
From juggling turbolifts on an enemy battleship to save Anakin Skywalker’s miserable life to fixing Luke’s X-Wing stabilisers during the first Death Star run, from mending the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon to cutting his way out of an Ewok trap, Artoo does all the hard galaxy-saving work and gets precious little credit. Think Henry the Hoover meets a Swiss army knife, only with personality.īecause he’s the real hero of the ‘Star Wars’ movies, consistently getting the others out of trouble just when things look their bleakest.

But whether or not you bitterly disagree with writer-director Rian Johnson’s choices here (and frankly, we’re still torn), there’s no arguing with the sheer dramatic heft that Hamill brought to the character, grey and grizzled and alone, torn between friendship and honour and fear of his own terrible power.Ī cheeky, level-headed dustbin on legs who comes complete with an Inspector Gadget-like array of convenient little nozzles and appendages.

His return in the sequel trilogy proved wildly controversial, as the Force’s erstwhile champion flat-out refused to throw himself back into the fight. Mark Hamill’s performance in the original trilogy is consistently intelligent, heartfelt and witty and Luke never comes close to crossing that line between upstanding hero and annoying goody-goody. Yes, his return in ‘ The Last Jedi’ was rather more downbeat, but he did manage to rally his strength and face evil one last time…Ĭ’mon! He’s the ultimate family-friendly adventure hero: kind to animals and droids, good at fighting, flying spaceships, swinging across chasms on ropes and doing the right thing. Just a simple kid from a broken home, Luke pulls himself up by his own utility belt and goes on to master the Force and save the entire galaxy from evil (at least temporarily). The hero, of course! Luke is the clean-livin’, hard-workin’, elders-respectin’, sister-kissin’, all-American boy from Tatooine whose adventures form the backbone of the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. Lando returns (played by 2018’s man of the year Donald ‘Childish Gambino’ Glover) in ‘ Solo’, and if anything, the character is even more complex and charismatic, flirting madly with his droid sidekick 元-37 and generally treating the galaxy like his personal playground. In ‘ The Empire Strikes Back’ Lando is at once enigmatic, despicable and dapper as hell and if the newly promoted General Calrissian goes a little soft in ‘ Return of the Jedi’, Billy Dee Williams’s sheer personal charm carries the character through. But look deeper and Calrissian’s matinee-idol charm and un-‘Star Wars’-like moral ambiguity make him one of the most intriguing figures in the series. And yes, accusations of tokenism are hard to refute (his initial characterisation as a treacherous, womanising sleazebag didn’t help).
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Yes, Lando was written into the series after complaints about the absence of black characters in ‘Star Wars’.

The ultimate charmer, a ramblin’, gamblin’ man who turns his back on his crooked, card-sharping ways to pursue a respectable career as a mining administrator and, ultimately, a Rebel Alliance hero. Key line: ‘You will remove these restraints and leave this cell with the door open.’

The way she ‘handles’ John Boyega’s Finn is hilarious, too – we can’t wait to see where that relationship goes. Watching actress Daisy Ridley bound up those stone steps on the planet Ahch-To in the final moments of ‘The Force Awakens’, we couldn’t help but be reminded of the BBC fantasy stories we loved as kids: ‘The Owl Service’ or ‘The Secret Garden’, perhaps, with their feisty stage-school heroines. The mysterious heroine of ‘ The Force Awakens’, a young orphan with a hidden past who dreams of escape from her drab, backwater existence – but when she gets the chance, isn’t sure if adventure was such a great idea after all. The mysterious heroine of ‘The Force Awakens’, a young orphan with a hidden past who dreams of escape from her drab, backwater existence – but when she gets the chance, isn’t sure if adventure was such a great idea after all.īecause she’s like something out of an old-fashioned British kids adventure novel: plucky, proud and a bit posh, with nerves of steel and a whip-smart mouth.
