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

He probably didn't anticipate his character being portrayed so poorly when he originally signed on.

 

I don't think Lucas was completely disgusted by the old EU, or at the very least he respected it's popularity with fans? Didn't he pull various things from the old EU like Coruscant ?

 

Lucas basically had the same attitude towards the old EU that Disney does now: "That stuff's not a part of my universe so I'll contradict it whenever I want, but at the same time if there's an idea in there that I like then I may include my own version of it while I'm adding things to my universe."

 

Early on, he also dictated what could and couldn't appear in books.

Mad clone of Obi-Wan? Gone.
Man in Darth Vader suit as main villain? Gone.

And so on.

 

Lucas was absolutely right to oppose Luke getting married in the EU. As written, Luke was a loyal friend, yes. But also a loner and a wanderer. He could find a companion like him, sure. But the idea of him getting married (and having kids) always felt off to me.

 

I disagree about that. I don’t think that Luke was a “ loner” or “ wanderer”. I think you might get that impression of him from the fact that TESB and RotJ had him away from his friends quite a bit of the time because he was on Dagobah with Yoda, learning to be a Jedi, or with Vader or Vader/Palpatine for big, important scenes. Luke also grew up on a desert world where there weren’t a lot of neighbors.

But was Luke really a “ loner”? I don’t think so. Despite being on desolate Tatooine, he enjoyed being with his friends, like Biggs. He certainly formed relationships quickly with Ben Kenobi and with Leia, Han, and Chewie; and later, with Lando. Family was also important to Luke. He wasn’t willing to go off with Kenobi until his Aunt and Uncle were killed because he cared about them, and he certainly was interested in knowing about his “ dead” father. He formed a close connection with Leia, and it was Vader’s threat against her, which was the final blow that nearly pushed him over the edge into darkness on the Death Star. It was his friends being in trouble that caused Luke to leave his jedi training before he was finished.

So, I disagree that Luke was a loner and wanderer. He only left his friends when he endangered them or when he was told to go for Jedi training or when responsibilities required it. I could easily see Luke married and a dad. I think he would have been a great father because family seemed so important to him.

 

That’s a fair interpretation. I was simply agreeing with George Lucas, who sees the character as I do.

 

I'm fine either way on Luke being married, but I'll just add that being a loner does not at all preclude you from getting married. It just makes the process of finding a spouse much slower!

 

There are good arguments for either scenarios. It was an interesting coming together between him and Mara though. They were such different personalities and it took a bunch of adventures before it happened.

 

Maybe there was a fan -a 'Rose'- at some point, with his father's lightsaber as a part of it.

Who 'slaughtered' those students? It wasn't Ben, and he did not destroy the temple either...building the temple was -had been- 'someone else's idea for him' according to P.Hidalgo. That would put Luke throwing that lightsaber in TLJ under a different light. Snoke had trained 'at least one other apprentice'. Maybe Rose became...Dooku, or there were more than one people involved.

The saber and Sifo-Dyas and his visions, etc., comes to mind too.
Just a theory, of course.

 

Yeah, man. There's hooded person in the comics telling Luke to 'follow his destiny' after TESB (in a vision, while offering Anakin's lightsaber to him) The individual is wearing gloves, like that force collector kid...and, again, a hooded person is seen in the TFA vision (IDW comic, sep.2017), killing a clan-looking guy wielding what looks like Anakin's lightsaber.
I guess the original lightsaber journey was given an arc, and that arc a character(s), related to Luke before Ben was trusted to him and obviously before Rey.

 

This is very similar to how I view Luke in the ST.

 

I don't understand why people are still comparing Luke's fight with Vader to him planning to kill Kylo in his sleep. They seem like completely different things to me. Regardless the video doesn't really add anything new, mainly the same arguments people have been making for years.

I think it's weird that he says the intent was to have Luke choose to die at the end of TLJ. There may not have been a narrative role for him in the ST, but there would have been plenty of ways for a Jedi master to help out in the fight against the First Order. I think it's actually better to have Luke die anticlimactically than to decide that his five minutes of effort were good enough and it's time to die.

