ST Luke Skywalker/Mark Hamill Discussion Thread [SEE WARNING ON PAGE 134]

The way i see it they are choosing the information they want to share. I note how they say the 2012 drafts we actually don’t know how far Lucas got on his drafts were the ones where Luke lived through to IX a 2013 draft or a late 2012 draft. The information is left purposely vague so that they not tell us how everything was when Lucas gave Disney the final story drafts that they bought.

@reyvision have to agree that LFL’s contradiction lies and obfuscations are ridiculous at this point don’t know if they picked that up from Bad Robot but it’s not a good look on them Mark Hamill and the actors have been far more truthful than anyone employed by LFL. I really would like to know what drafts they are talking about and not just have the vague 2012 moniker.

 

Except Hamill isn't referring to the old 80's treatment. He's referring explicitly to the 2012 one, and had regular contact with George in regards to his story ideas. In this interview, he laments the missed opportunity of training Leia in the Force, something that was a much larger focus in Lucas' script:

"This is always something that interest me because we can communicate telepathically and I tell her in one of the movies, I guess the third one, you have that power too. So I always wondered, and I don't read the fanfiction, why she wouldn't fully develop her Force sensibilities and I think that's something George Lucas addressed in his original outline for 7, 8, 9. I was talking to him last week, but they're not following George's ideas so we'll have to wait and see on that one. But it seems like a waste of an innate talent that she should utilize in some way."
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And it's not like Mark and George have irregular contact with one another. Even as late as 2018, Mark has openly stated that he and George converse over the phone about the state of things, and especially the direction of the newer movies. Given the frequency about how much they talk to each other, especially about Star Wars, I think it's highly unlikely that Mark is misinterpreting Lucas' intentions based on his foggy memory of an interview in the 80's. He's had way too much time in recent years personally discussing his role in films with George, both before and after their production, to not know what George's intentions for the ST were.

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In addition, the Art Of the Force Awakens backs up most if not all of what Mark is saying about Luke's role stretching across all three films, thanks to people who were making concept artwork around the ideas pitched in Lucas' treatment while it was still being revised by Michael Ardnt. Doug Chiang provides commentary throughout the book about what skeletal form the story took in its early stages with Ardnt's rewrites, which he and the other artists were basing their work around. And that commentary details Luke having a role in all three films, and dying in the final one. He would train Leia, before meeting his end in the final film, and passing the mantle of guardian of the Jedi Order to her.​

This isn't just Hamill misremembering things. These are elements explicitly from Lucas' treatments, which have been prominently supported by other material, including some published by Disney themselves like the TFA Art Book.

 

I thought about this when I first heard about the new Luke timeline discrepancy; One of the massive problems with TLJ's "I came here to die" Luke is that due to how old these characters are, and the canon ages they decided they were in the flashback, Luke would've had to have sat down and done literally nothing for nearly an entire decade before finally getting off his butt one day and dying to save 12 people.

You can't make me believe that Luke Skywalker could sit down and not see his family for 6 years, then not care when they ask for his help (I believe Mark himself said this as well). To that end, the shorter period of 3 years is slightly more palatable. It could just as easily be a clerical error, but since TLJ they've shown they're not above retconning things and lying about their intentions.

 

no doubt that George was in contact with all the OT3 as it was he who secured them all to return for an ST. Despite what happened i always thought Luke would die in 8 and be a ghost in 9 as it seemed to follow the ghost plot with obi wan and mirroring and all that and the fact George had said he wanted the ST to be ethereal

 

However ethereal Lucas intended the ST to be, I don't think he was planning on redoing the OT's story structure verbatim. If anything, trying to make the new trilogy as distinct and original as possible was something he actively pushed for, and publicly-lambasted TFA for failing to do.

“They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that,” Lucas adds. “Every movie, I work very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new.”

Things didn't improve when Lucas saw the finished movie. Following a private screening, Iger recalls, Lucas "didn't hide his disappointment. 'There's nothing new,' Bob Iger said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, 'There weren't enough visual or technical leaps forward.'
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Just keep all that in mind, because I can already see people taking the recent misinformation in Pablo's book as fact, and will start parading about the idea that the ST "follows Lucas' vision"....when it most certainly wasn't, by the admission of the man himself and the topmost authority at Disney.

There are ways to defend the merits of the ST. Using Lucas as some kind of shield of authority is not one of them.

 

im talking very broad strokes... of course when he sold up he knew there was s chance of loosing the control he'd always had. Especially the details.. the female protagonist.. the dark fallen jedi of skywalker blood, killed off Han, Luke in the nether world would have been there

 

Oh, I wasn't referring to you specifically...I've just seen the habits of the ST fanbase off this forum, and they tend to follow the same trends when it comes to defending these films.

On another minor note, apparently Pablo's new book is riddled with continuity issues and contradictions, including this very glaring one:

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In case you missed it...

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Which is strange. Because a little bird told me that it was the Expanded Universe that was the mess of inconsistencies and contradictions. Oh, well.

