ST Rey Skywalker/Daisy Ridley Discussion Thread

Crait:
Ice Foxes:

I suspect you might be surprised what portion of people who aren't happy with Luke's portrayal have never read the EU. (Speaking about the general audience of course, people who go on Star Wars forums like this site are much more likely to be hardcore fans who have consumed everything)

 

Honestly, the latter only seemed to matter to him insofar as using it as an excuse for having abandoned his friends and the galaxy at large. It's one thing to blame yourself and only yourself but he doesn't. He shifts responsibility all the time.

I accused him of that because literally no one in this thread is asking for Luke to be depicted that way. It's a moot point at best.

Luke has no semblance of wisdom though. Everything about him in TLJ is a complete failure. No one's asking that Luke be a perfect individual. It's just kind of awful when you literally strip away every aspect of what originally made him who he was. When the temple was in ruins, did he ever think of all the people who were going to die at the hands of Kylo Ren if he didn't at least try to stop him? Seems like he didn't. Did he ever think that his friends' lives were in mortal danger as a result of this? Guess that never occurred to him either. Would Luke seriously even contemplate killing a member of his own family for what essentially amounts to thought crime? Given the fact that he let Vader live in his last duel with him, someone who actually did terrible things, I can confidently say that he wouldn't. Would Luke seriously start blaming on his long since dead predecessors who managed to keep a millennium of peace for his own failures? You know, the ones he learned from in the first place? I sure didn't but you know what, I guess he was just that hopelessly useless all along.

That's what I mean. When you write a character like Luke in this fashion, it's important to at least keep a core of what he once was intact and there are ways to do that tastefully without gratuitously showing him off. That last part is important since that's why I think obi-arin was strawmanning people with the dissenting point of view. No one was asking that Luke should have been perfect here. No one. What I'm seeing is that more people think the way he was portrayed had, at least, bordered on character assassination.

What I was talking about veers pretty heavily away from the realm of "just making mistakes" and "just bad judgement". No, this was Luke considering that countless lives may be lost as a result of his own actions and his response is basically "Meh." If expecting someone like Luke to care about that is wanting him to be a perfect shining knight then that's a pretty low bar.

 

I think Luke on Crait is up there with Luke on the death on emotional level.

 

Also, as far as Rey is concerned, her absolute lack of a believable internal struggle only makes the vapidity inherent in many of the narrative choices surrounding Luke even more apparent.

 

Actually.....yes!
That was the point of his character, he was a pirate but underneath he had a soft heart.
Even Snoke knew that.

 

@Alliyah Skywalker , I agree with you about everything in this post.

I especially agree about Luke never fighting again. Notice that he took the time to retrieve his lightsaber. If he weren’t planning to fight again, he would have left it, as he didn’t have much time before the Death Star exploded anyway. Jedi aren’t pacifists. The Jedi had lightsabers and were the “ guardians of peace and justice,” as Ben kenobi told Luke. In order to guard and defend, Jedi would sometimes need to fight.

That’s also why I think Luke was wrong about the Jedi . The old republic Jedi were able to Serve and protect the republic and the galaxy for over a thousand generations. That’s an amazing feat! They didn’t cause Palpatine; they were his victims. And ending the Jedi is not going to stop evil. In fact, ending the Jedi just gives evil free reign. Luke was hiding on an island when he KNEW that Snoke and Kylo were out there in the galaxy. Who better to deal with darkside force users than a light side Jedi? Yet the only Jedi in the galaxy cowardly hid on that island for SIX YEARS instead of dealing with the evil, shirking his responsibility to the galaxy and his friends and leaving them all vulnerable to the evil. Evil wins when good men and women do nothing.

@K2771991 , I am sorry that my negativity bothers you. You are very lucky that you love the ST. I truly wish that I could have loved it too. I certainly WANTED to love it. Unfortunately for me, I absolutely HATED just about everything about it. It destroyed Star Wars for me by ( in my opinion), ruining the OT characters that I loved and killing all of them while taking away their achievements and leaving them with no lasting legacies. The ST also made the foundational OT films basically unnecessary and pointless while voiding Anakin/Vader’s victory of destroying the Sith and turning the skywalker saga into the Palpatine saga. Luke, Leia, and Han’s happy, satisfying, optimistic ending was ripped away from them, and replaced with their nihilistic, sad, cynical, depressing ending in TROS. They are dead; their accomplishments are gone; they leave no biological offspring; they leave no positive legacies; even Luke and leia’s lightsabers are buried.( which is really stupid. Couldn’t a future Jedi apprentice use them or couldn’t they be put in a Jedi museum or something) It’s almost like the filmmakers wanted to completely wipe away all traces of the OT films and characters.