Since this was addressed in the video, I'll say that I don't think that RJ subverted any plan of JJ's. From an interview before TFA it seems like this arc had already been planned by KK from the start. I actually think they did have a rough outline where Rey would search for Luke to solve the galaxy's problems, realize that he wasn't the perfect hero she'd expected and then save the day on her own. The main problem being is that they never came up with a narrative arc for Rey, which is why Luke's arc is the only part that doesn't feel half baked.

Interview I mentioned is here:
https://ew.com/article/2015/08/12/star-wars-luke-skywalker-hooked-jj-abrams/

 

Agreed we all get that the Luke arc is an inversion of the classic mentor arc. I just didn't care for it being done to Luke in that extreme.

 

I've talked with someone about the Luke thing and I got the impression they insisted that I wanted Luke to not be flawed or anything like that and talked about how great Luke was to be a flawed character in TLJ... And then they turned around and tried to say that Luke's abandoning everyone wasn't bad because he's not responsible for the universe or whatever...

So, which is it? Is Luke a flawed broken man or is he totally justified in what he did in parts, but not in others?

I also can't get around the fact that I think the movie presents this great flaw of Luke's, that supposedly he's always had, in him becoming consumed by his passions and anger and such in TLJ with sleeping Kylo (let's ignore for a minute that Kylo is a sleeping nephew who hasn't, as far as I think the movie says, not actually done anything yet, as opposed to a terror of the galaxy threatening his loved ones to him, in the midst of a lull in a fight), but what does the movie do with this great flaw of Luke's? Nothing. Luke's passions and anger isn't developed as a problem, which it clearly is as TLJ shows, isn't explored as a character flaw in TLJ, or resolved as a flaw in TLJ. No one ever brings it up. Luke's grand flaw is, instead, failing him by thinking his choice was made? Huh? Even if I bought that, the movie never explores why Luke would think that, in comparison to Vader. What on earth does that matter and why does that equal Luke considering killing his nephew in his sleep? And I think none of this is really resolved at all by his Yoda talk.

 

Here’s why I love Luke’s role in the ST:

In the original novelization of Star Wars, the prologue says this: “...the Republic rotted from within, though the danger was not visible from outside”. I think this is also the case of the Jedi Order. However, rather than their weakening being from hunger for political power, it was from the more subtle and more frequent corruption of hubris, the excessive confidence arisen naturally from the absence of being tested. The Jedi Order allied themselves so closely with the Republic, that they lost a little of the humility required for true communion with the Living Force. The real power of the Sith, the real evil genius of the rule of two and it’s culmination in Palpatine, is that it allowed enough time to pass for the Jedi Order to undergo this kind of atrophy. Had the Jedi Order been constantly at war with the Sith over the previous millennium, they would have developed more sensitivity to Sith presence, and the idea of them enjoying such a lofty position alongside the senate is questionable.

It seems to me that in the period of time between the events of the OT and the events of the ST, Luke Skywalker underwent this profound realization. That the Jedi, by working too closely with the Republic, by clinging too much to an exonerated seat within the halls of power, had allowed their connection to the Force to weaken and become exploited. Though Luke himself erroneously used this realization to justify some natural cowardice, eventually his strong connection to Leia encouraged him to finally accept the necessity of continuing despite his guilt and help the next generation succeed.

Luke Skywalker was wrong to keep himself exiled but he was correct in his criticism of the old Jedi Order.


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That's never talked about in the ST.

After connecting with Leia, Luke still doesn't go help. He has to get a talking to by Yoda.

Luke never mentions that as apart of failure of the jedi. He never talks about why the jedi failed at all in regards to that or about the republic in general. Interesting idea, but the movie doesn't talk about it.

 

I know, but he stopped shutting himself off from the Force for Leia’s sake. Yoda just walked into the recently-opened Force door.

No, but what he does talk about gives me that impression. I’m not denying that this is my interpretation. But I am saying that I didn’t have to stretch at all to have it.


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Leia could easily have been killed by the FO while Luke was hiding out. They chose to highlight the character's worse traits.