Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

And once again, I don't think it matters when he said them only that he said them and believes in them.

Yes and once he understood the full implications of the film, he was on board. He just had to get into the right mindset — again, he explains that he was coming into the film with the idea that "Luke is the eternal optimist" which, in this film, is changed. Once he understood that and once he realized what had changed Luke, he was okay with it.

Also, I think some actor's main jobs (aside from acting) is to protect their character no matter what, so I don't think you can use Hamill's comments as a way to criticize TLJ.

tldr; Hamill's opinions don't really matter.

Edited by alliterator on Mar 24th 2019 at 3:56:45 AM

If I am saying stuff about Luke's inaction being a problem, and Hamill specifically said that Luke's inaction is the problem, then I can quote that. I don't think Hamill has come around and said that no Luke wasn't inactive and so on. Hamill has said interesting stuff about how he saw Luke after the film came out he saw it as a metaphor for how baby boomers like him, and Luke is an icon for baby boomers after all failed millennial and he saw that as being part of what TLJ is about. The earlier generation had failed the newer ones. Which is interesting and compelling and probably close to what Rian Johnston was trying to convey, even if I, personally and subjectively, don't think it lands, or that Star Wars was the right place to put that kind of generational grudge match on-screen for.

If you read production stuff and behind the scenes information long enough you know that people, even artists, aren't always honest. In modern times you have corporations and stuff, NDA and so on. In Hamill's case, because he's been out of it for a long time as a professional actor he's a little more candid than others, so he's not learnt to dissemble the way other actors and actresses who are active are (as a general rule, star actors never stop acting, they are always performing especially on promotional circuit and so on). So to me, his comments before the backlash carry more weight than after the backlash.

And if I quote Hamill saying the opposite, you can't say, "But that doesn't count, because clearly he was trying to avoid the controversy!"

In any case, as I stated, Hamill's job, as he believes it, is to protect his character. Which means criticizing any decision he doesn't understand, even if he later came around. But "I don't understand this decision" doesn't mean "This is a bad decision."

You saying "Mark Hamill agrees with me" is basically the equivalent of saying "Well, the original author thinks..." but I don't care what the original author thinks. I care what the current author is doing and whether or not it makes a good and compelling story. And it does. You can fill in whatever blanks there are with Luke's backstory later, it doesn't matter, what matters is if this movie works and if it does a good job, both of which, I believe, it does.

That's a good thing, though.

Pretty sure nothing good will come from any conversation regarding quotes considering at this point there is a quote that any side can use to fuel the mess.

If I remember correctly the main reasons he didn't do it himself was partially the council and the fact that he decapitated the last person he believed murdered Mara Jade.

"When I offered to make Norea my third back-up girlfriend she just glared at me and started throwing things at me.." Renee Costa

If you want your characters to come across like people and not walking slogans then you're going to have to accept that they have their breaking points and will have times when they end up in a negative headspace. It doesn't make them monsters or villains it just means they are human.

Saying "Jedi don't quit" to dismiss what happens to Luke in the Sequel Trilogy ignores that Luke, like any other Jedi, is not made of stone.

Edited by windleopard on Mar 24th 2019 at 10:51:17 AM

Exactly.

I think some fans, however, look at Star Wars as an epic myth, rather than a story with flawed and fallible characters. And in epic myths, characters don't have the same complexity and are rather defined by a single trait. While this may not necessarily be a bad thing, I much prefer to see Star Wars as a continuing story about characters who grow and change, rather than a myth about demigods.

Edited by alliterator on Mar 24th 2019 at 10:53:00 AM

There are actually plenty of characters in epic myths who have flaws. Achilles, Heracles, Odysseus just to name a few.

Edited by windleopard on Mar 24th 2019 at 10:54:10 AM

And like with people their choices can grill you.

Damn Luke, at least finish the job before exiling yourself.

Greek Legends is all about fucked up heroes.

Edited by slimcoder on Mar 24th 2019 at 10:55:05 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Yes, but those characters are defined by their flaws and they rarely, if ever, change. Mythical characters tend to be static, almost by definition, while most of the characters in Star Wars are dynamic.

Edited by alliterator on Mar 24th 2019 at 10:56:26 AM

You could argue that Achilles, at least, goes through a visible arc and changes over the course of his story. The difference is that Achilles’ story, and a lot of epic heroes’ stories, are finite. Achilles’ death is a Foregone Conclusion that rigidly defines the terms of the story, and the tragedy in his tale is the fact that despite the fact that he’s now trying to change, he does anyway because it’s too late in terms of destiny.

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Yes, that, too, exactly.