 

Correct me if I've made a math error, but wouldn't everything line up if you just change age 50 to age 47? That seems like a (strange, because it's not a natural typo) misprint on the book's part rather than an actual issue with the timeline. Either way I agree on the general premise that it's fishy that the only details that Disney allows out about the original transcripts are the ones that line up with what ended up happening in the ST, and that superficially address some common complaints as if it's not the context behind those decisions that make people upset. (Although tbh I think that's something they genuinely don't understand, which is why they didn't see any problems during production, rather than a case of being willfully ignorant.)

 

So think about this - they killed Luke and Leia in their mid 50s and Han in his 60s (whatever nonsense they have in Solo about his age being different). None of them accomplished anything of permanence, so it's "get these losers off the stage" - the ones whose popularity set the whole universe in motion. I honestly cannot recall anything as cynical outside making Mr. Phelps the villain in Mission Impossible and that is a TV to movie adaptation, not a sequel to one of the biggest film franchises of all time, with beloved characters played by beloved actors, who all agree to come back and reprise their characters, only to have to play them as losers and fools.

Then what we get from Lucasfilm and their band of websites sucking up for goodies (or should I say, Rian Johnson acolytes because, wow, did they turn on the ST with TROS) is to sit down and shut up because, no, really, George came up with all this - when their big boss is ON RECORD as saying that they threw out George's treatments. I mean, it's of a piece with Iger saying to George "well, hey, we never promised you we'd use your treatments." George, who worked his whole career to fight back against Hollywood, got stabbed in the front by Hollywood. Not that he should have ever trusted a former weatherman who stepped over everyone to get where he was and somehow has become beloved (I wish that when he inevitably runs for office there was an actual way to vote against him, rather than just not vote for him).

I'd make a political analogy here, but I'll refrain from it.

 

if Harrison Ford had got his way Han would've died 2 films in... carbon freeze was something of a hedging of bets.. also i don't think George was s massive fan of the EU... and there are still fans upset their stories were not included..

 

I find it interesting that some people are so darned sure of what George Lucas would have done with Luke would have been more satisfying. I don't find it hard to believe at all that the ST storyline we got for Luke is George Lucas's idea. The PT is littered with elements of GL ideas and concepts that turned off a lot of fans permanently.

If anything, it seems like Disney would want to play things very safe and traditional with Luke Skywalker. If I view Disney cynically with as a cash grabbing company, it would seem highly unlikely that they'd want to get rid of Luke or alter his character. It just makes no sense to mess with the IP that way. Meanwhile, Lucas is exactly the one with the sensibilities to NOT give fans what they were expecting. Again, look at his track record with ROTJ, the PT, KOTC, etc.

GL loves to shake things up and Luke being Col. Kurtz and dying seems very much like Luca's thing. Consider: One of the biggest complaint about the ST....that it was too much like the Originals. You know what was unlike the OT? Luke Skywalker.

 

I actually think Luke's role in the ST is very much like the OT, except Luke isn't filling the Luke role (which is given to Rey) but rather a fusion of Obi-Wan and Yoda. Now, if we look at the PT, everything lines up pretty nicely in giving those two Jedi no real 'outs', so to speak. They aren't able to bring down the Empire on there own, so it makes sense they end up where they do in the OT, hiding away, taking action only when they're able. Even then, they have more of an action plan that Luke ever did on Achh-To.

But Luke in the OT doesn't set up that role. He's proactive, always striving to go out and do the right thing, and by the end is the most optimistic character in the saga. To bring him down to the level he is in TLJ is entirely to shift him from being a 'Luke' figure to awkwardly make him an 'Obi-Wan'.

Regarding Lucas' plans, I think there is a prior work of his that does touch on similar areas: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Say whatever you want about that movie, but Indy's character is perfectly in line with what came before. He gets to have a proper mentor role with Mutt, teaching him the ropes and passing the torch. They actually have moments of mutual affection and teamwork. Mutt may not be to everyone's tastes, but to me he's exactly the right contrast to Indy, not too antagonistic, not too much of a pushover. Rey sadly ends up weirdly both dismissive of Luke, abandoning him on the island, and also dependent on him, see all the longing in TFA and the way their meeting is handled in TROS, so their relationship never manages to feel genuine.

So it does seem that Lucas knows how to deal with older 'legacy' characters and creating new generations of heroes, in at least one example. Yes, Lucas likes doing 'new' things with his movies, but he still keeps characters aligned to their existing traits, as he did in the PT and KOTCS, years divorced from the originals.

 

Mentors have to die. It's in the mentor handbook which must always be followed.

 

That's not necessarily what people are arguing. We know Lucas came up with detached Luke, we've known that for years. That alone is already a risk depending on how it's handled, and there are people who were turned off from the Disney ST just from that.

The people that were still around were offended by the reasoning for Luke's detachment and his lack of a proper redemption and mentorship arc. And until LFL can produce George's treatments that say Luke attacked his family and quit for years sucking milk from a creature's teat, I don't wanna hear any more about how "Kurtz Luke" was his idea. Context matters, and trying to make us look like a bunch of whiners by deflecting blame just makes me further distrust Lucasfilm.

