Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Post-release)
- Thread starter Vivek
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robn1
Master Member
It's called bait and switch.
NakedMoleRat
Legendary Member
But it’s okay because Rey took the name Skywalker, so everyone has been honored.
Cephus
Master Member
No, their graves have been crapped on.
sztriki
Sr Member
I like that Mark Hamill is back in the public eye, he's a delight to listen to during Q and As, interviews and seems to be enjoying it a lot. He gave a really good performance in TLJ regardless of what I think of the script and the way the character was handled. And I'm happy they all got a fat paycheck. So that's a good outcome of this I guess.
Joek3rr
Master Member
We've talked about this some before, but I think it's a....hmm....middling middle film. The problem with a middle chapter is that it depends entirely on what comes before and what comes after. I think that had RJ done the entire series, TLJ would've been indisputably amazing. But following on the heels of JJ's TFA and then being follwed by ROS, the entire thing ends up diminished because the parts just don't work together. I mean, they work....enough....but tonally they're so wildly different that it ends up being really jarring.
I mean, that happens to plenty of people who are naive and wildly idealistic in their youth to cynical and embittered in middle age and later life. That's....kinda just life, ya know? I'd also argue that JJ set up a lot of this, albeit perhaps inadvertently.
Like, ask yourself for a second "Why was Luke all alone on that planet for so many years, in spite of all the stuff going on in the galaxy?" What would the reasons be? Why would Luke abandon the Republic and his friends and the Jedi?
Simply putting Luke on the planet alone already introduces the whole "Luke is tarnished" aspect of the films. The Luke hero of the OT wouldn't have gone in the first place. The guy that many people were expecting to see would have stuck around, would have fought to save Ben, would have tried to redeem him earlier, etc., etc., etc. Instead, TFA opens with "LUKE SKYWALKER IS MISSING!!"
Now, my guess is that JJ didn't really have a clear idea why Luke was missing, or at least his ideas were sort of hazy and not all that defined. I suspect JJ removed Luke from the picture for mechanical reasons, namely "There's no way to include this incredibly powerful Jedi master in the entire story, and also have the new generation be effective heroes. So, we have to sideline him. Ok, send him off to a random planet for the first film, and have Rey find him at the end and...uh....we'll.....figure it out later. Now, say the lines faster! More intense!"
But when you start unpacking what possible things would have made Luke leave AND stay gone at this time of need, the list of reasons starts getting pretty short. Having such an utter personal failure as his moment of contemplating killing Ben? AND the associated devastation that follows in the wake of it? (Snoke gets a new dark side recruit, Han and Leia split up, the Jedi are destroyed again, all because Luke had this moment of weakness.) All of that would make good sense as to why he'd hide away: he's deeply ashamed and believes that he himself is more of a problem than a hero. All of that makes perfect sense internally. All of it explains why Luke is gone in TFA.
It would arguably make even less sense to have Luke be off meditating while the galaxy is on fire, and refusing to come back, only to have Rey show up and for him to say "Ah. Once again, I must return to the fray. Come with me, my young Padawan, and I shall teach you to kick Sith ass all the way back to Korriban." That might be satisfying for fans of Luke, simply because it's fun to watch him kick ass and teach an apprentice, but it wouldn't jive narratively. It's EXACTLY the kind of thing that JJ would have done if he'd been in charge of the 2nd film, though, because it's all about what feels nice in the moment if you don't really interrogate it any further, but -- again, just like JJ's films -- if you stop and think about it for, like, 3 seconds you start saying "Heeeeeeyyyyy.....what the hell?!"
So, long story short, blame JJ for the setup of removing Luke from the film, without bothering to think of why Luke would be gone in the first place.
I think a lot of this got overblown, and in many cases by the people who really did like the film. You can not like his film and not be sexist, but a LOT of the dudes who were really vocal online were absolutely sexist, and many said some seriously sexist and racist things towards Kelly Marie Tran. So, those people get a harsh response, and then fans of the film jump on and shout them down, and THEN someone else comes along and says "I didn't like it because it didn't jive with my idea of who Luke is" and the fans jump on THEM as well. But that's just internet fandom and the dumpster fire that is Twitter.
