Converted to like the Sequel Trilogy

I am not overthinking her ability to fly a ship.

I said the Millennium Falcon. Same way Poe couldn't whip out the FO in a Tie fighter first time in one.

My point was that she knows everything about the history of the ship she is piloting except that it is the legendary Millennium Falcon.

You said she maybe have been flying the Millennium Falcon around for practice which has never once been mentioned in any movie, book, or comic.

I never said he doesn't know how to pilot a ship. She leaned all her skills from a flight simulator she found in a wrecked rebel bomber. That is the cannon we have. However ridiculous it is she can now pilot a heavily modified YT-1300 like she has been doing it all her life.

 

Vader had zero need to freeze the bolt. It's clear by the facial expressions of even Yoda that different force powers require different amounts of energy. Vader had no reason to impress or intimidate Han, he was in complete control. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, was very unsure of himself and his place in the dark side, yet appearing arrogant, perhaps as a defense mechanism for his self observed shortcomings. He sees a pilot, someone who doesn't fit into this spiritual village, shooting at him. Must be there for the map. But he hasn't run, maybe he's done something with the map. Showing off and intimidating Poe might help him get that info easier. Makes perfect sense to me.

Yoda's ghost summoning lightning? Although I'm not a huge fan of this, we never saw a scenario where a force ghost had any need to do this. Yoda needed to get through to Luke. I get it. Could do without it but it came and went without getting under my skin

 

I think you can only be "converted" on TFN where the mods ban negative takes on TLJ from most of the threads. They have a bad case of the SW religious attitude there.

 

"Sorry I took so long, I had a bad case of Old Exiled Jedi Syndrome....you guys stay in the cave. I got this!

 

but he didn't give up in the end.
and he gave Leia hope too.
that's what matters most.

i really struggled with this the first time i saw the movie because it was too horrifying to conceive.
not only for Luke's sake, but for Ben's.
but there is always a little Dark in all of us.
Luke literally just had a fleeting fearful thought.

the unfortunate thing is that Ben could feel it and reacted out of his own fear before Luke could talk to him.
it's not as though Luke went in there deliberately to kill him in his sleep after debating the pros and cons of it.
Luke went to confront him and panicked. then Ben panicked too.

now they have to deal with the fallout.
and they will.

 

I think he asks himself the same question.

After all that (and in context of assuming that the B.S. prophecy from his Jedi research was fulfilled by Anakin) his nephew will still fall to the Dark Side and repeat the destruction of the Clone Wars/Galactic Civil War. He reads Ben's mind (without Ben knowing, which may be seen as unforgivable from Ben's point of view). Chaos ensues. Ben kills other students and disappears to the F.O. Luke finds himself in the same situation as Kenobi, with the added shame of Ben being his sister and friend's son.

 

I see your points and understand. I would point out this though...

1. You can't conquer the dark side forever. The pull Luke resisted in the OT was nothing compared to seeing visions of your own nephew destroying your life's work and people you care about. Anakin couldn't do what Luke did. Luke was always able to pull back, even here.

2. Remember, it was Yoda and Obi-Wan that thought he should sacrifice his friends if he honored what they fought for. It seems Luke did become the Jedi of old. Kept attachments to a minimum. Never married. Learned to let go of those he'd fear to lose. When he resisted killing Ben, that's exactly what he did.

3. The traumatic nature of blaming yourself is not an easy thing to come back from. How does he face Leia and Han? In his mind, they are better off without him. That's human.

4. Luke didn't feel the threat of the First Order. He's been cut off from the force for years. The FO didn't emerge from the Unknown Regions until shortly before the events of TFA. Luke may not have known that Snoke was angling to be the next Emporer.

5. In the Visual Dictionary, there is a blurb about how Luke learned during his travels searching for new Jedi that the light and dark side have always gone into cycles, and that the galaxy paid a heavy price with each cycle. Maybe he feels if there are no Jedi to be corrupted and fall, maybe the cycle will stop. If there was no future Vader's, the galaxy is safer. That kind of thinking.

 

Nobody ages 30 years and stays as eager and idealistic. Luke has been changed by his experiences, like pretty much everyone. If rey went up to him and he was like "hell yeah let's make you a jedi and crush some bad guys" I would've walked right out. There's a reason he's in isolation. Does anyone think while he's milking weird creatures and spear fishing he is under the impression the galaxy is at total peace? NO! He feared Ben's dark side so badly he considered killing his own nephew! Does he think Ben turned some students and killed the rest so they could form a band and compete with the max rebo band on the shady palace and cantina circuit? NO! They're obviously up to no good and Luke knows this, but what he's been through in the last 30 years has him in doubt of himself and the Jedi as a whole. If Luke hadn't changed from idealistic ROTJ Luke, he wouldn't be exiled in the middle of nowhere in the first place.

