Vympel wrote: ↑2019-08-29 07:53am
Mark Hamill believing something about Luke as a character isn't really material to the issue. He played the character at a certain point in the character's life so he'll see the character a certain way. But the point I'm making is the complaints about Luke - if people were really paying attention - should have been raised in TFA. Instead they were (as noted above) so strongly conditioned to think of Luke a certain way that they suspended their critical faculties / didn't really think about what they had seen and its implications until confronted with the end result in TLJ, where they could no longer do so. And blamed TLJ (and Johnson) for it rather than going back and re-evaluating what TFA did and didn't do.
The point about Mark Hamill having a creative disagreement with Rian Johnson is that the people who had issues with the portrayal of Luke Skywalker in TLJ was not limited to a bunch of far-right nuts on some sci-fi forum. That such creative differences can be legitimate.
I think the fact that those complaints were quite common, AND the fact that people disagreed with the idea that everything has been implied or set up in TFA means there is a failure of communication in those set up and ideas. It's like people complaining about the final episode of GOT. You can say all you want about there being some sort of set-up for Daenerys turning evil, but the fact is there are many people who feel that the set-up isn't enough.
The same applies to Luke. If a decent amount of people felt that the set up was poor, then you have to acknowledge that the set up wasn't as good as it could have been.
That JJ Abrams is 'reserved' when he is asked about TLJ is not something I've ever seen any particular evidence for. I've never seen him be anything but complimentary, and most recently he said that Johnson's film made him more willing to take risks in TROS.
Being complimentary yes, because that is being a professional and not insulting your fellow director in front of live TV. But airing the fact that he had creative differences with Rian Johnson in public over the direction of the trilogy comes across as someone being diplomatically reserved about his feelings on Ep 8:
I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies.
More importantly, the idea that Abrams of all people would have a problem with Luke's character arc in TLJ in particular doesn't fly. It was him and Kasdan that wrote Luke as an exile who abandoned his friends, family and charge without bothering to tell anyone where he was going or if he would be back. It was him and Kasdan who created a situation where his friends were desperately looking about the galaxy for him for years to find some clue to his whereabouts. It was him and Kasdan who wrote that the reason he 'walked away from everything' was because he felt responsible for what happened at his temple.
(and it was JJ Abrams who days after the film was released expressly debunked the idea that R2-D2 being able to complete the map was in any way significant as opposed to a mere convenient coincidence - which as I've said earlier is a genuine misstep on his part - but one that was blown out of all proportion to everything else in the film even in the absence of his saying so)
Well Abrams did admit the direction for EP 8 was not what he envisioned. That we know for certain. Exactly what was the creative difference about is something we won't know until a few years down the line, when more behind the scene comments surface.
How the film presents information is the responsibility of the director, sure. How that information is received - or if it is received at all - also depends on how receptive the audience is to hearing it. Is it Johnson's fault, for example, that a canard of TLJ discourse is that "Kylo Ren was lying about Rey's parents" when Kylo Ren did nothing but stand there expectantly while Rey herself said they were nobody? Of course it isn't. The "Kylo Ren was lying" canard is 100% a product of audience pre-conditioning.
That's a wrong way of approaching film criticism. As a director, you have tremendous control over how you want to frame the story. You decide how the scene in composed, how the scene is edited, how a scene is shot by the cinematographer, and how to make adjustment on the actors' performance.
If a film fails to communicate certain ideas or themes well, very often you can go back to the film itself and think about how a director could have done it better in terms of the script, editing, cinematographer, acting and etc.
The hoo-hah over Rey's parents was a result of what JJ Abrams did in terms of framing the shots of Rey with her parents. The attempt at obscuring Rey's parents can be easily interpreted by many viewers as they being more important than a bunch of junk traders.
Moreover, JJ Abrams have flat out admitted his mistakes about how he framed certain key shots and give the audience the wrong impression of things.
The underwear scene of Alice Eve in Star Trek Into Darkness was seen as being sexist and misogynistic by a number of people, and Abrams admitted his mistakes in how he edited the scene:
https://teamcoco.com/video/conan-highli ... umberbatch
Then there is the famous scene of Chewie walking past Leia in TFA. He admitted he made a mistake too.
So I think you are being far too defensive of directors from criticism, when they can admit their mistakes about misframing certain scenes.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