But there absolutely was sexism and racism involved in a bunch of the criticism of TLJ. That wasn't the entirety of it, but it was there.
And it wasn't JJ either......
It was George's idea that Luke would have disappeared into self-exile. That was continued by Michael Arndt after George hired him to write VII while suggesting Luke not be discovered until the end of VII. After Michael left, it was JJ and Lawrence Kasdan that implemented the change from Luke being found partway through, to being found at the end.
Mark is such an underrated actor and I agree that his performance was top notch in TLJ despite it essentially being a totally different character, even in Mark's eyes, and the script being a total disaster.
Despite the many failings of the ST Mark is still without question one of my favorite actors and Luke is still my favorite character in the series.
Mark as a person seems like one of the few people in the business who never let his fame go to his head and that humility is one of the reasons I admire him as a person as much as I do as an actor.
cboath
Master Member
As has been said over and over by many people, he didn't have to self exile himself in such a crappy manner. No setting out the worst threat on the galaxy in 30 years and saying 'f it, i quit'. PLENTY of other plausible explanations that don't trash the character.
Joek3rr
Master Member
And he didn't.
From the opening crawl of The Force Awakens. "Luke Skywalker has vanished.
In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen..." The First Order doesn't make its self known until a year after Luke has vanished.
sztriki
Sr Member
Wait how did he know about the First Order then? He cut himself off from the Force so had no connection with anyone yet seemed to know how big the First Order was (not just going to stand them down with a lazorsword goaway). Did he have a Space Times subscription? Or did he hear that the first time when Rey showed up? In which case it's the same result that Cboath was saying, he hears that the worst threat in the galaxy is on the lose, his best mate is killed and he's like f it, I did quit. Not sure which one is worse for me.
Joek3rr
Master Member
NakedMoleRat
Legendary Member
How did force ghost Yoda knock him on the noggin with his cane and how did force ghost Luke catch a lightsaber?
Since it apparently bears repeating, or since it keeps being dismissed as somehow "not the same thing", the same way Force ghosts can push aside vines and sit on logs. Just because it took Obi-Wan a little while to pull himself back together to that point doesn't mean it can't be done at all. Yoda had decades, and Luke had both of them to guide him -- either theoretically in the intervening time we didn't see, or after he became one with the Force, himself.
sztriki
Sr Member
We've been through this ad nauseum and I'm guilty as charged for bringing it up again. My point was that I genuinely didn't realize that Luke had no knowledge whatsoever of the First Order at all.
It's okay. It's something we all needed to read between the lines to glean. Some like doing that with stories, some don't. Some stories are better at the subtext, some worse. It's been what I've been saying for five years, now -- there was too much that happened prior ot TFA that we needed to know to understand what was going on... Stuff that wasn't more than touched on in TLJ or TROS, so the "revealing it as we go" conceit fails. Even the ancillary material has only partially explained.
Five years before TFA, everything was hunky-dory. Luke and Ben were off in the Unknown Regions "looking for something". Some surmise it's the location of the first Jedi Temple, but for some reason I don't think so. While they were out of contact, Leia's true parentage was discovered and outed. The worst thing, for her, was that she and Han had never found the right time or the right way to tell Ben about Anakin/Vader, so that was how he found out, once he and Luke got back into range of the news.
She had, at the time, been investigating strangeness out in the fringes of known space -- discovering evidence of some group gathering its resources outside Republic purview. But since it was now out that she was Vader's daughter (never mind the actual circumstances), her attempts to warn were seen as a power grab. So she quit the Senate and formed the Resistance from people who believed her. At this point, not even she know what this group was called.
