ST ST Criticism Discussion Thread

I guess I just can't get over the lack of imagination part. All he had to do was give Luke a purpose on the island. Luke would still have made a mistake of course. Luke maybe just simply didn't see SKB coming, for example. Rey shows up a couple days after that. Luke could have been waiting, having sensed that she was coming after that great disturbance in the force. He could have explained that he was hiding out preparing to restart the Jedi Order or something. All RJ needed to do was come up with a story and then Luke could still be in the background. Luke as a suicidal quitter was in no way inevitable after TFA. I couldn't even imagine the story going there after I saw TFA, and I'm very confident that JJ didn't anticipate it going there when he wrote TFA.

But yeah, I definitely agree that Luke needed to be wrong in a way that the audience could relate to. That's a key part of any story that takes a hero on a journey. Luke being suicidal isn't outside the realm of possibility, but there needed to be more story there explaining it than Luke almost killed his sleeping nephew that hadn't done anything wrong and then felt bad about it.

 

I can appreciate that Ender, I've long said that I think Rian's fundamental problem is that his reach exceeds his grasp. But I think that if you want to do what he wanted to do with one of the great icons of modern pop culture history, you had better well be a damned grandmaster of your craft, and, well, he simply isn't. Neither am I, fwiw, it is what it is.

For my end I would have gone a different direction: I think (assuming we need Luke in roughly the place Rian needs him) the moment he saved Vader should have made Luke think that total and complete empathy always wins the day. Snoke should have told Ben about how Luke won the day in ROTJ and convinced Ben to exploit it. Luke sees this glimmer of good in Ben and *that* (not the opposite) is his undoing. He retreats to contemplation because if Yoda isn't right, and *he* isn't right, what could possibly be the way forward? Rey should have been framed as some brand new third way, and the philosophy arisen from there. But again, I'm not in charge.

 

I would honestly prefer Luke to go all red eyed and evil then become surely and unlikeable.

 

It seems to me that Johnson has a very unfortunate "near enough is good enough" attitude when it comes to character motivations- particularly unfortunate when the characters are as subordinate to the plot as they are in this film. "I want Character X to perform Action Y. What? Reasons? Uh... let's see... Reason Z will do, I guess. Good as any other."

 

Yes, I think that is accurate, and he is most definitely not alone in Hollywood with that particular affliction. To be fair every major blockbuster is going to be chess pieces moving to the tune of the writer/director, but the skill, the real craft is in hiding the strings. You always see every string Rian pulls, and that in turn pulls *you* out of the movie.

 

I like the potential of all of that, BytesizedRick. It reminds me in some ways of that I thought might happen with the gorilla walkers. I see those jagged edges on their back “legs” and assumed they were there because of what happened on Hoth & that the Reisistance would try to do what worked on Hoth and that those spikes would be like chain saws that cut the cables with the message clear. The villains have learned from what you did last.

Thus, I can appreciate that concept & can see what you had in mind & believe that there was potential to pull that off.

See, that would have crushed me. That would have been the most nihilistic thing imaginable to me, personally. That would have had me in the sanctuary, I suspect. I appreciate the differences in approach between Luke & Vader to extreme stresses & beleive that TLJ showed that (for me). I buy that Luke thought this might help long-term & was trying to be wise & less selfish & think more about the galaxy long-term. Seeing Luke go pure Dark Side for an extended time would have made me buy into the nihilism narrative more.

 

My problem with DJ is that he’s severely under-written to point of approaching irrelevance. We don’t learn where he comes from, why he’s hanging out in a prison cell he can escape from any time, how he is able to steal ships and break through security systems at will, or even his name. It’s almost like he’s not a character, just some guy who snuck onto the set of TLJ and faked his way into the movie. His convenient appearance is just not believable. Finn and Rose go to a planet because they are looking for a specific person with special slicing abilities (which the Raddus doesn’t have access to for some reason, even though they are a well-equipped military ship), and they just randomly find another person with the same abilities. If there are so many people who know how to disable a Super Star Destroyer’s shields then why doesn’t the Resistance employ one? The whole sequence is so poorly thought out.