 

The SW universe in light of the Force and Jediism can easily be questioned by interpreting OT and PT. What ST does is not question them but take them for granted.

 

It's more a consequence of the film that this occurs.
We don't spend any time with Luke during that period, and we don't get a narrative deviation for a bit to help us connect to the emotional impact of everything that happened to Luke.

It has huge impacts upon his psyche but we're not given two films to dwell on his emotions like we did with the weight of his relationship to his Father and all of the turmoil of that event.

We're given about as much time as we're given with Luke's Aunt and Uncle's deaths, and that's about it.
That happens in Star Wars. At times there's a lot that happens off camera that impacts the emotional weight upon a character, and we don't get a lot to work from.

Until the PT, we weren't given really any context to Yoda's disposition. It's just that he was also brand new so we took it at face value.

Think back to Luke's Aunt and Uncle.
He grew up with them. For all purposes, they were his parents. He loved them; dearly...allegedly.
And yet, in the OT, Luke goes off for an afternoon, comes back, they're dead, we see their charred remains, Luke looks sad for a moment, and then...he's off being a spicy meatball lipping off to Han a few hours later like that never happened.
He has a longer amount of time morning Kenobi's death than we got out of him over his own life-long adopted parents.
And he only knew Kenobi on a personal level for a couple days at most.

I sure hope that if my wife and I are burned to a crisp and our daughter's look at the remains that they are far more impacted by it than Luke, and I really hope they aren't more torn up a couple days later over the death of a celebrity they met on the same day we died.

Some things Star Wars fast-forwards through, and the audience has to pack that up and grasp the value on their own without being shown it directly.

What I mean is, in a normal film, that whole Jedi training series with Luke would be an entire film that examines Luke's character and the dynamics of his relationships, and steadily increases the tension until the climax when Luke fails to protect the students and Kylo, who he had promised Leia he would save, and subsequently falls to pieces.
Basically Omen if instead at the end Robert doesn't get killed and is instead left guilt-smashed that he caused his wife's death, and he failed to stop his son of Satan from rising to the throne of evil.

That's how it would be played out in a normal film.

But this is Star Wars, they shove whole movie's worth of context and emotional baggage into a scene or two and move on; leaving you to just accept how someone feels.

Remember Kitster?
The best friend Anakin almost didn't go off to be a Jedi for? The kid who Anakin said that he would never forget?

He forgot. Woops.

The same kid who never let go of anyone who meant anything to him so much that it was his downfall forgot the closest thing he had to a brother.

And that's all too common with Star Wars.
We never hear about Leia's family life, but we can assume that she was pretty shattered by her adopted parents blowing up with her entire planet's population.

Sheesh...Spock took more time to be shook by this in Star Trek and that film was ripped to pieces by fans - and that being one of the topics; that he was more upset over Kirk's death than his mom and his entire planet dying.

Meanwhile over in Star Warsland, we've been rolling with that concept since 1977. Parents and planet destroyed and no time to show remorse?
Yep, we got that.
Seems more torn up over a fellow comrade dying than their parents and planet dying? Yep; got that too.

We have short-cut emotional damage in spades in Star Wars.

And while it's not an excuse, it's because Star Wars is hyper-focused on themes and once it gets fixated on a theme, everything else that doesn't directly relate to the theme, but instead pushes motive for characters to be able to move into that theme, is abbreviated.

Anyway, just my 2 nuyen worth of waxing.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I wanted to expand on the last post a bit with more that I think is important.

Lucas is an amazing feature in film in that he has this uncanny archive of films stored in his mind, and he can sift through them and organize them seemingly effortlessly.

Before, I mentioned that Star Wars abbreviates whole emotional weights and relies on the audiance to pick up the tab.
This is true, but Lucas also did something that helped in this regard; he relied on the general knowledge of cinema to convey those weights.
He would borrow whole familiar scenes from other films, rearrange them a bit, and use them in his film in a much shorter moment.
This worked out really well because the implied relationships were easily assumed by the audiance at the time because a fimiliar relationship from a previous film was already sifting around the general psyche of the public.

An example:
Let's take a look at ROTJ.
Now, in ESB we end with a relationship between Vader and Luke being aggressive. There's no real compassion hinted here. There's shock, denial, and anger.
Vader isn't seeming compassionate when he asks Luke to join him. He seems evil and trying to pull Luke from good to evil.

