Luke Takes on Darker Look in New Star Wars: The Last Jedi Image
While we patiently await a new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, our good friend (in our minds) Mark Hamill has done his level best to give us updates, tidbits and peeks at the next installment in the franchise. The latest, once again courtesy of Hamill’s Twitter feed, is a cover image of Luke Skywalker with a much darker look on the Hungarian film magazine Cinemania Mozimánia.
Perhaps Luke felt the need to take on these darker shades thanks to his exile on Ahch-To and the disturbances he was feeling in the Force. When The Forces Awakens ended, Rey had found him and presumably was going to try to get him back into the Resistance fold, yet she was bearing some terrible news about his old friend Han Solo, and the state of affairs for the galaxy as a whole. Yet in the one trailer we’ve seen of the film, Luke famously said that the Jedi order should end. That’s a sentiment that fits the above look quite well.
It should also be noted that colors matter in Star Wars. Sith Lords and the assembled bad guys who wield power derived from the Dark Side have longed worn darker robes and cloaks, while Jedis, like Luke and Obi-Wan, traditionally have worn brown cloaks and robes and slightly lighter shades.
Luke has gone through a lot since we last saw him in The Return of the Jedi, and this is what’s fascinated Hamill the most. As he told the Associated Press, “There’s just decades of history that’s unknown” about the Jedi master, much of it likely very troubling (especially his fallout with Kylo Ren, whom he tried to teach but who ultimately went over to the dark side).
“I was saying to (Last Jedi director) Rian Johnson: ‘I need to know my backstory.” It was kind of unclear,” Hamill told the AP. “You read where he is now and what he’s doing now and sort of have to fill in the blanks for yourself. So I did do a backstory myself. It’s not about Luke anymore, so it’s not really important. But I had to make sense of it for myself. What Rian came up with, I was stunned.”
We’ll have to wait until The Last Jedi premieres on December 15 to find out how much we learn about what Luke’s history since Return of the Jedi, and whether or not this darker new look means we’ll be seeing a truly troubled, potentially resistant Luke when it comes to joining Rey and the remaining Jedi forces against Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader Snoke and the First Order.
Featured image: Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Luke (Mark Hamil) on the set of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Courtesy Walt Disney Studios.
