ST The Director and The Jedi - The TLJ Documentary Discussion Thread

The force has been a key factor in several character's evolving motivations in every single film.

It's one of the foundations of the saga. Not exclusive to this trilogy.

 

Every fandom had this ugly debate. If you follow a football team, this is tiringly commonplace, especially during free agency.

 

So...ugh...about that documentary...lets get this thread back on the rails please

 

Haven't seen it yet. Still waiting for the Blu-ray.

 

i'm buying the DVD

 

Recently a lot of DVDs don't get the extra features they include with Blu-rays, so you might want to confirm that first if you want this documentary.

 

Stop trying to up-sell him, you're not on Disney's payroll anymore

 

1 like=1 4K UHD sale.

 

I'm still getting retirement benefits.

 

And because the Big 3 have such sophisticated story arcs means we can kill them off.

Unfortunately, many people thing the strongest claims in terms of accuracy equal the strongest claims in terms of language. Even if such claims attempt to override facts.

I’m sorry. I missed it where it’s canonical that the Force is the end all, be all. Seems to me Kylo and Rey have free will.

Right key factor. Not absolute agency on the part of the Force. Unfortunately, reductionistic reasoning leads to the straw man of the Force being diegetically a deterministic God and narratively a cheap storytelling device.

 

I might have thought it was inevitable if Luke would have already trained Jedi to take his place. However, since Luke left no Jedi order behind and didn’t even train Rey, it seems kind of silly to me to kill off the only Jedi master in the galaxy. Rey was already criticized after TFA for being overpowered. To now have her be a Jedi without training or mentoring or guidance by a Jedi master, now compounds this issue. Luke should have survived to train her properly. There was truly no reason to kill off the character at the end of TLJ. He had just come to th e realization that the Jedi were needed, and he was killed off without training a single Jedi. The rest if the film could have been exactly the same, but Luke could and should have lived, especially since Luke still needed to redeem himself for his mistakes ( that four minute force projection wasn’t nearly enough). After Carrie’s death, it was even more important for Luke to live, in my opinion.

And this idea that someone said came from the novelization, that Rey sort of downloaded the force skills from Kylo Ren is really ridiculous. That’s not the way things work in Star Wars, and if that’s what the filmmakers are now going for, I rethink it makes the force and the Jedi far less because if it. Becoming a Jedi shouldn’t be so easy. It should take work, study, struggle, and guidance by a master. Otherwise, being a Jedi is no big deal and makes the person himself/herself far less interesting or compelling or special. I think it’s a huge mistake, if this is really what they are doing. It means that Rey has earned nothing; that everything is just being handed to her, when every other Jedi in the thousands of years of Jedi history have needed to work at being a Jedi and learn many things.

@Ricardo Funes , Luke didn’t need to be “ humanized” in TLJ. Luke was always a VERY human character. He made many mistakes and learned and grew from them. He needed to be rescued many times. He was compassionate, and family and friends were important to him. We saw him grieve over his lost guardians and obiwan and Yoda. We saw him leave his training to save his friends. We saw him get angry when Vader threatened his newfound sister. We saw him treat even the droids with kindness. Luke was probably the most human character in the entire OT. He wasn’t some kind of god; nor did he always do everything right. He needed to learn and grow and struggle and he failed at things.

What we got in TLJ wasn’t humanizing Luke. It was deconstucting him. It was twisting his character like a pretzel to serve a plot.

 

Luke not properly training Rey might be disappointing, but it's necessary for the story to progress in a new direction. Yes, the Jedi are needed, but their old ways are no longer viable, and Luke is symbolic of that. The core idea here is that Rey must learn things for herself. The Jedi texts are a baseline foundation for her, and then she can take the Jedi in a completely new direction.

 

Luke was supposed to be the one to take the Jedi in a new direction. He himself was very different from the prequel Jedi. He had grown up among normal folk in a normal family. He wasn’t trained from when he was an infant, and he wasn’t isolated from the regular world. Luke wouldn’t have believed in a no attachment rule because his love for his father and his father for him had brought down the empire. Family and friends were important to him; important enough to leave his training to try to save his friends.

Luke was also taught differently. Yoda purposely made the choice for Luke and leia to grow up in family settings instead of training them right away. I think most have always felt that Luke’s philosophy and Jedi traditions would have been vastly different from that if the prequel order.

How do you know that Rey’s way will be any different or better? She doesn’t really know much about the force or the Jedi or anything. How do you know that she won’t make the same mistakes the OT Jedi did or do things exactly the way that they did if she knows nothing about them? She doesn’t know about the past, , so she could easily make the same mistakes. Luke, on the other hand, has already made mistakes. He now knows what doesn’t work. He has learned from his failure. Doesn’t it make more sense for Luke to rebuild the ordr, especially since Rey will likely be busy for many years being the active Jedi in the galaxy?

I really resent having the legacy which should have been Luke’s, given to Rey, someone who hasn’t earned the honor and never struggled or sacrificed or even trained as a Jedi.

 

And Luke may still guide Rey moving forwards. What did Yoda say? Lose Rey we must not. She's no more alone than Luke was. And Yoda gave crucial guidance in 8 to Luke.