But in ROTJ, in the Yavin scene with Vader, Lucas has mere minutes to give us their entire compassionate relationship and get us to buy into Vader and Luke both loving each other, and to make us feel sorry for Vader.
No pressure! That's A LOT to cram into ONE scene given that there's two entire movies before it that have pushed the weight entirely the opposite direction.

Lucas sticks to his method and gives us that connection in a few minutes of film.
How?

Well, firstly, let's account for children.
Generally speaking young children don't require context for emotional weight because that's just daily life to them. It's not an uncommon experience for a child to not have a clue why something's happening, but still have a need to emotionally empathize and react to what is happening to someone that they see.
They are rather accustomed to taking emotions of a person at face value. If someone looks sad; they are sad. If they look happy; they are happy.
If Luke looks sad for his Dad, Vader, then he is sad for his Dad.
So Lucas doesn't have to worry as much over the really young audience members, but how does he pull in this weight for the older audience?

Well, he resorts to his common method of borrowing scenes that are already in the public consciousness and rephrases them to suit his need.
He fast-tracks an entire connection; essentially.

So back to the ROTJ scene.
Lucas borrowed two scenes from Billy Budd and mixed them up and rephrased them into two scenes in Star Wars: the Yavin scene and the throne room scene.

The two scenes that he borrowed were the shipside talk between Billy and Claggart, and the conversation just before his execution between Billy and the Captain.
The concepts are mixed around, and Lucas inserts his own spin on everything of course, but the bones are essentially the same.

Claggart is a tall Mastar at Arms dressed in full black, wearing a black tall hat, and is cruel, dark, and thinks himself evil and gone.
Billy is a bright eyed hopeful idiot who only sees the good in everyone; to a fault.

The Captain, unlike the Emperor, is compassionate and wishes he did not have to sentence Billy, however, his conversation with Billy is similar in some ways to the Emperor's conversation - he begs Billy to give into his hate and use it.
Billy starts this conversation off with something rather familiar sounding to the Yavin scene, "Is there hope for me?" - in almost the same way Luke expresses to Vader.
To which the Captain responds by asking if there is hope for any man.
Flip this around a tad bit, and you have Luke's assertion that there is still hope for Vader and that he feels goodness in him (this part is from the below scene).

The motives are different, because the Captain basically wishes that Billy would just not be so damn decent and ignorantly hopeful and innocent in spirit so that it would be easier to accept sentencing him to death, but the conversations are similar.


Now, Claggart and Billy have this conversation on the rail of the ship, and it's so very similar in mood and style of shots as what's in ROTJ between Vader and Luke.
Claggart basically tries to get Billy to explain why he does not hate Claggart; why does he not fear him. Asking, effectively, if Billy cannot see that he is evil, like all the men say that he is.
Billy, for his part, explains that he doesn't think that Claggart is evil because no man is truly purely evil - there's always good in everyone, basically.
Claggart finds Billy naive, but pitifully so. He tells him that he is a fool and that he will not be charmed by Billy, after a moment which seems so very close to a moment where Claggart was about to give in to goodness, but at the last second, catches himself and returns to being cold and shut off.



By the way, also...Billy is convicted by innocently (meaning, his spirit is still pure and ignorantly naive as a child) killing Claggart in the Captain's quarters in front of the Captain when Claggart antagonizes this simple-naive idiot to such an angry rise that he can't even speak and in a moment of uncharacteristic rage, lashes out and strikes Claggart, causing his death.
To which Claggart dies smiling; happy that he had corrupted the purely innocent boy. (It bothered him terribly that Billy did not fit into his world view that all men were, at their core, evil and prone to violence; it consumed his mind, as that was his internal narrative he justified his own cruelty by.)



OK, so.
That's it in a nutshell, but it's more nuanced than that in the script, but I'm not going to type that all out by hand at the moment.

The point is, this had been a novel, then a play that was pretty popular, and then a movie in the 60's.
It was decently played around in the loose general psyche of entertainment.

He plays a little mash-up with these scenes to fit his narrative needs, and bam! He's got a shortcut to an empathetic connection between Vader and Luke in a matter of minutes, and he gets to re-use that connection in the same way Billy Budd does, in the throne room - reversing some relationships (Vader is more sympathetic like the Captain, while Clagger is more like the Emperor in motive and attitude, but the words are said inversely by each respectively).

Now, people don't have to think, "OH! That's Billy Budd!!" for this to work. It just has to feel familiar, because if it does, then you don't need to take as long to get to the result. Your scene is resting on the shoulders of the already established cultural storytelling language.

