Spoilers Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Grading & Discussion

[DigificWriter]

^ Don't pay attention to misrepresentative headlines; pay attention to the actual context of what was said.

Hamill had a fundamental disagreement with Rian Johnson over the direction of Luke's character, and in order to bring the character to life as Johnson wanted him to, he had to disassociate the character he had played previously with the character he was currently being asked to play.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Hamill did a good job. He was fantastic in the role, regardless of whether it's where he would have taken Luke.

 

[Hound of UIster]

I read the EU from Heir to the Empire until the middle of NJO. They really pissed me off by sacrificing Chewbacca at the altar of a plot twist, only to have the reason he died (Anakin Solo) get killed off a few books later.

But apparently you have no problem with Luke and Han being sacrificed on the altar of the Mouse for high box office returns.

 

[Campe]

But apparently you have no problem with Luke and Han being sacrificed on the altar of the Mouse for high box office returns.

I would if both sacrificed for something that was negated in Episode IX.

 

[Reverend]

I've seen Hamill talk about it several times over the previous months and he's repeatedly stated (self-deprecatingly) that his own ideas for how Luke should have been used are probably terrible, and that there's a good reason why he's an actor and not a writer or director. I swear, some people are just determined to make drama out of nothing.

Anyway, here's the thing: Luke in TLJ is not the Luke from the OT. He's the Luke who spent 25 years rebuilding the Jedi Order only for the whole thing to literally go up in smoke in a matter of days, mostly (as he sees it) due to his own lack of wisdom. That he's not the person the galaxy remembers (or we the audience, for that matter) is kind of the whole point of his arc. From Rey's perspective it's the old classic "don't meet your heroes" story. Luke is a disappointment to her precisely because he's a disappointment to himself.

 

[crookeddy]

Headline "Mark Hamill blasts the Last Jedi" trending on Facebook...

 

[fireproof78]

I agree it was vastly more interesting, but at the same time, you can't fault the fans for not liking it. Nobody likes having their favorite character deconstructed that way. We want our heroes and legends! Imagine if a Trek movie "deconstructed" Kirk and showed us a character who was never really the hero we thought he was or imagine a DC movie that "deconstructed" Superman and gave us a character unworthy of adulation. I doubt those fans would be too happy either.

And yet, has the potential for a far more interesting story than a lot of fan service.

But apparently you have no problem with Luke and Han being sacrificed on the altar of the Mouse for high box office returns.

Yes.

Headline "Mark Hamill blasts the Last Jedi" trending on Facebook...

Click bait.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Hahaha! Really, the original Star Wars didn't make the men seem dumb camparwed to Leia? I think you need to REWATCH the entire Han and Luke get into the Prison area of the Death Star to get Leia out... sequence again.

Leia: "You got in here...Didn't you have a plan for getting out?!"
Han: "He's the brains, sweetheart!"
Luke: "Well..I didn't..."
Han: "What the hell are you doing?!"
Leia: "Somebody has to save our skins!...Into the Garbage Chute flyboy!"
^^^
Yeah, compared to Leia, Luke and Han come off as very capable...oh, wait.

Oh, please. In ANH, Luke is the mastermind of the escape plan outside of Kenobi deactivating the tractor beam. He's also the guy who...hmm....destroyed the Death Star, giving the Rebellion its first, great impact against the Empire. Leia's one or two lines did not render him a tap dancing minstrel like Finn, or an emasculated, easily dismissed boy like Poe in TLJ. There's no comparison between George Lucas and what Kathleen Kennedy is clearly doing to male characters.

 

[DarKush]

I wouldn’t be so sure. He has been very vocal about his disapproval and disappointment of how they handled his (and all of the OT) character(s) in almost every single interview and public appearance. The Mouse ain’t forgiving when it comes to these things.

Good point. Though I could see Hamill coming back if he got a take on Luke he liked better in Episode IX. He objected to TLJ portrayal of Luke and still did the part after all. And I could see Disney being amenable to Hamill returning, especially if TLJ’s box office is softer than expected.