 

Hell it was in the opening crawl of Episode 3

 

I don’t personally feel DJ is underwritten for who he needs to be but I do wonder why Johnson thought it best to have the original code breaker end up unusable & to go with DJ later. The best reason I can tell is that he didn’t want Maz to look bad for recommending anyone who would double cross. I’m not sure why that consideration was deemed a high priority though when he just as easily could have had DJ be the original and have Maz say something as simple as “He’s been loyal to me before and he’s a great code breaker but others have had issues. Tell him I sent you and hopefully he will be loyal to you, too.”

I don’t think planting that seed of doubt earlier would have ruined tension much because of the clever slight of hand of having DJ give her the necklace back which leads almost everyone to believe he’s yet another scoundrel with a heart of gold anyway.

 

I fully expected Luke in TLJ to be broken. I eagerly anticipated it. I did not, however, expect him to be unlikable. Not just “unlikable for Luke” - unlikable no matter who he had been.

I’m not sure if that was intentional or not, because I *loved* Luke at the end. I really feel - as a Luke fan - that LFL understands who Luke is.

So I remain puzzled.

 

It’s too bad the Lucasfilm Story Group doesn’t look at the story and the setting Lucas developed over two trilogies and incorporate some of the subsidiary material in the canon films. Sienar Systems and Incom as well as the Banking Clan and the Corporate Sector should be used as bits of dialogue when ideas like arms dealers and war profiteering is addressed.


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Then why did it have to be Maz who sends them to the code-breaker? It could have been Poe, and he could have even warned Finn and Rose to be careful because the guy would be in it for the money. Come to think of it, Maz's cameo is kind of weird in and of itself. She's supposed to be a good guy, and she can disable the shields on a Super Star Destroyer, but she's caught up in a "union dispute" while the FO is overrunning the New Republic? Seems like a weird excuse just to find some opportunity to shoehorn her into the film. I'm not sure there are reasonable answers to these questions because it doesn't seem like RJ thought all this through.

 

All of this is fair. It doesn’t bother me, personally, if I’m being brutally honest but it’s fair nevertheless.

 

Agreed.

The only thing I can think of beyond this is that it provides a momentary setback for our heroes there & that younger audiences may wonder more so than we do how our heroes will get out of the prison. Oddly enough I think I personally still like that plotting more than Lando’s drawn out “get comfortable & then lets go for a tour where I take you to Vader while C3PO gets dismantled limb by limb” but to each their own. I realize I’m in the minority there & don’t want a repeat of last time where that derailed things. I love the acting there on Bespin but the plotting there felt off for me. I can see where the jail plot doesn’t work for people here though & admit that it does feel like plot busywork there for Finn & Rose.

 

I feel like Luke was kind of written all over the place in a way that makes him very difficult to watch. For a guy like me, who as a kid thought the world of Luke, this was very difficult to understand. The bits that Abrams wrote set him up to be something of a travelling aesthetic, something along the lines of David Carradine's character in Kung Fu, seeking solace in knowledge after a traumatic past, which I was eager to see. When we finally meet him in VII, he still has that sense of calm and also looks to have matured into a more thoughtful phase of his life, much like his old masters.... And then VIII rolls around.

And we find a Luke who for all intents and purposes has regressed so UTTERLY, that even the anxious farm boy from Tattooine comes off as a better example. He's lost all the balance and wisdom he fought over the prequel trilogy to gain and has essentially become a pouting child, cutting himself off from life because things went sideways on him. Like he completely forgot that he's ONLY HUMAN and is not going to get everything perfect all the time, something that the Original Trilogy and its events had soundly placed into his mind by the end of the Battle of Endor. This was a Luke who somehow made it to the point of trying to teach students while simultaneously forgetting all of the things he had learned from his own experiences. It was like having the arrogant kid in the hut from Empire trying to run the show and that makes 0 sense.