Lucas does this repeatedly throughout Star Wars, and it's not a matter of tipping hats; it's a way of getting a lot of information shoved into the audience in a short amount of time.


Let's go back to a scene I brought up previously: The death of Luke's aunt and uncle.
There's this film that was pretty popular in the late 50's called The Chasers. It had this guy named Jon Wayne in it, and it was directed by this guy named Ford who was basically the Spielberg of his day. EVERYONE knew Ford. Ford is even responsible for most of the content we've been watching on the History channel regarding WWII for decades.

PIcture time!
Look familiar?


Sure, there's lots of scene of burning buildings, so that's not all that convincing.
OK, alright; true. Here's a side-by-side.



Again, Lucas is playing on the communal language of what's already in the audience consciousness and at that point in time, this would have felt familiar - relatable - even if you couldn't put your finger on it, because it was already well stamped in the general entertainment zeitgeist.


It goes right down to the action as well.
Why was the Death Star scene SO emotionally compelling to mature audiences back then?
Because Dam Busters was still a fresh familiar film with a rather memorable sequence in it. It was a smash hit in the UK at its time; everyone knew that film in England.
America knew it fairly well as well; not as vividly, but still it did know it pretty well.

So, how did that work for Lucas:

As you can see, Lucas practically riffs the entire scene beat for beat down the line, and I disagree with the title of the video.
Lucas didn't "rip off" Dam Busters.

He employed it and rephrased it and gave it a new context to convey the value of this really alien concept.
I mean...it's 1977.
HOW do you get audiences to actually get invested in Spaceships shooting a thingamajig floating in space when all you have are models, models, more models, and some face shots with helmets in the way of any emotive expression? Especially when everyone in the scene is just some guy we never even met or got a connection to. We're connected to Luke, but no one else in the group. It's just a bunch of people that might as well be Stormtroopers or Star Trek redshirts unless you give the audience some kind of emotional connections because we're not really given a LOT of emotional time spending with the troubles of the Rebellion and the heart tugs involved with their story - we're following Luke and he tacks on to their story, but we're definitely focused on Luke.
So how do we make everyone care about all these random people, and feel invested - pensive - hopeful, worried?

Connect it to something they ARE familiar with emotionally - WWII movies, and Dam Busters is probably the king of bombing raid films covering WWII.



Now, what the hell does all of this have to do with my last post?
Well, thing is, Luke felt weird to a lot of people because that whole scene was REALLY short that contextualized the entire motive for his behavior.
That in itself isn't odd for Star Wars, as discussed, HOWEVER, the one thing that the new movies ARE actually missing over the OT and PT alike, is that they don't really borrow from OUR common cinematic language and rephrase familiar scenes to abbreviate the point.

For instance, it would have probably gone a little bit differently if the flashback scenes with Luke approaching Kylo and all hell breaking loose were shot to mirror Omen themes and moods so that it was familiar as a sense - again, even if no one could put their finger on it and say "HEY! That's like Omen!", it would have been familiar to a large portion of the audience and made it more implicitly understandable why Luke was behaving the way he was.

However, the new ST films are a bit too busy riffing and rephrasing older Star Wars films to have much time to fit in rephrasing modern cinema references for emotional short-cuts like Lucas was doing.


In this respect of the craft, they suffer a bit, because while they do call back to Star Wars, they don't call back to any wider cultural cinematic language and that causes the films to exist inside of a cultural Star Wars tunnel vision.


This isn't to say the newer films are bad; far from it (yes, I know - some of you reading will likely immediately think "Like hell! They suck!"...a different time; in my opinion, they aren't bad at all), but it's just that in THIS way, Lucas is far beyond what normal filmmakers are.

Again, it's really amazing how much material of cinematic history is rolling around in his mind and how he's able to rearrange it all to serve an entirely different narrative.
That, I believe, is what made Star Wars connect so well, and in a way, the newer films are attempting the same thing; just with a reduced pallet, and it's not really fair, honestly, because let's face it....there's only one George Lucas; one man who can rearrange so much content in his mind to such high level of nuance and spit out a space opera of epic proportions out of that chimera of film clips.


The point here was to say that if it felt weird; there's a reason for that.
Star Wars has always taken short cuts just like that scene with Luke, Kylo, and the dead pupils, but it was a successful method because there was a meta-connection being made by a very talented man. The current films are trying, and let's keep this in mind, to follow in the footsteps of a cinematic genius.
They have the form, but at times will miss the mark on the panache because...well...Lucas.

