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Notes -
Spoilers!
That moment Luke appeared in front of Ren on the battlefield and survived all of that weapons fire. That was so exciting. Luke was going to lay the biggest fucking beatdown on that Ren guy, who so badly deserved it.
And then it doesn't happen. Instead Luke's entire life ends just trying to be a diversion.
I wish I had seen it in theaters. I bet the disappointment would have been palpable.
I'm still kind of pissed off about it. I sat through that damn movie waiting for closure and it was denied. Luke checks out with basically a whimper.
Well played, Johnson. Definitely peed on Star Wars with that one.
Too bad they had Holdo sacrificing herself to slice that first order ship in half instead of Leia, given that the Carrie Fisher died so soon after. That would have been perfect.
Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.
I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.
The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.
That's true, but I think it's a good feel it's a good example of what I mean when I say that the Jedi from the original trilogy are just very limited and stretched to the limits of what you can narratively do with them. It's very interesting to see a quasi-pacifist hero in a war movie, but you have to really rig the plot to make that work. I don't want to see Luke sitting around in a swamp offering mystical mumbo-jumbo doing nothing, like Yoda, but I also don't want to see him charging in killing everything. He sorta got lucky with RotJ that he could be a pacifist so that Vader could do the actual killing. It's fine to be in inspiration or philosopher, but someone still has to do the actual fighting, and they just never really had a good answer for that.
The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.
How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".
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In theaters, opening night, at that point the levels of Rian Johnson's "I know that you know that I know that you know" subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations had worn me down so much that by that point in the film I felt nothing. I remember being excited that Luke was going to be the badass we desperately wanted to see, being annoyed it was all an illusion, being relieved he was still safe, then just being annoyed/numb that he got killed anyways because fuck it, why not?
I left the theater wondering what the fuck I had just watched. I watched Solo and actually really enjoyed it. It left me thinking only a boomer can make a proper Star Wars movie. I never watched anything Star Wars after that. Not even The Mandalorian. Whatever love I had for Star Wars, which my dog eared West End Games RPG books can attest to, just evaporated after Last Jedi.
IMO it wasn't bad (nor amazing) when I saw it later, but I probably would have seen it in a theater if TLJ hadn't been so bad.
I honestly forget precisely how quickly I'd seen it, and if I watched a RLM review first or not. But I did see it in theaters.
Admittedly my decision to see it was somewhat nonsensical. Because TLJ had already killed Star Wars for me, but perhaps I wasn't quite done with my stages of grief yet. Maybe I'd heard it was good? Maybe Ron Howard seemed a steady enough hand to deliver a competent homage to the boomer childhood pastiche that Star Wars lives in, a dirge for a world that is dead and passing out of living memory faster and faster.
At the end of the day, I look forward to one day watching my de-special editioned fan edit of the original trilogy with my children one day. But that will probably be it.
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I saw it in theaters. It was, indeed, very disappointing. Turns out my childhood hero was completely useless. But then, I don't know what i really expected from one kooky old man.
Chopping the ship in half made me think: "wait, they can do that now? Could they always do that? Makes all their previous fights look kinda dumb if that's the case. Maybe the rebels are all going to become suicide bombers now and kamikaze their way to victory? That's uh... an interesting tactic to show to kids..."
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