I hate all of this. I didn’t find the ST films to be fun or uplifting or hopeful or entertaining. For me, they were the exact opposite: depressing, pessimistic, nihilistic, and awful. You are lucky that you like them and can enjoy them. Unfortunately, I don’t, and there is nothing positive that I can say about them except that I liked the characters of Finn, Poe, and Rey in TFA ( but lost interest in the first two and came to actively dislike and resent Rey in TLJ) , and I liked the Porgs and BB8. So, sadly, I am afraid that my posts are likely to continue to contain a lot of “negativity”. I truly wish that it wouldn’t be that way, but the ST films were truly terrible for me and destroyed what I loved about SW. I can’t even watch the OT films that I used to love anymore. That’s how much damage the ST films caused for me.

 

Well I dont know what you even said earlier tbh.

However, I dont think its TLJ that struggles with Rey as a character. I think it is The Force Awakens. In A New Hope, Luke's aunt and uncle are both killed, so his drive is very believable. In The Force Awakens there isn't much of that for Rey. There is focus on the character, but there is also focus on Finn, and Kylo and Han and poe is there too. They are treating it like an intro a bit too much, imo, for a trilogy that is meant to be the closing to a nine part saga. Too many new "main" characters, which could work but the old main characters are in some ways given more precedence.

@ChildOfWinds

I actually share many of the same sentiments as you do. However for myself it is very easy to separate Disney and Lucas as authors. I personally would have preferred Lucas direct. That's the biggest bummer imo. Or let down, really. With that said I dont see the purpose in hating what was made or denying the positive aspects when many talented people worked on the films.

What would be your thoughts if Lucas's story came out and things were actually closer to it than you thought? What if when he said "theres nothing new" he meant visually and structurally. What if it comes out that TLJ, when he said it was beautifully made, it turns out he said so because it was much closer to his vision?

 

I honestly would have preferred Rey having always wanted to get off Jakku in the first place but ultimately being unable to for some reason until she departs with Finn (and/or Poe but that requires some rewriting) and having abandoned all concept of a family returning for her because then Han being killed and Finn being wounded at Kylo Ren's hands actually matters.

 

The sad thing is that the Force Awakens actually does make Han's death and Finn's injury matter.

The Force Awakens concludes Rey's desire for a family with the scene linked below.



Her longing for someone to come back for her was finally answered and it was by her friends. It means the world to her and it signifies that they are her found family - her real family.


Rey wasn't just weeping over the death of a friend. She was weeping because she had found her family and lost it in the same day.

When she fights Kylo Ren, she is cleared scared, but she is also clearly pissed because, of course, she is: she had finally found what she had been waiting for all her life and Kylo Ren took it away from her (in addition to everything that he directly did to her)

Unfortunately, The Last Jedi (and Rise of Skywalker continued this, to be fair) regressed her journey by focusing on the subject of her parents even though they were no longer that relevant to her story; by the time that Rey decided to go to Luke's island, she had effectively moved on. She had accepted that her parents weren't going to come back for her and/or that she was no longer going to wait for them. She had found her family - one that cared about her - and a direction in life.

That doesn't mean that her abandonment issues wouldn't haunt her, but it does mean that her story no longer revolves around her parents. They were the starting point of her journey in the Force Awakens and the rest of her journey in that movie was about moving past that point onto the next one.

An important part of Rey's journey in the Force Awakens was about no longer letting her parents' abandonment define her life and let it revolve around them. It was about letting go so that she could finally start living her life.

 

Yeah, agreed, as this was mostly what I was referring to.

 

I would hate the ST films just as much if Lucas had written the same story. It would still be a terrible, nihilistic story that destroyed the OT characters and their achievements and left them with nothing, and would have still made the OT films meaningless and unnecessary. However, as I have said before, I am sure that the Lucas story would not have been the same as what we got from the ST by RJ and JJ. In the first place, the films we got do not seem to have been well-planned ahead of time, and things like who rey is seems to have changed from film to film, and the inclusion of Palpatine seems to have been added after TLJ where Snoke was killed off. I doubt that Lucas would have ruined Anakin/Vader’s victory by having Palpatine return. We know that Lucas had “ grandchildren” for Anakin, so there were at least two next-generation skywalker characters. At least one of them would likely have been good and not evil.