Consequently, as an extra consideration, this feature of sampling pieces of common stories and arranging them into a new mythical and allegorical story of Star Wars is partially what causes Lucas' Star Wars to feel like the Christian Bible, as that is the form of their narrative constituion as well.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

With the last one you forget: "....and saves them". Luke's initial reaction is not the same as the one of Luke who actually starts training Rey and saves the Resistance at the end of the movie. It is truly mind boggling that some people simply don't see that part.

 

For me I saw it on my birthday with some good friends and they has seen it once before and I loved it at first...they said they hated it even after a second screening. Sidenote mad props to my friends did not spoiling it for me and willingness to go with me

Anyway I very quickly had my mind changed as I heard their points of views and I felt very torn...

Then after two more viewings on my own I was able to take the initial shock away and build my own opinions... but what breaks my heart is that my friends who are as big of fans of the Films as I am can no longer geek out

I guess my random rant is that I respect fully people who don’t like it. I agree to disagree all I hope is it doesn’t turn into a finger pointing in if you hate the movie you’re a true fan or vice versa...

I will say the brilliance no matter which way you feel that we are still talking about it and that says something

 

He wanted to save darth vader, but he almost killed him when he taunt him, about converting Leia to the dark side

It seems that the skywalker bloodline is prone to the dark side, they are easily seduced by it

 

If you don't mind me asking, what changed your mind?

Just curious because I've been advocating a second view to some - I had likes and dislikes but it took a little time to process and a second viewing before I came around.

 

I'm not sure if I agree with that. I've been pretty critical of TLJ and I've had no issue starting threads or commenting. For the most part, even when I disagree (often quite strongly) most people here in general are pretty polite and cordial, even if they disagree just as strongly with my views.

I've vented but got most of that out of my system. Now I'm trying to find positives, or hope to see the quality some of these others see. I'll admit I mostly fail in this, but it's SW and I try anyways. In truth I have my doubts I'll ever come to terms with TLJ and thanks to that, the whole of the ST. At this point I hope it lands somewhere around the PT where I can appreciate the good part sand gloss over the bad. Hopefully 9 is called "Redemption" lol.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 18, 2018, Original Post Date: Jan 18, 2018 ---

If someone hurts you or your loved one and you resist hurting them back, does that mean you'll resist hurting the next person to hurt someone you care about?

Is the dark side ever conquered or is it a battle Jedi have to battle daily, some days tougher than others?

I think it's more akin to an alcoholic or smoker trying to quit and kick that habit/addiction. Or probably more accurately, the diabetic avoiding those carbs or sugars, yet he/she still has to eat to live.

Though I agree they took Luke too far (for my taste anyways), I can't discount that he might be tempted again. I guess I'm more disappointed that RJ decided to take him that far rather than it being impossible that he might go that far. We only have a glimpse of Luke's life in the OT. Even a person who is capable of doing great good can wind up being known for a stupid or selfish mistake in a fleeting moment.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 18, 2018 ---

Awesome post Jayson... (I can honestly say I enjoyed your post more than TLJ hahaha... just take the compliment ).

I read through all of both those posts. I can't say I had seen any of those movies, but I get where you're coming from. It's something that has been missing from the ST. Lucas had a way that just made things feel epic. It's hard to describe, but those posts have hit closest to the mark than any I've read so far. We hear "tone" and "pacing" a lot and I think often they're trying to get at what you're saying here. On occasion TLJ touches it, but it seems so brief, it's like a tease. Luke looking at the sunset had that moment. As much as you credit Lucas, and not to down the new actors, but I think Lucas was working with some amazing chemistry on camera to boot and those actors as well as Lucas's editing managed to get exactly what the audience needed in the OT.

 

I'm working on some material for a post that will be in the general star wars films section that actually dives in to the rest of what the difference is.
Part of it is the rephrasing of culturally familiar scenes from other movies, and the other half is shot composition, which combines with editing (as you note).
What I'm doing at the moment is that I've collected a series of scenes from every Star Wars film, and I've drawn up a composition grid to lay over the top of the footage.
I'll be combining the composition grid as an overlay in Adobe Premiere, line up the scenes from each film in film sequence (maybe not scene sequence, but in order of film) and compile it all in one long video with no sound.
This will force a focus on the differences between the directors' styles between every movie (in the case of the PT, it's all Lucas, so there's no shifting around of composition style there, but it is different than Lucas' style on ANH - and it's on purpose, but I'll save that for the thread), and I think it will be pretty eye-opening to some to see what a difference it makes, and also...it's really cool because it forces the unfamiliar eye (in terms of the craft) to notice the purposefully designed angles and hard work that goes into lining up some of these shots - even things like the Death Star firing pop in a whole new way once you can see the geometry of the shot more overtly.

Cheers!
Jayson