What sets The Last Jedi apart, ultimately, is that we've finally got a team of Rebels who feel like members of a nascent democracy. But at the same time, the movies have always revolved around aristocratic families and their precious dynastic bloodlines. The grand arc of the Star Wars series is about how the scrappy Rebels fight the yoke of Imperial oppression. Luke actually makes fun of his mythical reputation when the wide-eyed Rey (Daisy Ridley) begs for his help (Mark Hamill is in fine form here as a sarcastic old dude). In other words, they feel realistically ordinary. They do the wrong thing, or the right thing for the wrong reasons. They are conflicted, disappointed, and unsure what to do. Instead of giving us legendary heroes whose main job is to propel the plot, The Last Jedi focuses on our protagonists’ struggles with the same everyday problems that all sentient creatures face.

Without giving away any of the plot, I can say that The Last Jedi’s greatest strength comes from its characters-and of course the actors who play them. Jedi turns our characters into multi-faceted people and takes the series in new and unexpected directions. Luckily, The Last Jedi is not a reboot or recreation of The Empire Strikes Back, the way The Force Awakens was of A New Hope. The possible exception would be The Empire Strikes Back, and The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson is obviously trying to evoke that film here. You can usually depend on this franchise to deliver zoomy action steered by easily recognizable good guys and bad guys, their motivations untainted by complexity. There are a lot of good things I expected from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but nuance wasn’t one of them.

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