Leia told Han in TFA that it was Snoke who turned Ben. Gonna guess Ben was shocked and dismayed, but was working through it until Snoke fed the fire. The circumstances of that are utterly unknown. From the way Leia said it, it sure seems like she knows Han knows who Snoke is. So how did they all encounter him and when? Did they all go trying to find out more about this group -- Han and Leia and Luke and Ben (and maybe some other Resistance folks) -- and ran across Snoke then? Did Han and Leia take Ben to try and talk to him and something happened, so Luke remained unaware? *eloquent shrug*
All we know is that sometime after all that happened, Luke was drawn to Ben's sleeping chamber back at his training center, had his moment of kneejerk, and 24-to-29-year-old Ben (not a teenager, people) woke to see his uncle standing over him with saber ignited, reacted, pulled everything down around Luke's ears, and left. I need to actually find time to read The Rise of Kylo Ren. Hoping it answers some of the timeline questions.
And we're left still not knowing how long Luke's been in exile at the beginning of TFA. Poe says Leia's been looking for the map fragment "for a long time", so probably over a year. But not a decade, either. There's just too much we don't know. And it s not our fault as the audience that we don't. It is not only unclear -- most of the data is flat-out not there.
Five years before TFA, everything was hunky-dory. Luke and Ben were off in the Unknown Regions "looking for something". Some surmise it's the location of the first Jedi Temple, but for some reason I don't think so. While they were out of contact, Leia's true parentage was discovered and outed. The worst thing, for her, was that she and Han had never found the right time or the right way to tell Ben about Anakin/Vader, so that was how he found out, once he and Luke got back into range of the news.
She had, at the time, been investigating strangeness out in the fringes of known space -- discovering evidence of some group gathering its resources outside Republic purview. But since it was now out that she was Vader's daughter (never mind the actual circumstances), her attempts to warn were seen as a power grab. So she quit the Senate and formed the Resistance from people who believed her. At this point, not even she know what this group was called.
Leia told Han in TFA that it was Snoke who turned Ben. Gonna guess Ben was shocked and dismayed, but was working through it until Snoke fed the fire. The circumstances of that are utterly unknown. From the way Leia said it, it sure seems like she knows Han knows who Snoke is. So how did they all encounter him and when? Did they all go trying to find out more about this group -- Han and Leia and Luke and Ben (and maybe some other Resistance folks) -- and ran across Snoke then? Did Han and Leia take Ben to try and talk to him and something happened, so Luke remained unaware? *eloquent shrug*
All we know is that sometime after all that happened, Luke was drawn to Ben's sleeping chamber back at his training center, had his moment of kneejerk, and 24-to-29-year-old Ben (not a teenager, people) woke to see his uncle standing over him with saber ignited, reacted, pulled everything down around Luke's ears, and left. I need to actually find time to read The Rise of Kylo Ren. Hoping it answers some of the timeline questions.
And we're left still not knowing how long Luke's been in exile at the beginning of TFA. Poe says Leia's been looking for the map fragment "for a long time", so probably over a year. But not a decade, either. There's just too much we don't know. And it s not our fault as the audience that we don't. It is not only unclear -- most of the data is flat-out not there.
Solo4114
Master Member
It's that intentional ball-hiding that really irritates me about JJ's style. Leaving out information doesn't qualify as mystery, and it damn sure doesn't qualify as good storytelling.
Now, some stuff isn't really relevant or important to a given narrative, so it doesn't have to be revealed, but a huge part of the problem is that we're thrown so into the middle of things in a world we already know that we suffer from profound almost culture shock when we're thrown into the middle of the tale.
Psychologically, it's a different.....lift....for the audience to be plunged into a world that they know nothing about and have information be gradually revealed to them, as opposed to a world they know about and are now unfamiliar with. In the one case, you expect "Well, things will be a little different and I won't know everything going on, but the story will reveal itself to me over time." In the other case, it's like you stop reading a book at Chapter 5 and pick up at Chapter 27. Wait, the detective who was investigating the crime is now an alcoholic washout? And the girl he saved is now a Senator, and the serial killer whom we KNOW he plugged in the chest 7 times at the end of Chapter 5 is suddenly walking around in a robot battle suit and has made a deal with the Chinese Triads who had never even appeared before in the book?! WTF is going on here?!
