he tells her to Breathe. Just Breathe. Reach out--and we see the rocks levitating because by breathing and focusing the mind on the present moment--you sense the Force stirring between you, the air, the rocks, the trees--come on now, y'all heard this all before. Yoda said it in Empire Strikes Back to Luke on Dagobah-- this is how the Force works, y'all. Luke asks Rey,"What do you see?" and this is where we go deeper into The Force, Deeper into the Story of the Saga. We see Leia and her silhouette looks very similar to that of her father as Darth Vader. We hear a much younger Leia when she sent the distress call,"Help me Obi-Wan, you're our only Hope." Rey says she sees light--and think about that...Leia is talking about Obi-Wan being her only Hope, a line from A New Hope-- where Luke Skywalker emerges as the new hope for the Rebellion. So you could say that even though Luke is more of the mentor, like Obi-Wan-- he's still the Hope for the Resistance some 34 years after he first entered the picture. Now we just saw Leia with the silhouette of Vader--Rey says Light and we're talking about Hope, but on the flip side, we see Kylo Ren's broken helmet. Rey says Darkness, and we're hearing Obi-Wan say "Seduced by the Darkside" from when Obi-Wan was talking about Darth Vader. This is an interesting image for a number of reasons, and I had a lot of questions about it that still linger. Kylo Ren's helmet is smashed, does that mean Kylo Ren no longer needs it? He wears the helmet to hide his identity from everyone else. Think about him killing Lor San Tekka--he knew who Kylo Ren was, San Tekka said "you can't deny the truth that is your family," so Kylo Ren kills him. He kills his father, Han Solo-- remember what he said out on the bridge? Your son is gone, he was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him." So I'm not sure what to make of this image--will Ben's identity as the darkside student of Snoke known as Kylo Ren be smashed and destroyed, or will Kylo Ren go deeper into his study of the dark side so that he no longer needs to hide his face, and his identity, from the First Order or anyone else? So we've explored the dark side and the light side of the Force--we go back to Ach-To--to what we believe to be the inside of the giant tree that makes up the first Jedi Temple. We see the manuscripts, the books--maybe the Journal of Old Ben Kenobi is among those books on the book shelf, maybe there is the original Journal of the Whills or old manuscripts from the first Jedi. We'll have to wait and see--but we hear Yoda saying "Surrounds us and Binds us," he's talking about the totality of the Force...not this whole dark side/light side dichotomy-- the Force is greater than that--that was the point of view taken by the Guardians and the Brotherhood of the Whills--you can't split up the Force into a binary understanding and no one can hold a monopoly over their understanding of the Force. So we see the symbol of the Jedi in a book that Luke is reading, or at least touching. Rey says "the Balance," and Luke says "it's so much bigger." I think that in his time traversing the Galaxy, tracing the Jedi back to their point of Origin, and dealing with the heartbreak of seeing his students killed, a temple burned, and his nephew turned--I think that Luke gets to see first hand that the Force is bigger than the Jedi thought, and even his own experiences from the Original Trilogy prove that the Jedi of the Republic Era were not always right and did not have all of the Answers...just like Sway didn't. At this point in the teaser, things speed up significantly. We have this idea of the Force--Rey is learning about the Force, what it means, what it is, how to communicate with it--and now this is what's happening. Rey is training on Ach-To--learning to use her lightsaber for the things to come. We see these Ski Speeders on Crait with the Gorilla Walkers off in the horizon. The First Order and the Resistance are about to officially clash head to head in a full-on battle and not some minor skirmish or suprise attack, like in the past. Crait has a history of being a place that helped fund the Rebellion and now the Resistance--and we'll be learning more about the history of Crait with the Rebellion in a comic book coming out very soon, but basically the Rebellion had been conducting mining operations there. The Resistance is probably still conducting mining operations to fund their current operations. Think tactically now-- The New Republic and Leia's allies there are star dust at this point. In order for Leia to lead the fight against the First Order, she's going to need funding-- so if you cut off this one place funding the Resistance, you've essentially grounded them. Now I have a feeling that there is also a Resistance base on Crait--and there may be other reasons that make this planet very important, but basically, if you look at the surface encrusted with salt, those lava veins that lie beneath the surface--this is why the posters for the Last Jedi are red--it has to do with the significance of this planet Crait and whatever is going to happen here when the First Order and the Resistance clash head to head on that planet. We also see Finn. We know Finn is going to emerge from his coma and go undercover to infiltrate the First Order. We have no idea about the details of that mission other than he will team up with Rose Tico, a mechanic working for the Resistance. So we'll have to wait and see what new skills Finn displays when he emerges from the bacta tank and his lightsaber burns have healed. We see Poe with BB8 running-- Poe's wearing his flight suit, and it's hard to tell if they are aboard a ship or in another part of the base on D'Qar, but it looks like everyone is running to their battle stations