The thing about breaking points is that people have different ideas as to what those breaking points are. Some would believe that Luke's Fatal Flaw in the ST would be that he's too optimistic about redemption to not see that Vader was the exception to the rule. Others would think that Luke would be too busy searching for an answer to the cosmic problem to the point that he forgot that the little things are important too.

It's something I've seen with a lot of characters regarding their flaws and how fans react to them. Some good, some bad. Unlike Real Life, fictional characters are not so easily deconstructed since it's easy to invoke Fanon Discontinuity or Death of the Author in the event of a controversial depiction.

It just occurred to me, Luke in The Last Jedi is essentially a Former Child Star. He achieved great fame and success at a very young age, but then all the pressure got to him, he made some bad choices, and his whole career burned down. Years later, someone tracks him down at an out-of-the-way shack where he lives a reclusive life, and he flatly rejects the idea of going back to his old career, wishing he'd never got involved with it in the first place.

Edited by RavenWilder on Mar 25th 2019 at 12:38:56 PM

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

Nobody:

Luke:

Except I wasn't talking about a fatal flaw. I was talking about Luke reaching a moment of despair and trauma that he ultimately decided he can't deal with this anymore and flees. Which is a very common arc for heroes and wouldn't be out of place in Star Wars even if it isn't used as much.

It still feels jarring for some fans even if it is the point of Luke's character arc. It also didn't help that the film is follow up to the Force Awakens where it looked like that they were going to get Luke involved.

"Analay, an original fan character from a 2006 non canon comic. Do not steal!"

In a general sense I was fine with the idea that Luke's spirit had broken and he effectively quit. My issue is mostly in that the big reveal was extremely underwhelming. We already knew Luke failed to keep Ben, his nephew, from turning to the dark side. We already knew Ben slaughtered all the other students. The reveal that Luke was tempted to kill him does not explain Ben's predisposition to the dark side in the first place and it does not explain why Luke left clues on how to find him.

Mark Hamill said something similar in his criticisms of TLJ, saying his idea of why Luke went into exile was because he fell in love and fathered a child. His exile was to protect them, in a way that the secret would be hidden by the mystery of his disappearance. With Kylo Ren and the First Order out to get him, that would be be especially important to him. I find that premise far more meaningful and emotional than what we got, which is instead all filtered through how it affects Rey, an outsider to the situation with little stake in that conflict.

Firstly, I have no problems with Luke Skywalker being flawed. I have problems with those flaws coming in and presented without proper set-up and clarification of how it fit with what we previously knew. If Rian Johnston is going to say, he was like this in ESB, its entirely in anyone's right to point out he signed up to do a movie set after ROTJ, a 30 year Time Skip and TFA, and not the direct sequel to ESB. And second after Johnston presented his version of the character he still has Luke face no consequences for the crap he did, and get to be this heroic icon for everyone for all time in a way that takes focus from Rey, the actual protagonist of these films.

Secondly, Star Wars was modeled by George Lucas deliberately on epic myths as he stated multiple times. It's intended to be a constructed epic with sci-fi touches modeled on Lord of the Rings. And Epic myths do have flawed and fallible characters.

I am sure an entire army of literary professors, philosophers, and others will come in and tell you otherwise. They will also argue, quite convincingly, that characters in epic myths are more complex than those in many modern movies, including Star Wars (OT, PT, ST) and other movies. So unless you are trying to be specific here, there's not much point. You can actually argue that the characters of the ST are also defined by single traits far more than earlier films. Kylo Ren is angry all the time. Finn blunders his way in and out of stuff. Poe Dameron is cocky.

Characters did grow and change in the OT and the PT. And you know as far as "myth about demigods" goes, Lucas never had small children talk in wonder about the great Jedi masters with toys in any of his original films.

Luke dies.

No, Star Wars was based on adventure serials and Kurasawa films. Please find me the quote where he said it was based on epic myths.

Can you provide me with any sort of evidence for your claim? Because I can provide dozens sources saying that myths are symbolic stories, metaphors and so on, where characters are, again, defined by their single trait, myths made up in order to explain the world. And most will say that while myths can be complex, mythological characters generally are not.

Not really. Any single trait of theirs from TFA is actually subverted and changed in TLJ.

I never said they didn't. I mean, my entire point was that they did.

He gets a heroic beautiful death, a combination of Obi-Wan's Heroic Sacrifice and Yoda's peaceful death in old age. And the epilogue shows us that he's remembered by small children across the galaxy as a hero. Those aren't consequences. They are how Luke's death would have been like had he not done the things seen in TLJ. If there's no difference in either version or scenario, there are no consequences.

