Christmas exchange gifts

There’s a scene in the middle of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” that’s so mysterious, inspired, rich in overtones, and tenuously attached to the movie surrounding it that it virtually shouts its presence as the writer and director Rian Johnson’s embedded showreel, his flourish of personal purpose and creative power amid the two and a half wearying hours that serve as its frame. It’s part of a sequence that takes place in a neo-medieval island hideout where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has long been sulking (shades of Achilles in the Iliad). Rey (Daisy Ridley), one of the new generation of heroes introduced in “The Force Awakens,” in 2015, goes to that forbidding, rocky, windswept retreat in the hope of persuading Luke to come back and join her and the other heroes in the Resistance to the First Order—to which the son of Han and Leia, Ben Solo, now known as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has sworn fealty. While visiting Luke, Rey drops out of his sight for a moment and enters a hidden place in which she faces a vast subterranean mirrored curtain. She beholds her own reflection, reaches out to it, and sees it multiply. Suddenly, there’s a dozen or more identical Reys, all moving in unison, but then moving not in unison but in sequence, as if choreographed as a one-woman crowd in a Busby Berkeley production number, snapping her fingers and chanting a line or two, echoing outward toward an endless chorus line of Reys that seemingly recedes to infinity.