Mange wrote: ↑2020-01-02 03:56pm
Oh really? In the script? I haven't managed to find the script anywhere online, so perhaps you'll cite the passage. Oh, we have Luke
saying that it was "pure instinct", but he lied earlier (or "from a certain point of view") and we're also shown Kylo's point of view. And the version from Luke's POV is quite enough.
Luke saying it's pure instinct means its in the script. Like - that's the script. That's why he said it. Also, if you're actually going to argue with a straight face that the third version we see isn't the truth, then you're not actually engaging with the film in good faith at all, you're looking for excuses to dislike it. It's some of the most blatantly obvious storytelling imaginable:
1st Version: Luke's lie;
2nd Version: Ben's version;
3rd Version: what actually happened
And if we're playing the script game, I'd like to cite the end of the TFA script:
So what? That says absolutely nothing meaningful at all. What am I supposed to take away from this? We actually know from Mark Hamill that he asked Abrams for direction on how to play this in the script? You know what Abrams had for him? Nothing. No guidance at all.
While one shouldn't read too much into some parts of this (especially not the "He doesn't need to ask her who she is, or what she is doing here. His look says it all."-part), this doesn't read as a character being handed his father's lightsaber only to toss it away in the next few seconds. Rian Johnson did his own failed take on the character.
No, his take on the character is successful, coherent and above all - human. The alternative you've proposed is nothing of the kind. More on this later.
Now you're flat out contradicting yourself. You can't have it both ways. Vader, and the Emperor, were direct threats to Leia. I'm not saying that they could bring her onto the Death Star at an instant, but they were in a dominant position. Why wouldn't Luke, again under the immense pressure he was under, break? The two situations aren't comparable. Ben Solo wasn't a direct threat to anyone, yet Luke acted as a psychopath and was considering murdering his nephew (heck, what was his plan anyway? Just mindprobe Ben in his sleep based on "visions"?).
There's no contradiction here at all. Luke received visions in the Force when he reacted to the darkness he sensed from Ben. Visions which we know from six movies now (from both Anakin and Luke) have a tendency to come true, and feel
extremely real. Luke didn't get a
vision in the throne room, he was merely taunted. And he still flipped out and almost killed his father. But him instinctively activating his lightsaber and then immediately being ashamed of himself is some sort of unforgiveable betrayal of the character? Please.
Doesn't it? I think it does but I think it's impossible to come to some sort of consensus here. I think it's implied in TFA and you do not and is heavily invested in Johnson's storytelling.
It's impossible to come to a consensus because you refuse to actually recognise what's going on in TFA for what it is, and even if your - frankly - fantastical version of Luke's exile was true - it would still make for incredibly poor storytelling.
Nowhere have you even begun to grapple with all the issues this "I must go for no reason until I am ... needed" stuff creates for TFA. Indeed, you haven't even tried. You're just asserting that you think it works without even attempting to justify it.
In reality, your version makes Luke a
bad character with no possible explanation for his behavior that could be recognised and understood by human beings. Let's break this down:
1. Luke disappears because for some reason you can't really explain except to say that he thinks he'll only be "needed" later.
2. In disappearing, he doesn't bother telling Han, Leia, or
anyone where he's actually going. This is in TFA - the first Jedi temple is where he is
rumored to have gone.
3. Not only does he not bother telling where he's going or
why, so as to actually give his friends and family hope for the future, he doesn't even give them a way to contact him.
4. This kicks off an intergalactic easter egg hunt that is only resolved
years after his disappearance by one of Leia's old friends discovering - as the opening crawl says - "a clue" (i.e. the map) to his whereabouts. This is the map you think he actually purposefully left behind (an objectively false assertion, but let's leave that aside), by the way. The First Order, also searching for Skywalker, comes within literal minutes of finding the map first and using their own archives to find Luke and kill him.
5. The Luke who somehow thinks he will only be 'needed' later sat on his hands and did nothing at all even though he should've felt in the Force both the death of Han and the destruction of Hosnian Prime.
How does your version
actually explain any of this behavior? It doesn't. At all. Because it's not something that's recogniseably human or an audience could actually comprehend. It turns Luke Skywalker for a human being who is dealing with real problems and from which the audience can identify with, sympathise with, or draw actual lessons from (e.g. the importance of learning from failure, the value of legends even if you can't always live up to them) to an inscrutable, distant diety figure who just does crazy, irresponsible and selfish shit for no understandable reason at all.
Luke is an established character who has had his arc to be further built upon, not torn down and rebuild a new character (Jake Skywalker).
This doesn't mean anything. Again, tell me what kind of arc you envisage that would actually explain any of this behavior and
not include Luke somehow going through a personal crisis?
Vympel, I know you've seen the OT so I can also see three reasons as to why you don't understand the arguments: 1. I fail to make myself understood (English is, after all, my second language), 2. You are unwilling to understand or 3. You are unable to understand. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and go with either 1 (the most likely) or 2.
You are the one spouting nonsense. As I have said many, many times over, Luke is an already established character! He developed through the OT and has had 30 years to mature. We know of his personal characteristics. Are those set in stone? No, but if Johnson tried to deconstruct Luke, he must build on characteristics the character already had!
