It has been explained to me that every point in the universe appears to be the center of the universe. Where ever you go, the center is where you are. One physicist described this as being in a container of milk: where ever you move in it, you see the same thing. But the universe is not contained or limited in a way we understand. The concept of a border collapses much like our mathematics does when approaching the first moment of all we know to be. It also appears as if the universe expanded from a quantum event. This means that everything in the universe is related, and functions by the same laws.
It is this relatedness that the first film in the Star Wars series attempted to obscure with the idea of immense chronological/spacial distance. The events described in the franchise’s first movie in 1977 happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The narrative function of this distancing was to make the story and its creatures so strange to us that we had to suspend belief in our customs and values. And the more powerful the spectacle of spaceships, laser blasters, and planets that are defined by one climate (snowball globes, endless deserts, total tropics), the more we submitted to the illusion of chronological/spacial distance.
The spectacles in Star Wars: The Last Jedi are some of the most powerful and believable in the franchises.