 

[DarKush]

Also not true.

I read the EU from Heir to the Empire until the middle of NJO. They really pissed me off by sacrificing Chewbacca at the altar of a plot twist, only to have the reason he died (Anakin Solo) get killed off a few books later.

From what I recall about the NJO it wasn’t the authors’ intention to kill off Anakin Solo. I read that the original plan was to kill off Jacen, however Lucas objected to that. I think he might have felt there was the possibility of audience confusion with having both Anakin Skywalker in the prequels and Anakin Solo in the NJO. It sucks that they killed off Anakin Solo, but they did give him that NJO duology to soften the blow.

 

[Trekker4747]

Oh, please. In ANH, Luke is the mastermind of the escape plan outside of Kenobi deactivating the tractor beam. He's also the guy who...hmm....destroyed the Death Star, giving the Rebellion its first, great impact against the Empire. Leia's one or two lines did not render him a tap dancing minstrel like Finn, or an emasculated, easily dismissed boy like Poe in TLJ. There's no comparison between George Lucas and what Kathleen Kennedy is clearly doing to male characters.

Great, just what we need to bring into this... "Menism."

 

[plynch]

From way upthread I gather that some think Rian Johnson was trying to teach serious fans something about what to expect out of SW films. This seems farfetched.

I guess if they made a Trek movie and Kirk had stopped being a humane explorer and really loved his desk job, I would empathize with the angry SW fans; even if critics and casual fans said it worked for them.

Nevertheless the more I read here, the more I like messed-up Luke as an idea.

 

[Ithekro]

I was born in 1977. I've basically lived Star Wars. This movie was fine. Did I have expectations that were different from what was in the film, certainly. But I enjoyed the film.

Do I think there still might be something up with Rey? Yes. Will I be disappointed if she remains a nobody lineage? Probably not, but to qualify, Kennedy did say that the Episode films were the Skywalker story, and if there are no more Skywalkers by the end of Episode IX...that's the last "Episode" film. There can of course be any number of films, both before and after Episode IX....just their would never be a Episode X without a Skywalker.

Are there problems with the movie? Of course there are, there are problems with every Star Wars movie. The largest one here is a hold over from TFA, no enough backstory or galactic setup. We don't know what's going on in the Galaxy anymore, since unlike the two previous trilogies, we are focused on two groups that are supposedly small, fighting each other. The First Order is taking down the Republic and the Resistance is fighting the First Order. But the First Order isn't suppose to be up to the size of the Empire or even the old CIS of the Clone Wars days....yet the Republic is falling hard, but can the First Order take over the governmental part of running the galaxy, or will they just let systems do whatever as long as they pledge loyalty to the First Order, seeing that the Republic didn't seem to have that strong of a hold on the galaxy at it is.

 

[bigdaddy]

Headline "Mark Hamill blasts the Last Jedi" trending on Facebook...

That was just Russian propaganda.

 

[fireproof78]

From what I recall about the NJO it wasn’t the authors’ intention to kill off Anakin Solo. I read that the original plan was to kill off Jacen, however Lucas objected to that. I think he might have felt there was the possibility of audience confusion with having both Anakin Skywalker in the prequels and Anakin Solo in the NJO. It sucks that they killed off Anakin Solo, but they did give him that NJO duology to soften the blow.

And then Chewbacca...

Sorry, when those things happened in the EU I was like, "Um, no., 100% no."

And that's when the EU became not for me. I'm glad people still like it but these films were something that I felt I could step in to without worrying about the back story.

 

[Reverend]

From what I recall about the NJO it wasn’t the authors’ intention to kill off Anakin Solo. I read that the original plan was to kill off Jacen, however Lucas objected to that. I think he might have felt there was the possibility of audience confusion with having both Anakin Skywalker in the prequels and Anakin Solo in the NJO. It sucks that they killed off Anakin Solo, but they did give him that NJO duology to soften the blow.