What I mean with the reset button is that the Luke as portrayed in TLJ has no characteristics, no strengths and weaknesses of the character as portrayed in three goddamn movies before the TLJ trainwreck. The lessons the character learned from the OT such as the nature of visions, the lessons he learned confronting the Emperor and him finally throwing away his lightsaber and stepping away from the Dark Side and his tendency to rush and help his friends in need. All of this was undone with Jake Skywalker (I'm not at all surprised that Mark Hamill and John Boyega discussed their respective characters at length during the production of TLJ and that both rejected the direction their characters went.). While I'm sure that an older, more mature Luke wouldn't rush head over heels to help his family or friends, the OT, you know, the three movies with the character of Luke Skywalker, doesn't establish a character that would sit on his ass doing nothing when his family and friends are in mortal danger. That's Rian Johnson's bullshit.
(TESB: "They are my friends! I got to help them! TLJ:" The galaxy is being overrun by the First Order and my sister Leia is in mortal danger. Meh, I'll sit this one out brooding as I've been doing already for the past six years.")
Heck, let's talk about the psychological trauma Rey would've suffered and why that doesn't come across in the movies if it's fair game to pick Luke as some sort of deconstructionist playground.
And finally, Star Wars is a simple story. It's great to try to think in another direction, but again, if Johnson wanted to do it then he should've done it in his goddamn movies. Ultimately this is Kennedy's fault.
You can see he's an 'established character' all you want - its a meaningless statement. Luke was in his
early 20s at the end of ROTJ. The idea that 30 years later all he would've done is "mature" so that he would never make an actual error again is garbage. What does the Luke of ROTJ know about training an apprentice? Is that a lesson he learned in ROTJ, is it? Did Luke learn that you never trust Force visions in ROTJ? When did that happen? Your entire argument is basically "Luke learned everything he needed to know in ROTJ so he would literally never make a mistake again, nevermind that nothing in the OT ever put him in this situation".
And the weird thing about it is that you keep making excuses for TFA and trying to heap the "blame" on TLJ even though "the galaxy is being overrun by the First Order and my sister Leia is in mortal danger"
is clearly established in TFA. It's the whole
premise of the movie - that Luke is a MacGuffin that needs to be found, because he's vanished!
Just
what sort of worthwhile story do you think can be told with Luke that explains his behavior if you refuse to allow him to make any sort of mistake?
Unlike Abrams, Johnson had a clear idea of Luke's actual purpose as a character in a mythic story given the character's position and age:
"With Mark, it was a much bigger conversation about the whole kind of shape of the character and where it was going. And it was about his expectations coming into it and I think the expectation that this would be, you know, much closer to the Luke from - that was the hero, his hero's journey from the original trilogy.
Whereas for me, this is 30 years later, and not only that, this is - you know - if you look at any classic kind of hero's myth that is worth its salt, and if you look at the beginning of the hero's journey like with King Arthur, he pulls the sword from the stone and he's ascendant, he has setbacks, but he unites all the kingdoms and get his knights together, or Beowulf - you know - killing Grendel's mother and taking it all down and getting his own hall.
There's always that first arc, but then any one of these things, if you keep reading and it goes past that and then you get into the hero's middle aged life and beyond, it always starts to get into - you think about King Arthur betrayed by his best friend and his wife and ultimately depending on what version you read, coming up against the product of incest from him who has completely usurped his kingdom, and he has to kill him at the cost of his own life - it gets into darker places.
And there's a reason for that. Because myths are not made to sell action figures. They're made to reflect the difficult transitions we go through in life. That early part of the hero's journey- I think - is about going from adolescence into adulthood, where you're ascendant and you're finding yourself, and you're winning.
In order for something to address middle age and beyond in a really honest way, if you look at the myths - the Fisher King, it deals with disillusionment, like you're losing your place in the world, everything changing, and loss - and that's because they're honest and they have to be honest because that's what these things are there for.
And it would be a betrayal of them and of Luke Skywalker as a character not to take it seriously enough to reflect that I think, and just give us the waxworks version of Luke that we might love and expect, because he's up there as the action figure in plastic on our wall looking heroic and stuff. If you want to take him seriously as a character- for me at least - it felt important to go into that realm.
And that sort of reasoning will always be worth more than this bizarre desire to put the character of Luke up on a pedestal and make him for all intents and purposes infallible, because for some reason our distorted childhood images of him are somehow meant to be precious things.
And it's this point that is really critical - there's no actual story here. You're just working backwards from "I didn't want this to happen", no matter how little sense the final result makes.
Also, I could honestly give a shit what either Mark Hamill or John Boyega think about their character arcs. They're not writers, they're actors. Their ability to speak intelligently about what makes for good writing - particularly where its irrevocably tied up with their careers and conceptions of themselves - is zero. It's the laziest, most irrelevant appeal to non-existent authority imaginable.
Boyega actually argued with a straight face that his character arc in TROS is better than in TLJ, lol. Boyega's part in TLJ was a weak part of the film, but at least he got an actual independent, complete story arc where he wasn't just chasing after Rey screaming "Reeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" every goddamn two seconds. Hamill at least had the self-awareness to call his ideas for the film stupid.