The "treatment of Luke"

Not knowing the Sith were back until the events of TPM is an oversight in and of itself and it’s one of the few that the Jedi actually cop to during the Prequel timeline. They were given numerous warnings, both direct and indirect about a brewing darkness and a large-scale galaxy-wide conflict and they largely ignored everything. Even the Senate, famous for complacency and being late to the party on just about everything took more action from these warnings. They were oblivious to an entire army being built for the Republic. They were unable to sense Palpatine, the darkness, and shifts within the Force because they lost their spiritual connection with it, turning it into nothing more than a cheap parlor trick. Even upon learning that the Sith had returned, they still remained overly proud and smug. When it was revealed to them that Dooku could possibly be behind a lot of what was going on, they shoot it down, using a tired explanation of, "Haha no... he's a former Jedi, he couldn't possibly have anything to do with this" despite not knowing what he's actually been up to for over a decade at this point.

The canonical timeline of Jedi mistakes that lead directly to the rise of the Empire starts way before The Phantom Menace, so yes, I think saying decades is fair. Even if you only want to use the movies, it's still well over a decade. Either way, the point is they made a lot of mistakes over a long period of time and it caused the Galaxy to plunge into cruelty and tyranny without any opposition until it was far, far too late.

 

Nope. They didn't have those droughts just because they failed to hit in just one game. And they hit in plenty of games in the years they failed to win a title.

And they were still in the league the whole time.

 

I think I would be less salty if I could see what was lost. What was the academy like? What kind of teacher/uncle was Luke? All of this should have made its way into the film. Instead, JJ hit the reset button and we saw no progress in the galaxy from the point of ANH.

I really don't understand him going down the no attachments route in Mando. Luke was a new kind of Jedi, he was strengthened by his familial bonds.

I feel like those that are now responsible for him don't understand him. It saddens me a great deal. Same can be said for much of the fabric of SW.

 

I have no investment in Luke as a character, and I don't hold anything against anyone because I'm not really bothered by any of this. However, it is an unfortunate consequence of basic narrative time logistics that we don't get to see all that backstory unfolding, as is more typical for Lost Faith tropes (but by no means unheard of to not have).

Michael Arndt, truly, is the one who started the snowball that led to the avalanche in the history of the formation of this narrative element.
And it wasn't arbitrary. It was actually purely to solve a narrative problem. Every time you brought regular Luke into the story; the entire story broke.
The narrative immediately struggles to keep its focus every time Luke popped in by default of the character's inherent charisma.
You nearly might as well be telling the harrowing adventure of one of the Apostle's kids and have Jesus Christ walk in.

So, he took to pushing Luke out of the story as much as possible. This was with Lucas still involved. The biggest difference being this was, at that time, planned as the first movie and not the second. He also, along with Lucas, is the one who gave the story the Lost Faith narrative element for Luke as the justification for not having Luke running in like Superman saving the day everywhere. That's what the first movie was when Arndt was working on it before Disney bought the brand from Lucas. It had TLJ's Lost Faith hermit Luke. It's what birthed it into existence.

Then when it was sold to Disney, Arndt came with it in the beginning and suggested that the story bones he wrote move to the second movie because he didn't think audiences were going to want to show up to the first movie in a decade and really get excited watching a Lost Faith hermit Luke. I'm willing to bet he's right on this. So that notion got kicked down the road, and then it landed with Johnson. There's no guarantee he had to take that, but he took that arc element for Luke and put it right where Arndt had suggested it should go.

Now, Johnson might have kept it for the same reason that Arndt created it, or he might have kept it because Lucas was involved in creating that arc for Luke as well, or he might have kept it simply because he found this version of Luke interesting to write about. Or a mix of all three. Who knows.

But the point here is that it was created originally to solve a problem revolving around Luke's narrative gravity as a character but was a solution inside of a story that wasn't focused on Luke as the principal character arc. That means the only thing you can really do is highlight the backstory of how he got there in hindsight. You can't really take the time to show it unfolding so that people can truly sympathize with it more easily.

It's sort of a screwed if you do or don't issue. If you don't make Luke Lost Faith, then you have to have Luke around more. If you have Luke around more, he considerably impedes in the way of other characters who are supposed to be the primary focus of the story.

In a perfect world, you'd have those movies showing Luke's downfall before getting to TLJ... However, in so doing, you also hit into another snag. It's no longer surprising that it happens.

It's sort of the problem with Vader being Luke's father if the Prequels had already existed before the original trilogy was made. The theatrical gut punch surprise of it in Empire Strikes back wouldn't really be as famous as it is if the Prequels predated it. Likewise, no one would really care about TLJ's Luke arc's existence if we already had a set of movies showing us that downfall before the Sequel Trilogy happened.

Now, on a personal narrative opinion note, and this by no means indicates that I think the current narrative is bad... my particular way of thinking narratively wouldn't bother with the entire Luke almost taking out Kylo backstory and just made it more hard hitting - Luke just lost faith in people because people suck and given enough time, can erode even the most optimistic person's faith in humanity at times. It's tiring, very tiring, trying to fight for a better world for people constantly only to have them treat their world like plastic bags. So, I would have just had him get sick of people and stick to the one narrative motive regarding nothing mattering because it all just ends up causing more crap to go wrong anyway and not even bother defining this idea that he feels guilt over almost killing Kylo because he sensed bad in him.

Not because that's a bad element. Just, I feel like it softens things. It's much harsher to just simply become jaded and cynical over time than to have a personal failure of conduct as the provocation. It's the difference between someone being pushed off a building, and someone jumping. The latter is much more harsh because there's no distraction from the complete collapse of a person's joy and faith in the world. And that is crushing.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I agree. I wouldn't go so far as to characterize him as "robotic" but I liked how we were given the first steps (at least as I've interpreted them) toward the future Luke we see in the ST films.