because they are under an attack. That's made even more obvious when we see the explosion right in front of Poe's X-Wing. That image is followed up with an image of the Millennium Falcon in a dogfight with TIE fighters. My thoughts are that this is part of the final act in the movie. I think Rey and Luke will have to flee from their location with Chewie and R2 to meet up with Leia and the Resistance on Crait, but we'll have to wait and see if things played out the way I guessed they will. We see a shot of Rey running in the darkness. Notice here that she's still wearing her Resistance outfit, so this is probably pretty early into the movie, maybe it's part of her training on Ach-To. That image is immediately followed up with a picture of Kylo Ren pointing his lightsaber. Kylo Ren is unmasked here-- Now I'm planning at least one video, possibly a series, on Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi. Him being masked versus unmasked, the look of his lightsaber and any possible changes or modifications will be very significant things in terms of him moving further into the dark side or feeling the pull and returning to the light side of the Force. We see his lightsaber being reflected in his eyes, which gives the look of his eyes having the look of a dark side user, but so far, I've not seen him with those predator looking eyes. So I think even though Kylo Ren is dealing with a lot of pain and disappointment, he still has a lot to learn about the darkside--like even the Inquisitors had that look and they weren't even Sith. So--maybe I'm digging too deep, like some people like to say, but that's something significant to me. You don't have to look that closely, but I am. Now this next shot, this is a flash back, I believe. We saw this from a different angle in Rey's vision. She saw a firelight from a distant, burning temple with a small blue-and-silver R2 unit. A figure appeared. Falling to his knees, he reached out to the droid. Next we see Phasma making a ground assault with her elite Stormtroopers. I think there will be an assault on the D'Qar base. I have a feeling that the First Order is going to roll in deep with the intentions of crushing the Resistance. They know that the base is located in the Ileenium System because that's what Starkiller Base was targetting. Maybe someone tracked their ships after they made the jump to hyperspace just before Starkiller Base was destroyed. I actually think Kylo Ren placed a tracker on the Millennium Falcon when he was aboard the ship--and he's managed to trace the Resistance to D'Qar, and he'll eventually follow Rey to Ach-To to extract his revenge after she humiliated him in their last fight. The last thing we hear and see is that shadowy silhouette of Luke Skywalker and those words,"I know only one truth, It's time for the Jedi to end." Now what can we make of that statement--well, we can make a lot out of it...or nothing at all. Some people said that he may not even say that line in the actual movie. Right, a Teaser is just something to get people hyped up for a movie. It doesn't tell a story. There's no real theme. It's just a bunch of shots that could be in the movie to get us excited. But what if that line is in the movie? What does it mean? Does it mean there will be a new Jedi Order built? Did Luke do what Vader set out to do by destroying the Jedi Order completely? Does it mean the Jedi are going to become Gray--which is a complete misunderstanding of The Force? I'm sorry y'all, but Jedi can't be Gray. If you're gray, you're not a Jedi. You can still be a force user, but you'd have a very incomplete understanding of the Force--the understanding needs to be refined. I know there will be people who want to challenge me on that-- so if you want to challenge me, put down the old Star Wars comic books from Legends--spend some time meditating. Spend some time actually studying Taoism, because that's what the Force is based on--there's no gray in Taoism. There's no 50/50 equilibrium that stays that way-- there's always constant motion, constant shifting...the ebb and flow of life....it's like water. There's a constant state of change...there's constant motion. If water becomes stagnant, it gets spoiled and becomes rotten. So that's why Jedi can't be Gray-- because that sounds like some kind of stagnation. But I'm not turning this into a debate on why Jedi can't be Gray and how the fans of this Gray Jedi nonsense don't really understand the Force-- I'm just breaking down the material, from my perspective from that first Teaser Trailer. I'm anticipating whatever is going to be presented in the first official trailer, and I can't wait to break it down and discuss it as we get hyped up for The Last Jedi coming this December. Anyway--like I said, these are my thoughts...now I would like to hear yours. What things did you pick up from this break down that you may not have caught back in April? Also, what are you most looking forward to seeing in The Last Jedi? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll be checking back to see what you all have to say. If you haven't subscribed already, go ahead and click the subscribe button so that you can take your first steps towards becoming an Urban Acolyte. Embark on the Journey to Become the Hero of YOUR OWN STORY, and become a Force for Change in your community. Make sure to check out some of my other videos, and be on the lookout for the Urban Acolyte Podcast. I�ll be uploading the episodes to YouTube, Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you want to get more involved, be sure to support the podcast over on Patreon at patreon.com/urbanacolyte. Anyway, that�s all I�ve got for this video. Thanks for watching. Y�all keep on breathing, and may the Force of others be with you, Always.