Oh, but wait, you can't find out, because the author of the book cut the chapters in between out, and is only posting them on his website as piecemeal outlines, out of order, every couple of months.
THAT'S MYSTERY, BABY!!!11!!
No, that's just audience manipulation via metanarrative techniques.
Now, some stuff isn't really relevant or important to a given narrative, so it doesn't have to be revealed, but a huge part of the problem is that we're thrown so into the middle of things in a world we already know that we suffer from profound almost culture shock when we're thrown into the middle of the tale.
Psychologically, it's a different.....lift....for the audience to be plunged into a world that they know nothing about and have information be gradually revealed to them, as opposed to a world they know about and are now unfamiliar with. In the one case, you expect "Well, things will be a little different and I won't know everything going on, but the story will reveal itself to me over time." In the other case, it's like you stop reading a book at Chapter 5 and pick up at Chapter 27. Wait, the detective who was investigating the crime is now an alcoholic washout? And the girl he saved is now a Senator, and the serial killer whom we KNOW he plugged in the chest 7 times at the end of Chapter 5 is suddenly walking around in a robot battle suit and has made a deal with the Chinese Triads who had never even appeared before in the book?! WTF is going on here?!
Oh, but wait, you can't find out, because the author of the book cut the chapters in between out, and is only posting them on his website as piecemeal outlines, out of order, every couple of months.
THAT'S MYSTERY, BABY!!!11!!
No, that's just audience manipulation via metanarrative techniques.
HMSwolfe
Master Member
All of that sounds way more interesting than the films it’s meant to prop up
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Ok, the RJ video seems to honestly delve more into what RJ wanted to see and make Star Wars lore fit around that.
The Jedi bring more evil than good? Except they were the peacekeepers of the galaxy and peace lasted under their guidance for decades. Was the PT Jedi order flawed? Yes but it doesn’t mean there should be no order.
Luke not getting involved in V was completely different. It was a clear trap to draw an untrained Luke to Vader to be captured and delivered to Palpatine to turn him to the dark side but Luke went anyway because he wanted to save his friends. Luke is now a master and has the capability to save his friends and others who need him. To not act would be foolish.
seeking a new light, then why did Luke say he came to the island to die? The Luke RJ is describing is different from the one he depicted in his movie.
And this anticiliary material Is still bad story telling. Disney may think it’s an opportunity to extract more cash from its fans but fans only pay of the base product is good. I don’t care about the old geezer in the beginning of VII who gave the map to Poe because he is just a mcguffin.
The order comment is infuriating because it would be incredibly disrespectful and stupid for Luke to come to that conclusion. Oh, despite their years of service, Yoda, Obi Wan, and all of his peers brought more trouble through their service than good. I’m going to just end their legacy and wait for some other person to propose a new, better way to establish peace. Not work on improving the system, just dump it in the trash. Well jokes on you Luke because the Sith returned despite your inaction.
The Jedi bring more evil than good? Except they were the peacekeepers of the galaxy and peace lasted under their guidance for decades. Was the PT Jedi order flawed? Yes but it doesn’t mean there should be no order.
Luke not getting involved in V was completely different. It was a clear trap to draw an untrained Luke to Vader to be captured and delivered to Palpatine to turn him to the dark side but Luke went anyway because he wanted to save his friends. Luke is now a master and has the capability to save his friends and others who need him. To not act would be foolish.
seeking a new light, then why did Luke say he came to the island to die? The Luke RJ is describing is different from the one he depicted in his movie.
And this anticiliary material Is still bad story telling. Disney may think it’s an opportunity to extract more cash from its fans but fans only pay of the base product is good. I don’t care about the old geezer in the beginning of VII who gave the map to Poe because he is just a mcguffin.
The order comment is infuriating because it would be incredibly disrespectful and stupid for Luke to come to that conclusion. Oh, despite their years of service, Yoda, Obi Wan, and all of his peers brought more trouble through their service than good. I’m going to just end their legacy and wait for some other person to propose a new, better way to establish peace. Not work on improving the system, just dump it in the trash. Well jokes on you Luke because the Sith returned despite your inaction.
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