I actually know that the story would not have been the same if it had been Lucas’ story though, because Bob Iger revealed in his book that they had thrown out the Lucas story treatments. He hinted that Lucas was not very happy about it and (rightly, in my opinion), felt betrayed.

I can’t help hating the ST films. It doesn’t matter if a lot of “ talented people worked on them”. I hated the story; I hated what the films did to the OT characters ( and ST characters, especially Rey, for that matter), and to the OT films. I can’t like or enjoy something just because people worked hard on them. That’s not the way watching films work. You either like it or you don’t. You either enjoy it or you don’t. You don’t have to like a film just because people work on it. Talented people work on almost all films. Some are entertaining for me and others aren’t.

Rey should have been a legacy character; the daughter of either Luke or Leia. She probably would have been in a Lucas story. That would have given her more reason to care about what happened to Kylo, ( and maybe there wouldn’t even have been a new fallen skywalker in a Lucas story); and it would have tied the three trilogies together better, while giving the Skywalker family a better ending, with a GOOD skywalker descendant left standing at the end, instead of a good Palpatine. Having her be a skywalker would have made the story at least a little more satisfying. It would have given the Skywalker family a legacy. It also likely would have meant that it was still a skywalker and not a Palpatine who eventually restores the Jedi order.

 

I'm still trying to decide if that lightsaber design is dumber than Maris Brood's lightsaber tonfa or not.

 

And what's wrong with niche?

Traditional heroism, IMO, is overdone. TLJ was a breath of fresh air to me (though I can understand why other peaple did'nt like it, even if I think peaple are to aggressive in that dislike) in that regard, especially after decades of EU Luke (who I want to stress that I do like as a character). I did'nt know I wanted something new with the character until I saw the movie, but now that I have it I can't imagine never wanting it.

I don't think it is - ultimatly peaple seem to be disliking Luke becuase of what they wanted or imagined he should be, so headcanon seems the most accurate term for the situation; perhaps perconcieved notions would be better, though?

And if your logic is that TLJ made a bad choice becuase it did'nt go for the popular and obvious choice then, no offense, but that makes no sense and I firmly disagree. Speaking as the guy who was one of the unpopular kids, what's popular is not always good.

And IMO that just goes to show why Johnson's approch was better then Abrams - better to try and please nobody while making a movie with a vision that some peaple won't like then try to please everyone with a film with no vision.

He should'nt have been, though. That's kinda the point of the character - he's the "true" Jedi and the others have lost their way.

I'd say TLJ Luke is fairly unique - as far as I can recall we've never had a Jedi Master who contemplated murder and sucuumed to a deep depression afterwards. The only way he's akin to Obi-Wan and Yoda is they both went into exile, but their reasons why were totally different.

Maybe, but I suspect there's a great deal of overlap.

He does actually blame himself. I can't recall him blaming anyone but himself for what he did.

Why is that a bad thing, though? I think it was an interesting choice to dipict him as having failed in rebuilding the order and fallen victim to depression due to the cost of the hubris and overconfidence in his abilities that took hold after he came to believe his own legend.

It made him seem much more Human and belivable to me, and even if one does'nt like it I don't see why that makes it an objectively bad choice; IMO Johnson's vision for the character is just as valid as any other fans.

Luke believed that further interference from him - the person he believes created the problem - would only cuase more problems, so by running away to ensure the Jedi died out he belived he was helping. He was wrong, of course, a fact the movie makes clear and he ultimatly reconizes, but he was also in deep despire and deeply depressed, and peaple don't think rationally under those circomstances.

Luke flipped out on his father and nearly cut him down in a red rage just becuase of some weak-*@$# half-threat agianst Leia that Vader had no way of carrying through with, so yes, I do believe 100# Luke would contemplate killing Ben for a breif second becuase he saw a glipse of a possible future were he brought immense suffering onto multipule peaple.

Considering that Luke does'nt blame his predecessors for his faliures, then no, I don't think he would do that.

A character being dipicted in a way you don't like is'nt "character assassination." I did'nt like the way Anakin was dipicted in the PT becuase it clashed strongly with how I imagined him being dipicted, so does that make it character assasination? After all, that's the same reason don't like how Luke was dipicted, is'nt it? Becuase it's not how you felt he should be dipicted?