If they're so certain that Johnson was 100% in lockstep with Lucas's vision, they should have no problem releasing his full storyline instead of this "pick and choose to create a narrative" crap.

 

Part of the reason why people assume whatever Lucas was planning with Luke would have been better is because what we got in TLJ was the absolute bottom of the barrel. It would be hard to do much worse.

 

I feel like all Disney did was quarantine Luke into an arc that had no consequences to the rest of the trilogy. Hamil isn't famous for his live action roles, so this was the safest thing from their perspective.

 

I'm someone who prefers the Expanded Universe above all else, so if Lucas' trilogy ever came to fruition, I would've mentally regarded it the same way I treat Disney's trilogy: as an alternate continuity that is completely unrelated to the stories I consider to be my true canon. It doesn't impact what I enjoy, and in that lens, I would've been fine with seeing whatever Lucas did with Luke, just out of curiosity. I already have the definitive way for Luke to be handled in the EU, so Lucas can run wild.

The only challenge on Lucas' hands at that point would be to make Luke's on-screen role fulfilling. And if Mark and the TFA Artbook are to be believed, Luke in George's version would've come out of his Colonel Kurtz depression in the first film, and play an active role in the remaining two movies. That already sounds like a massive improvement over the Disney ST, at least to me. I mean, think about how much narrative potential there is to having Luke around in a substantial role in all three films, instead of one film and two glorified cameos a la Disney's version:

Seeing Luke act as an active mentor to the protagonist across all three films would've been really satisfying. It might even have led to some generational clashes between him and the younger characters, maybe even a relationship to develop with them across all three films.

In the ST, the only character Luke really has multiple interactions with is Rey, which with her empty characterization is about as fulfilling as watching him spend the entire film interacting with a tree.

 

That's the aspect of all this that boggles my mind the most. When the sale was first announced and people were bemoaning the fact that Disney was going to "ruin Star Wars", I thought those fears were pretty unfounded if for no other reason than their desire for profit. Now, I absolutely foresaw the possibility of a TFA, which one could argue did in fact ruin Star Wars in and of itself, but the general public's reaction was exceedingly positive, and it made oodles of money, which is exactly why I'm not surprised it got made. But then TLJ came along it played it the exact opposite of safe, both in regards to the OT and to TFA itself, and it seems nobody anywhere among the higher ups was at all concerned by this. Sure enough there was a noticeable drop-off in box office from 7 to 8, and then once again from 8 to 9, with the disastrous Solo sprinkled in between as well. Somehow the same people who saw absolutely nothing wrong with TLJ felt the need to step in and completely scrap both George Lucas' original treatments and CT's version of Episode 9, not to mention the speculation that the Reylo kiss was forced upon JJ from above(emphasis on speculation). So there's a very weird mix of significant corporate meddling in the trilogy and yet RJ seems to have been allowed complete artistic freedom to carry out his vision regardless of the risks. The only logical conclusion I can come to is that the suits simply looked at the script for TLJ and didn't foresee that it would get the reaction that it did, even though it was obvious enough to Mark on set. Corporate big-wigs being wildly out of touch with how their consumer will respond to certain choices certainly isn't an unheard of phenomenon. That being said logical conclusions can only take you so far, as I definitely wouldn't have fathomed that a 4 billion dollar franchise would completely wing a trilogy by 3 different writers/directors with no overall plan to keep them all on the same page, but by all accounts that seems to be what happened.


ETA: Do we know if RJ even had the chance to see the Lucas treatments himself or were they ditched by the time he was brought on board?

 

Indeed, the one thing that's consistent with both the st and the Lucas treatments, is one of the things that I despise the most. The destruction of Luke's new Jedi Order. What a boring reset from BOTH sets of creatives. Now Luke is a totally different matter, as I have no idea how that Luke would have been handled, but the destruction of Luke's academy will never be an idea I find all that inspired or interesting.

As far as Rian seeing the treatments, I've seen nothing to suggest he's seen them, nor that he ever had any interest in looking at them. I have seen a LOT of evidence that he fundamentally mis-understood the inspiration's he looked towards, such as Joseph Campbell, but I can say he at least marginally had interest in looking at it... so go him I guess?

 

That and they hung the franchise on Kylo. KK et al were in love with Adam Driver and having their own Loki/Snape/Anakin and Vader in one. I mean, when even Harrison Ford is saying he's there to support Adam Driver, and Johnson was talking about having to rewrite because certain new characters proved more popular than they expected, it's clear where the priorities were.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think they would trash everything that came before in a "soft reboot" and then get upset when people complained, either.

 

I thought it was a Jedi Temple massacre “rhyme”
“It’s like poetry, it’s so that they rhyme. Every stanza kinda rhymes with the last one.”


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The issue is the Jedi Academy is so new and theJedi aren’t this massive organization so it feels less like a rhyme and more like they just didn’t want more than one Jedi in the film.