Read J. W. Rinzler's making of books. Lucas has talked multiple times about his influence taken from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces which is a comparative survey of myths from across multiple cultures. Lucas studied anthropology in college and that involved studying different societies, cultures, and belief systems and so on. If you go to the Lucasfilm offices in San Francisco, like I have (the lobby is open to visitors as is the visit to the Yoda fountain), you can find an entire shelf on display of books that inspired him. Myths are included there. Lucas isn't some moron. He is a pretty intelligent, well-read man. And he started in the avant-garde tradition. His films made in college are still admired by experimental film-makers like Thom Andersen (his classmate who said that Lucas in class was at the time far and away the brightest and most technically accomplished of the bunch).

About myths being complex and characters in there being deep. Wow. That's a big list. I'm not a literary scholar myself. But if you look around tvtropes on the pages for Euripides and The Odyssey and The Iliad and The Aeneid and see the YMMV pages you will find a lot of debate and discussion about the characters and how they are interpreted and seen, and whether those works are pro or anti-war and so on. I am told that E. R. Dodds and Bernard Knox are writers who have written extensively on what makes these stories work. Bear in mind, people have discussed Greek myths and stuff for more than 2000 years, we're only disccusing Star Wars for some 40 plus years, the 50 year anniversary is actually a few years away (can't imagine what that would be like). I mean the 2020 decade is going to be 50 years since the 1970 so a lot of the New Hollywood movies are going to have their Milestone Celebration. So there's a lot of material to cover and discuss. Also let's not forget that modern Psychology was inspired by a Greek myth, Oedipus Rex. The entire discipline of sussing out human complexity was inspired by Greek myths. That myth, oedipus in particular, is of course a huge influence on the entire Star Wars saga.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Mar 25th 2019 at 7:28:05 AM

With Luke "not getting consequences", I would argue that would go against the point of his narrative. His arc is learning to forgive himself. In fact, I would argue his exile is self-inflicted punishment, and learning that he doesn't need to be punished is kinda the point.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Mar 25th 2019 at 7:38:01 AM

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

But he does deserve to be punished. He betrayed his sister and best friend and failed their son and tried to kill his nephew. The whole "it was only an instance" thing can only be forgiven if its some brief daydream sequence or thought, not when he actually removed a lightsaber, ignited it and raised it. In real-life imagine if your trusted family friend or whoever played with loaded guns or knives in front of you. You wouldn't forgive them if they said, "it was only an instance". After doing that, he then goes off and mopes, and refuses to take responsibility for what he did to his friends, loved ones and comrades. And when Rey asks him about what happened, he lied about it. Which again, for a guy who called out Obi-Wan and Yoda for lying about his Dad (which is pretty minor considering that in real life telling someone that the father they look up to and admire and who they once knew as a good man turned bad and became a terrorist or gangster or lawyer would be hard in any circumstance), is as they say, a pretty bad look. Especially because Obi-Wan and Yoda were covering up for Anakin while Luke is covering up for himself which makes him look corrupt.

People go over the top Ron the Death Eater in bashing the prequel era Jedi for being by and large total d—ks to Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda for lying to Luke about Vader being his father, and that's called out and acknowledged in the films themselves. Luke did stuff far worse than any of the prequel jedi, then Obi-Wan and Yoda...and he's going to get a pass why? Because of the character he was in the OT. No. Rian Johnston changed that character without explaining why and then pretends that the Luke we are seeing didn't do the things his movie showed him do for most of the runtime and then has it both ways. That's not how things work.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Mar 25th 2019 at 7:58:27 AM

You're acting like he betrayed Leia and Han on purpose. He did a stupid thing, and he payed for it. hard. He watched his entire legacy murdered and burnt to the ground, quite literally, in that his students, with whom he likely shared a pretty intense bond, were all killed or turned.

Anakin murdered hundreds by his own hand, and millions with his blessing by defending the Death Star. Almost all of whom were noncombatants. A quarter of whom were likely children.

How the hell could Luke begin to compare to that? Ron the Death Eater indeed.

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on Mar 25th 2019 at 10:03:42 AM

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

I'd argue that his death was sadder than their's and more tragic, even if he went out as a hero.

Myths and stories across culture. The Hero With a Thousand Faces is all about stories. And saying "He was influenced" is not the same thing as saying "He based it on epic myths."

There is a complex discussion about those characters, yes, but that doesn't mean those characters are complex. And YMMV pages aren't exactly evidence, since there are YMMV pages about practically everything. In fact, there are people who will find complexity in every character, no matter how shallow that character actually is. It's the nature of fandom. But, again, I'm not talking about whether or not a character is discussed in scholarly circles, I'm talking about the differences between mythological characters, who are generally static and do not change, and modern day characters (modern defined broadly as mid-19th century to now), who generally do change and grow and learn.

No, he doesn't.