I like the idea behind it; you can flip it up and get a sword or flip it down to get a double-bladed saber, and if you want to suprise and opponent you can do that in the middle of combat - your in a saber lock and you drop the lower half, then before they can react us their own pressure to angle the weapon and slice at them from below.

And I though Brood's tonfasabers looked pretty cool

I don't think either are bad venues, though certainly some peaple would enjoy one genre over the other. IMO, though, I think Star Wars is a big enough francise for both. It gives the saga a variety that I wish it had more of.

Perhaps we have different standerds of belligerence then, but I do feel like their is a lot of anger aimed at the ST films. IMO it seems inordinate and IMO it seems to have started to rise in the past few months.

You can be belligerent towards inanimate things.

I don't think it makes me so crazy to want us all to get along and try and understand each others views, as well as not act so dramatic over things we don't like. The ST films are just movies, at the end of the day, and yet a lot of peaple her act like they killed their cat or something.

I want to have good discussions about this and I want to understand the opposing side's views, but those things are both very hard to do when so much of these threads are clogged up with negativity and the opposing side is so aggressive in their views and dissmissive of others - for instance I'd rather my conversations with ChildOfWinds be more like the below exchange and my exchanges with Alliyah be more like that at the top of this (unfortunatly to long) post, rather then how the majority of our exchanges go.

Jedi are'nt pacifists, but their not warriors either. They only fight when forced to or when it's nessesery to defend peaple, and they don't carry lightsabers as weapons, they carry them as tools for defense, and ideally when forced to fight they should find ways to end combat without killing their opponent or - as Luke did in TLJ and Rey did in TROS - only fight defensivly, rather then offensivly, letting their opponent defeat themselves.

“Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.”
- Sun Tzu.

Luke was supposed to be wrong about that, though.

I supose it depends on how you look at it. I can see why one might see it that way, but I don't really see why the OT heros dying in the end is bad - everyone dies eventually, and not everyone gets a happy ending - and I definantly think their accomplishments outlived them and they left positive legecies. Nor do I think Palpatine's ressurection voided Anakin's victory over him, as it still happened, but I suppose I can see why that would be fustrating.

I can't imagine disliking a film series so bad that it effects my view of anouther film series, but I'm sorry that it had such a negative effect on you. Hopefully that will pass with time and you'll find a way to comparmentalize the OT from the ST.

Um...Rey's parents and her wanting to find them was still an overhanging plot thread at the end of TFA. It was never resolved.

 

Based on what?

 

Based on the fact that it was just left hanging and never resolved.

The last time it's adressed is the exhange between Maz and Rey, and while Maz tries to convince Rey that their never coming back Rey rejects her reasoning, does'nt listen and runs off, with no indication made by the film that she later relizes Maz was correct; it's not until the end of TLJ, after she learns the "truth" about her parents, that she gives up on them and truly embraces the family she's made for herself (the Resistence).

 

My entire point was basically meant to be a counter to the assumption that people in general would have been fine with TLJ-Luke if Legends had never existed or something. I think a lot of people who were put off by TLJ-Luke never read a word of Legends in their lives, probably don`t even know it ever existed. They just don`t like arthous-y stuff and never will.

I think TLJ-Luke overall was divisive because it diverged so much from the traditional approach to heroism. That would remain true if indeed Legends had never existed. By nature, niche is niche and therefore will "sell" to less people than mainstream would.

I actually wasn`t making a judgement on the value of either choice. Sure, I hate the choices made in TLJ with Luke, just as others seem to love them. But completely unrelated to that I truly believe that it would have always been divisive, simply because that approach will have less of an outreach than the traditional one. And traditional depictions have not remotely gone out of style. Lots of people still love it and their perspectives hold value, too.

You love the niche approach for being exactly what it was. I`m someone who likes traditional heroism in general but goes by a case-by-case scenario on what I enjoy in a story. Sometimes strange and not traditional works for me. What I saw and heard before watching Thor Ragnarok was pretty off-putting to me and some overly comedic moments in the movie stil lare but overall I enjoyed it. TLJ just didn`t. I don`t think RJ could ever work for me, what he seems to go for looks to be stuff I abhor. Having learned my lesson, I will simply steer clear of him. Would be nicer if it had just happened with a character or franchise that was less dear to my heart but what can you do.

