Disney just dropped the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi as part of this week's Star Wars Celebration in Orlando. (You can watch a livestream of the Last Jedi panel here.) Suffice it to say that it looks amazing and delivers pretty much everything you'd want in a teaser—just a peek with extremely low spoiler levels.

First of all, our main characters are back. We catch a glimpse of Finn in some kind of medical pod, looking alive and well. Poe is in full hunky resistance fighter mode racing around with BB-8. Kylo is glowering out of the shadows like a Marilyn Manson fan circa 1995. And the Millennium Falcon is swooping around like the modded, overclocked machine that she is. There are snippets of battles and one shot of a fantastic-looking flight across the surface of a planet where giant red plumes arc out of the desert floor behind some ships. It looks very Mad Max: Fury Road, and I mean that as a high compliment.

Best of all, at least to this viewer, we see Luke doing what appear to be Yoda-esque "use the Force" exercises with Rey on the island where we left them at the end of The Force Awakens. Rey is learning to levitate little rocks and using her mind to feel the balance of light and dark in the Force. (Tearful moment as we glimpse the back of Leia's head when Rey mentions "the light.") There are also some ancient books and maps in Luke's monk cave, which is interesting—I don't recall seeing any Jedi books in paper form before, though we saw lots of augmented reality classrooms in previous films.

One of the things that has me extra excited about this flick is that it's directed by Rian Johnson, whose previous films Looper and Brick were superlative. Looper is one of the best time travel movies you'll ever watch, and it features terrific performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as older and younger versions of a time traveling mercenary. Johnson has a crazy imagination, but he always manages to inject a dark and thoughtful cynicism into even the most escapist work. His sensibility is perfect for the Star Wars universe at a time when everything seems to be falling apart and hope is at its lowest ebb.

The overall flavor we get is of a film that is harkening back to The Empire Strikes Back but with Rey in the student role that Luke once occupied. This is about the moment when we rebalance the light and the dark. And then, just as the trailer winds to a close, we hear Luke say, "The Jedi must end." WHAT? Luke, no! Does he mean we need a new organization that's better than the Jedi? Or is he just being Annoying Emo Luke? We'll have to wait until December 15 to find out.

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