The way I heard it, George Lucas had zero input nor had any interest in this whatsoever. So far as I recall the "objection"--if you want to call it that--came from Lucasfilm Licencing. You know, the one's who's job it was to keep tabs on this crap.
I think the reason this so often gets misreported is that certain people (be the the interviewer or interviewee) use "Lucas" to refer to the company and the man interchangeably.

 

[David cgc]

I guess if they made a Trek movie and Kirk had stopped being a humane explorer and really loved his desk job, I would empathize with the angry SW fans; even if critics and casual fans said it worked for them.

Captain Kirk giving up being an explorer to take a desk job for vague reasons is the backstory of, like, half the Trek films. TMP, TWOK, TUC (sort of), GEN (a bit moreso than TUC). Beyond had the revolutionary approach of showing him considering taking a desk job before deciding it wasn't for him without actually having to do that and then get back in the saddle during the film.

 

[Reverend]

Captain Kirk giving up being an explorer to take a desk job for vague reasons is the backstory of, like, half the Trek films. TMP, TWOK, TUC (sort of), GEN (a bit moreso than TUC). Beyond had the revolutionary approach of showing him considering taking a desk job before deciding it wasn't for him without actually having to do that and then get back in the saddle during the film.

To say nothing of the fact that the "reluctant old gunslinger/veteran/master sought out by some bright-eyed, star-struck kid to come fight the good fight again" trope is a mainstay of the westerns and samurai movies that were a huge influence on Star Wars from the get-go.

To my mind it's a very simple trade-off: if one wants a movie with old Luke Skywalker as more than just a cameo (and *isn't* a snooze-fest devoid of drama) then you're going to need to give him a character arc and some conflict.
If one wants Luke to live happily ever after following the events of RotJ, then one can't have him in one's movie as anything other than a cameo without it being a snooze-fest devoid of drama. It's really an either or thing. No simultaneous possession and consumption of baked confectionery is permitted.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

A few observations (pros and cons) on second viewing:

• Resistance Bombers are the worst designed, slowest, and probably most useless element of their arsenal. The WWII imagery was strong with this one, which was fun, but as a practical weapon it was pretty much a non-starter (a single piece of shrapnel took out three of them?)
  
  
• Laura Dern and 3D do not mix. She looked stretched and ... wrong.
  
  
• In fact, I thought Luke's Force projection actually looked like a projection. It was as if it was superimposed on the image. Whether or not this was intentional, it made it interesting to watch a second time.
  
  
• Luke's projection doesn't track through the salt. They purposefully show Kylo Ren digging in his heels to produce a red footprint, and right after Luke doing the same thing (with no footprint).
  
  
• Luke's best scenes are with R2 and Yoda, when he's the character Hamill wanted to play. I agree with an earlier poster that the age of the broken hero ended a few years ago. While the whole projection battle was novel, it left me wanting because I didn't want Luke's last act to be phoned in.
  
  
• Domhnall Gleeson could have been replaced with a mannequin, since he basically stood still in his Imperial pose for every scene.
  
  

 

[TedShatner10]

OK, I've seen the film again and with the opening battle there's no real excuse (other than severe institional problems within the FO's navy and especially bad command paralysis) why the THREE powerful Star Destroyer escorts did not fire their secondary batteries at the Resistance fighters/bombers and unload their primary batteries at the Radama flotilla (let alone deploy TIEs to screen the Dreadnought until it was too late).

And at the start of the pursuit it seemed like the Resistance fleet was accelerating past the FO's fleet turbo laser coverage of Kylo' s squadron (but bare in mind the FO's TIEs are more uniformally equipped with hyperdrives like their opposition).

Seemed like Snoke was more a sadist and micromanaging bully with his sauntering fleet rather than a inspired military strategist. And General (not Admiral) Hux was a ground force commander, bureaucrat and ideological fanatic who was clearly out of his depth as a space fleet commander (with the FO having severe institutional problems and lack of naval tactical experience, with a minority clapped out Imperial veterans like Canady and vast numbers of brainwashed rookies).