Book Review: 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Expanded Edition'

(C) 2018 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

On March 6, 2018, Random House’s Del Rey science fiction/fantasy imprint published Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Expanded Edition, a novelization of the middle act of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy that started with 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Written by Jason Fry with direct input from writer-director Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi chronicles the continuing adventures of Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron, as the brave Resistance led by General Leia Organa fights a desperate battle for survival against the evil First Order.

 Set three decades after the deaths of Emperor Sheev Palpatine and Darth Vader and the fall of the Galactic Empire, The Last Jedi begins where The Force Awakens left off. And taking a cue from Alan Dean Foster, who adapted The Force Awakens three years ago, Fry opens his novel with the actual “crawl” from Johnson’s film:

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 small 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….

 And just as Foster begins his novel with a short Prologue that is centered on Leia and summarizes the state of the galaxy between the fall of the Empire at the Battle of Endor and the beginning of The Force Awakens, Fry gives us a tantalizing glimpse into the mind of Leia’s twin brother, the self-exiled Jedi Master who vanished years earlier and now lives on the watery world of Ach-To.

Luke Skywalker stood in the cooling sands of Tatooine, his wife at his side.

The strip of sky at the horizon was still painted with the last orange of sunset, but the first stars had emerged. Luke peered at them, searching for something he knew was already gone.

“What did you think you saw?” Camie asked.

He could hear the affection in her voice – but if he listened harder, he could hear the weariness as well.

“Star Destroyer,” he said. “At least I thought so.”

“Then I believe you,” she said, one hand on his shoulder. “You always could recognize one – even at high noon.”

Luke smiled, thinking back to the long-ago day at Tosche Station when he’d burst in to tell his friends about the two ships sitting in orbit right above their heads. Camie hadn’t believed him – she’d peered through his old macrobinoculars before dismissively tossing them back to him and seeking refuge from the relentless twin suns. Fixer hadn’t believed him, either. Neither had Biggs.

But he’d been right.

His smile faded away at the thought of Biggs Darklighter, who’d left Tatooine and died somewhere unimaginably far away. Biggs, who’d been his first friend. His only friend, he supposed.  

His mind retreated from the thought, as quickly as if his bare hand had strayed to a vaporator casing at midday.

“I wonder what the Empire wanted out here,” he said, searching the sky again. Resupplying the garrison at Mos Eisley hardly required a warship the size of a Star Destroyer. These days, with the galaxy at peace, it hardly required a warship at all.

“Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with us,” Camie said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Luke said, his eyes reflexively scanning the lights that marked the homestead’s perimeter. Such caution wasn’t necessary – no Tusken Raider had been seen this side of Mos Eisley in two decades – but old habits died hard.

The Tuskens are gone – nothing left of them but bones in the sand.

For some reason that made him sad.

In this prologue, we get a tantalizing vision of a past Luke Skywalker never had: in what appears to be a Force vision – or maybe just a nightmare – a 60-year-old Luke imagines the life he would have had if he had gone after the runaway R2-D2 the night that the little droid ran away from his Uncle Owen’s homestead. In all likelihood, he would have seen the Imperial stormtroopers arrive at the moisture farm, take the droids into their custody, and his aunt and uncle saved by the last-minute intervention of Ben Kenobi, the strange old hermit who lived beyond the Dune Sea.

In this reimagined past, Luke doesn’t leave Tatooine to join the Rebellion. As a result, the young woman Luke saw in the hologram appears on the Imperial Holonet and publicly identified as Princess Leia Organa, a member of the Senate from the planet Alderaan – and a leader of the Rebellion. Leia is executed, and after three Rebel worlds are destroyed by the Empire, the Galactic Civil War ends with the defeat of rhe Rebel Alliance.