 

I absolutely agree with everything you said but I would add that my family rented Knives Out the other day and I actually thought it was really entertaining. I haven't seen any of his movies but those two so I don't know what represents more "typical" RJ but I just thought that was worth noting.

 

No, it doesn't. How Anakin is in the PT makes a lot of sense considering what we know about Vader in the OT.

Two things. One, the idea of Vader not being able to carry through with that is questionable at best.

Two, the fact that you simply can't concede that you're wrong and that you're blatantly omitting context when it comes to comparing Luke's duel with one of the most dangerous warriors in the galaxy in ROTJ to Luke sneaking up on his nephew in his sleep, invading his mind and contemplating his murder blows my mind. Those are two completely different things. The relevant thing about the former is that even in the situation Luke is in and even after all Vader has done, Luke still chooses to not to kill him because he was already defeated. That's the point. Confrontation between Vader and Luke was inevitable but Luke's heroism was deciding to relent even if many others (Leia, especially) would have killed him anyway. He saw that was exactly what the Emperor wanted. These two situations are nothing alike and considering how Luke feels about family, what happened between him and Ben was, by and large, character assassination. Leaving his own friends of many years to their likely demise without even trying to do anything at all is character assassination.

He implicitly blames the PT Jedi a lot for his own failures. Otherwise, he would have never brought them up in the first place.

 

Perhaps your right, but honestly I have a hard time imagining half as many peaple would be upset if their was no alternative version of Luke who had been built up - no matter how he was shown TLJ Luke was always going to be compared, favorably or unvarably, to his post-ROTJ dipictions in Legends, simply becuase he was "replacing" that interpretation of the character.

Well IMO trying to make something sell to the most peaple is folly. You should try to tell an interesting story that you want to tell, not mass-market something with the goal of appealing to the most peaple.

I don't mind traditional heroes, it's just that by-and-by I find them rather overdone and (more often then not, but not always) . I'm very much a person who perfers Batman and Tony Stark over Superman and Captain America, the DCEU Harley Quinn over the CW Supergirl or Kira Nerys over William T. Riker (or, say, TLJ Luke Skywalker over EU Luke Skywalker). I don't think traditional depictions of hereos have gone out of style, nor do I think their is'nt still value in such dipictions, it's just that they've become a little stale for me.

Ironicly I hated the first two Thor films (I'd go so far as to say I thought they were hot garbage - in my opinion of course - but I would have had to stay awake through them in order to make that judgement) and did'nt much care for the character in his pre-Ragnarok Avengers movies, but he's now one of my favorite characters in the MCU becuase of that film.

To me it did'nt; I had long imagined - and was expecting - a totally different dipiction of Anakin Skywalker based on what little the OT had told us of him and what scarce little pre-fall information the EU had of the character up to that point.

And I was very upset when the films did'nt deliver on what I had assumed they would, which to me seems like very much the same as what's being discussed here. My personal, perferred vision for Anakin did'nt make Lucas's vision for the character invalid, though, just like yours for Luke don't make RJ's vision for that character invalid or "character assasination"; forgive me, but I really don't see the difference between me having preconcived notions about how I wanted Anakin to be dipicted and you haveing preconcived notions about how you wanted Luke to be dipicted.

I did'nt omit any context, and why would I concede I'm wrong when I don't think I am?

I see Luke contempating killing Ben for a brief second becuase he believes he see a vision of him going evil and doing horrible things perfectly in character and consistent with what we've been shown prior, considering that he flipped up and very nearly did kill - not just merely thought about it, actually made the attempt and nearly carried through with it all the way - Vader for a much weaker reason.

And he chose not to kill Ben either, so...

Agian, no it's not. A character being dipicted in a way you don't personally like is'nt character assassination.

He blames the PT Jedi for two things - the training of Vader and the rise of Sidious (both of which they are responsable for, at least partially, as the narrative of the PT itself made clear). When does he blame them for anything he did? He explicitly blames himself for what he did, not them.

 

I'm pretty sure Vader could find Leia if he wanted to. Of course he couldn't find her at that exact moment. He captured her twice in the OT. He'd probably torture her or so Luke thought which must have enraged him.

 

And he never should have been even close to that position in the first place. That's my point. Even the contemplation of it was absurd. Especially considering that Ben had done nothing at that point.

A guy who spares someone like Vader isn't going to contemplate murdering someone like Ben at that point.