That doesn't mean I like Luke's depiction in TLJ any better. But if the ST films are to remain canon, a well-done lead-in to them will help fans appreciate them 'as history' down the road.

 

This wasn't the way George Lucas saw things. JJ/Disney made a lot of choices Lucas didn't like, but the Luke we see in TLJ was very much in line with where Lucas saw the character at that point. Lucas was also adamant that Luke didn't get married or have kids. So while it's perfectly reasonable to think Luke would have been a "new kind of Jedi" the person who created the character didn't see that.

 

I don't have a problem with Luke becoming a less than ideal person. I've seen signs of this in the Original Trilogy. I had a problem with "how" he became a less than ideal person. Or . . . I had a problem with the reasons Rian Johnson gave that led him to become that person in "The Last Jedi". It didn't jibe with his character to me.

 

What reasons were they?

 

He became an absolutist out of fear and almost killed his nephew, so he came to believe that nothing truly makes a net good difference since doing good just spawns reactive bad crap to happen.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

They can turn back time - they've done it with TBOBF and people (for the most part) ate that Luke up. Nowhere was there hundreds of thousands of people saying his portrayal destroyed what they thought about his character, as they did for TLJ.

We must see things differently. Luke in ROTJ is the best. He literally throws down his saber and life because he believes there's still good in his father. His love redeems Vader. The Jedi didn't believe this was possible, nor did The Emperor and neither did Vader.

'I am a Jedi, like my father before me' - that's the heart of the series for me, delivered by a very alive, very heroic Luke.

 

Almost anything is possible with VFX nowadays... I would welcome Mark Hamill back in any capacity... I really enjoyed TBOBF where he returned.

 

Oh, it'll happen. Give it enough time and it'll happen.

I've long said, since I was a teenager really, that if you give it enough time, they'll remake the original trilogy. And that was before there was the possibility of visually cloning actors faces... which Back to the Future 2 already showed us a long time ago that the business will absolutely go for that option (when they used plaster casting to replace Jeffrey Weissman's face with Crispin Glover's).

Now that the technology is refining constantly, it's only a matter of time until fidelity and agility reaches a high enough threshold that it can produce enough confidence in creators to go for a whole movie that way.
If you don't think the technology works that well, take a look at Massive Talent. The younger "Nick Cage", while not flawless, is sufficient enough that the vast majority of audiences don't think about it when watching the show. It definitely didn't hurt the movie any.

And Nicolas Cage's expressions are extreme. It's not like they were replicating someone talking normal. They had to replicate Nicolas Cage's iconic bat-s*** crazy unhinged acting style and emoting. Now, that's with having an older Nicolas Cage and lots of young Nicolas Cage material to work from as a base, but that's the same that was done for Young Luke previously, just with a lesser refined version of the technique.

Every few months this technology increases in quality and we're going to see a heck of a lot more deepfake and full CG characters from this point on.
I have no doubts what-so-ever that Luke isn't too sacred to not be ran through this process repeatedly going forward and can easily see it as possible for the brand decision being made to launch a Young Luke series or movie(s).

Whether anyone wants it or not on the audience side, full CG live action characters are absolutely being driven towards as a real production solution.

Also... Younger generations don't seem to care about the particulars of this all that much. I've poked my kids and others their age a bit about this, and it's not really a breaking point. In fact, what something looks like doesn't seem to be a breaking point much at all. This might be a byproduct of the fact that they've grown up with a nearly infinite timeline of media to consume and get thrown every kind of style and era of content constantly, I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, they'll watch janky just as much as polished realism.

I've never heard them, or their age equivalents, cite CG as the reason they didn't like something (even when to me it looks terrible). It's instead almost always about story and style.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Damn. You seem like a pretty confrontational person.

This went off track anyway - I'm talking about the wider problems of the sequel trilogy. We all know it was a crime we didn't get Luke/Han/Leia all back together at least once. The technology was there to adequately show more of Luke's academy/Kylo's temptation by Snoke etc. As TFA was a complete reset, this became nearly impossible to carry out - characters and quality then suffered

 

No one was ever going to do Luke's build up story. All versions drop you into a cranky old disillusioned Luke. Lucas is the one, with Arndt, who kicked that idea off.

The biggest difference in this regard is you would have been dropped into cranky Luke in movie one rather than two.

No one hit a reset button.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Do you know where I can find more info on the process of writing the ST? I'm intrigued by who was responsible for each idea/beat etc. So surprised that GL instigated this!

In a wider sense though, beyond Luke, I feel like a reset button was hit. FO dominating, Jedi have receded, Han a smuggler again, small band of resistance fighters, superweapon etc. It felt reductive of the OT as nothing had changed

 

A friendly reminder to rule #6, no flaming or antagonizing posters… you are right, we have swayed a bit off course let’s return to the discussion at hand.

 

Just search Michael Arndt's work on Star Wars and Lucas' version of the trilogy.

You'll find lots of information scattered around. You usually have to read half a dozen to a dozen or so various articles to get a decent picture as most snip just a few parts of the source interview or document which they find provocative. Like, you'll run across a lot of cranky Luke, but fewer bring up how the sunken second Death Star which holds a treasured plot MacGuffin was also present around then (most of TROS is made from thrown out ideas from the past 8 movies).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

In "The Last Jedi", Luke reminded me of Obi-Wan at his worst, instead of Luke at his worst.