In this altered past, Luke marries Camie and inherits the Lars homestead after his foster parents die of old age. The Empire reigns supreme, and Tatooine moisture farmers still pay water taxes to the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt. Still, Lucky Luke, as his friends now call him, always wonders what happened to Ben Kenobi after he saved Owen and Beru from being killed by the stormtroopers – and he always dreams “about the girl who’d called out for Obi-Wan. Just last week he’d woken with a start, certain that the astromech was waiting for him in the garage, finally willing to play the full message for him. It was important that Luke hear it – there was something he needed to do. Something he was meant to do.”’

The first chapter of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is derived mostly from deleted scenes or story ideas by Rian Johnson that were not used in the film. In a similar vein to The Force Awakens’ novelization, it’s a sequence that shows Leia Organa as she copes with recent tragedies and losses, both to the galaxy and to herself personally. The Resistance has managed to destroy the First Order’s Starkiller Base, but not before the inheritors of the Empire’s ruthless legacy gut the New Republic with its dreaded superweapon. The central government and the Senate are no more. The Republic fleet is gone, too – blasted by the same lethal energy that obliterated Hosnian Prime.

Worse, Leia must now live with the knowledge that her lovable scoundrel, Han Solo, is dead, murdered by their son Ben, who now serves the First Order’s Supreme Leader Snoke as a dark side adept known as Kylo Ren.

So even as the Resistance fighters she leads prepare to evacuate from their base on the jungle world D’Qar, the grieving Leia must give her husband a fitting, if rather hurried, eulogy.

After these “additional content” derived scenes, Fry’s novel, which is divided into three parts, follows the plot of Rian Johnson’s film closely, with, as a certain Corellian smuggler-turned- Rebel would say, “special modifications” that layers of depth to the story seen by millions around the world.

Written with input from director Rian Johnson, this official adaptation of Star Wars: The Last Jedi expands on the film to include scenes from alternate versions of the script and other additional content.

From the ashes of the Empire has arisen another threat to the galaxy's freedom: the ruthless First Order. Fortunately, new heroes have emerged to take up arms—and perhaps lay down their lives—for the cause. Rey, the orphan strong in the Force; Finn, the ex-stormtrooper who stands against his former masters; and Poe Dameron, the fearless X-wing pilot, have been drawn together to fight side-by-side with General Leia Organa and the Resistance. But the First Order's Supreme Leader Snoke and his merciless enforcer Kylo Ren are adversaries with superior numbers and devastating firepower at their command. Against this enemy, the champions of light may finally be facing their extinction. Their only hope rests with a lost legend: Jedi Master Luke Skywalker.

Where the action of Star Wars: The Force Awakens ended, Star Wars: The Last Jedi begins, as the battle between light and dark climbs to astonishing new heights. - Dust jacket blurb, Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Expanded Edition

It is a dark time for the Resistance. Although Starkiller Base has been destroyed due to the daring of X-wing fighter hero Poe Dameron, stormtrooper Finn, Force-wielding scavenger Rey, and others, the First Order has discovered their secret base on D'qar.  

Now, as the First Order forces under the command of Gen. Armitage Hux arrive, the freedom fighters led by General Organa are evacuating from D'qar. 

In a desperate (and ill-advised) effort to buy time for the evacuating Resistance fleet, Poe leads a group of slow and ungainly bombers in an attack against the First Order's mighty Dreadnaught. The attack succeeds – but at the cost of every ship and crew member of Cobalt Squadron. Considering that the Resistance is a small isolated fighting force and that its covert sponsor, the New Republic, was decimated by Starkiller Base, this Pyrrhic victory does not sit well with Leia Organa. She demotes her protégé Poe from Commander to Captain to teach him to be more disciplined and curb his desire to be a "hero."

The new rebellion's efforts to escape from Supreme Leader Snoke are intercut with Rey's efforts to convince a sad and withdrawn Jedi Master Luke Skywalker to help the Resistance and to train her as a Jedi.

Rey is a resourceful and optimistic young woman with incredible potential in the Force, but Luke's disillusion and guilt over his failure to see the darkness in his nephew Ben are obstacles that even she can't overcome.