I think it would have been worlds better if instead of becoming too regressive and trying to adhere to a broken system, Luke had tried to go the other way and be a much more personal, gentler teacher than what he grew up around. He had always been presented as having a large heart and a mellow disposition (though he certainly did have his flaws and very much inherited his father's awful temper, though the difference between them was he had FAR better control). I could easily see his hardened disposition coming more from blaming himself for being too lax with Ben and not recognizing the severity of his internal conflict enough to provide a firmer hand and more guidance, as opposed to letting Ben try to work things through for himself and eventually landing inside of a prison in his mind and heart that he couldn't escape from thanks to Snoke. As the massacre takes place, Luke tries his best to fight back, like Yoda and Ben did so many years before, but it's too late. Even the mighty Skywalker is no match for the Knights of Ren and his fallen newphew. Past his prime and already beaten from the loss of everything he tried to build, the burgeoning Dark Side order beats him down and leaves him for dead. Their final act of spite, crushing his green lightsaber and his spirit with it.....

But instead of dying, Luke somehow manages to live. Faithful Artoo drags him away and he limps to his ship, managing to escape the planet. Guided by the Force and half dead, Luke makes it to Ach-To and there, begins the long process of healing, as the First Order is finally bold enough to move forward, believing the Jedi to finally be dead. Luke at this time is still despondent. Terrified of facing Leia and Han with his failures, he instead decides the best solution is to course correct himself. To get back in touch with being a student again. To that end, he is guided to the Jedi texts and spends weeks pouring over their contents. The weeks become months and time passes in a blur as Luke delves deeper and deeper into the heart of the old Jedi ways.

When Rey finds him, he's now a much wiser man, if somewhat slightly mad from everything he's been learning. She tells him everything and he breaks down at Han's death and the destruction of the Hosnian System. His time on Ach-To, a planet completely bursting with the Force, has essentially rendered him tone deaf to everything outside of it, like white noise. And now this strange girl has popped that bubble and Luke recognizes it as things coming full circle. Just as he bumbled onto Yoda through the Force, so has this girl been guided to him and he must pass of what he's learned. And true to his experiences from the fallout of the temple massacre, his initial training of Rey is the boot camp style training he endured through Yoda. Strict and not to be questioned, black and white, right and wrong. But as time goes on and he learns more of Rey and her experiences, he begins to see so much of where he failed was not in not being too firm or too gentle, but that masters and students are far more than just teachers and students- they're FAMILY, even if not by blood and that it's important for them to draw closer together in crisis, not further apart. That big Skywalker heart finally starts to show itself again and Luke begins Rey's training anew, focusing on how to maximize her strengths, while helping her learn to guard her weaknesses. He teaches her every trick he ever learned and more, by passing on the best of the ancient Jedi, mixing the old and the new to birth a new breed of Jedi for a new time, culminating that training with both master and pupil building new lightsabers, as a symbol of the rebirth of the Jedi, leaving Anakin's sword on the island as a mark of honor and a reminder of their time there.

 

Good post @Justin Gensel

 

Great post. Remember when Luke was a whiny farm boy and totally grated. I never thought I would yearn for that Luke! Ha!


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Not to mention her bar was destroyed a day or so ago. Or how Poe would know her. I think this is one of those “characters that they weren’t expecting to be popular” Rian has to write in.

 

Episode 9: Return of the Dewbacks

Think about what appeared just before the Skywalker protagonist entered the story in each of the Lucas trilogies?

A Dewback. The true Whills that herald the emergence of the Chosen Ones.

Only TFA broke that string. So that's what went wrong with the ST! So simple, the answer was! JJ needs to cast some Dewbacks fast to get things back on track!

 

Yes. It made AOTC a great success. I say let's try again.

 

I posted this in "Beyond the Saga", but feel it is relevant to criticism of the Sequel Trilogy...I don't think it's only Solo's BO that's responsible:

http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-story-spin-offs/#more-491639

 

Wow. I wish what you wrote actually happened in Ep8. Alot of layers there and is true to Luke's character still. And Luke and Rey would then have an actual relationship and bond. If that happened, Ep8 would have been a masterpiece....even if Luke still died at the end of the movie as the core essence of his character would have remained intact alot more than what we saw.