 

I've surmised that the Force always intended for the Skywalkers to destroy the old institutions of Jedi and Sith. But the job of rebuilding into something new is intended for someone completely unburdened by old doctrines or family legacy. It's worth keeping in mind that although Luke was trained differently by Obi-Wan and Yoda than the prequel Jedi, he did ultimately defy them in redeeming Vader. Same thing here with Rey. She relies on guidance from people who have a lot of past baggage in Han, Luke, and Kylo. But ultimately, she must forge her own path forward, and this may be the way forward for the future of the Jedi.

 

It's not about one person being better. They each build on eachother.

Qui-Gon was better than the old Jedi.

Yoda and Obi-Wan built on Qui-Gon.

Luke built on Obi-Wan and Yoda.

Rey will build on Luke.

 

Well, we have no idea really what Luke did as a Jedi master, because we never saw Luke with his apprentices, so we have no idea whether he built on yoda or Obi-Wan, though I would assume he would pass on the techniques they taught him.

But Rey can’t build on Luke. She was never really taught by him, and has no idea what yoda or Obi-Wan taught him. She may end up making some of the same errors as the PT Jedi, because she has no idea what they did or how they did it. This is what happens when you have a character who simply downloads skills from someone else, but is never taught philosophy or traditions or what works or what doesn’t, and who is never guided or mentored. It’s a mess. But, of course, I am expecting Rey to be a perfect Jedi teacher, even though she was never taught herself. Rey never makes any mistakes, and everything seems to be given to her without her needing to earn it.

I still think it’s awful that the filmmakers took away Luke’s legacy and left him with no accomplishments at all. It’s not a good idea to raise a new character by diminishing and making irrelevant a beloved iconic character, in my opinion, as that may backfire on the new character.

 

We know, per the novelisation, he improved upon them somewhat (non-attachment, etc).

Are you just going to keep assuming Luke won't ever talk to Rey again?

 

@DarthPhilosopher , I did not read the novelization; nor do I plan to do so. Information like that should be in the film itself. It’s interesting to hear that Luke did improve on the old order though. So what went wrong? Why did half the Jedi go dark? I have heard posters say that it’s good that Luke isn’t restoring the Jedi because Rey will do everything differently. If it didn’t work for Luke, why should it work for Rey, who has never even been taught herself?

I really don’t expect Luke to have a real role in ix. If the filmmakers wanted him to teach or mentor Rey, Luke wouldn’t have been killed. He didn’t need to die after the force projection. The reason that he did means that they wanted to get rid of him or had no future plans for him. Maybe he will make an appearance at the end with other force ghosts to smile at successful Rey, but I am not even sure that will happen. Luke and Rey never had a relationship. They never cared about one another.

Disney and LFL really do seem to be trying to “kill the past”, and we know that they said that they wanted “ move away from the skywalkers,” so I really don’t think Luke is going to be training Rey from beyond the grave.

 

The whole message of the film is that there will be failures, but that's okay. Rey will fall in some ways also.

 

Obi Wan got killed, and he still appeared to Luke and gave him advice. Yoda died, and he still appeared and gave advice. There is absolutely nothing in this movie that suggests any of the things you say. On top of that, Rian Johnson specifically said that having Luke die was done to allow him to appear in a completely new and interesting fashion. Seriously, you couldn't be more wrong about this whole thing. You somehow manage to not only ignore what the movie itself says, but also what the people in charge of making these movies are saying.

Neither Disney nor Lucasfilm is in any way trying to "kill the past", it is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that. They brought back old characters, they made a movie about the Death Star plans, they are telling the story of the young Han Solo, none of this could be further away from trying to kill the past. Nor did TLJ try to tell anyone that the past needs to be killed. Luke thought that maybe it was time to let the Jedi vanish into history, and he was wrong, as he himself clearly stated at the end of the movie. Kylo Ren mentioned this idea, and he's the villain, and he is wrong. That's the whole point! It's truly amazing how people cling to this one line spoken by the villain, yet seem to have lost all memory of what the counter-argument was.

They are "moving away from the Skywalkers" to broaden the franchise and allow different stories to be told. That's the extent of it. This has happened in the past as well. Only that know we get it in the movies as well, while in the past, stories that didn't center on the Skywalkers were limited to books, comics and games.

 

That’s why is name comes up in red. The khakis are clearly implied.

Btw, that has happened to me in Target. Made the mistake of wearing a red sweater and khakis one night after work. Was picking up some stuff, gotnaskes where the dishes were.

 

Fascinating how we can all have such diametrically opposing takes on the exact same movie; for me the entire point of TLJ was that it left Luke with a MASSIVE legacy, becoming a legend once again and saving the entire galaxy by preserving the Jedi and the spark of hope against the First Order. A greater accomplishment than, for instance, his old Legends self ever managed.

 

Agreed. I love the idea that his arc in TLJ boils down to an act of sacrifice and myth-making that ensures that despite Ben Solo's fall and his Luke's loss of faith, the Jedi will be reborn and continue to be a beacon of hope in the darkness.