 She is aware that Ben was seduced by the Dark Side. She even saw him murder his own father, Han Solo, in the bowels of Starkiller Base. To her, Ben/Kylo Ren is a monster. Yet, she feels that he can be turned back to the light.

Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, like Irvin Kershner's The Empire Strikes Back, is the second act of a three-act drama. As such, it serves to flesh out the new cast of characters introduced in The Force Awakens and put them all in situations that will test their mettle. Here, the Rey/Finn/BB-8 trio that coalesced on Jakku in Episode VII is split up. Rey has gone to Ach-To to find the self-exiled last Jedi. Meanwhile, ex-stormtrooper Finn is forced to decide which path to take when he accompanies the idealistic Resistance mechanic Rose Tico on a daring mission that will help the small band of rebels escape from the dreaded First Order. 

My Take

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Expanded Edition follows a time-tested tradition that started when Alan Dean Foster (ghost writing for George Lucas, whose name appears on the book cover) wrote the novelization for the film then simply known as Star Wars almost 42 years ago. 

Since November of 1976, authors such as Foster, Donald F. Glut, James Kahn, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, and Matthew Stover have worked closely with Lucasfilm and its 1970s predecessor, The Star Wars Corporation, to create readable, exciting, and entertaining novels based on the films made by Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand, and J.J. Abrams. Sworn to secrecy and working from screenplays that don't always reflect the finished movies, these writers somehow manage to come up with books that allow fans - die-hard and casual alike - to relive the experiences they had in the multiplex theater while at the same time delving deeper into the characters' hearts and minds. 

Jason Fry, who is a Star Wars fan as well as the author of many Star Wars roleplaying game resource books, novels, and canon reference works, is well equipped to follow in the creative footsteps of those legendary Star Wars writers. 

Fry worked closely with Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson (who, despite the protestations of the film's detractors, is a devoted fan of the franchise). Not only did Johnson give Fry access to several drafts of the screenplay - a fact that accounts for some of the discrepancies between what we see on screen and read on the page), he also met with Fry and discussed the film's themes and the characters' motivations and "plot needs." Judging from the effusive notes of gratitude in the Acknowledgments page at the end of the book, Johnson's contributions to the novel  - and to that "galaxy far, far away" - are not to be sneered at or wished away.

Fry is also a good writer. His style is simple and elegant, and he avoids using unnecessarily baroque sentence structures or purple prose. The pace is almost as energetic as that of the film it is based on, although the printed medium allows the writer to connect The Last Jedi with films from the Original Trilogy (especially A New Hope) and the previous chapter of the Sequel Trilogy, as well as novels and other published works in the Lucasfilm canon, including Claudia Gray's Bloodline and Chuck Wendig's Aftermath trilogy.

There are those fans who dislike Star Wars: The Last Jedi for any of a thousand reasons, and many of them will say that if a movie needs a novelization to "explain" what people saw in theaters, then that film failed to do what it was intended to do. 

I disagree. I like Star Wars: The Last Jedi as both a standalone viewing experience and a Star Wars saga film. Having watched both of the Trilogies made under George Lucas's aegis. I suspected that the plot would place the characters - old and new -in challenging and even dire situations. 

The novel doesn't exist merely to explain what happened in the movie; it adds layers upon layers of emotional depth that mere images and sounds can't, by their ephemeral nature, convey. 

For instance, who knew before reading Fry's novel how sentient Han Solo's battered Millennium Falcon is? Sure, in The Empire Strikes Back we hear See-Threepio complain about the ship's use of language, but were we aware of how snippy the Falcon feels about Chewbacca's style of maintenance? 

Well, I wasn't - until I read Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Extended Edition. 

It's a highly enjoyable novel, and amazingly full of insights about the characters and situations. And, no matter what Last Jedi bashers claim, it fits in with the rest of the established canon. 

So, Constant Reader, till next time, clear skies, and May the Force be with you.