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Post #1155778

Author
Mithrandir
Parent topic
The Last Jedi: Official Review and Opinions Thread ** SPOILERS **
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1155778/action/topic#1155778
Date created
8-Jan-2018, 2:25 PM

Mrebo said:

I’m old enough to remember it being cool to say ROTJ was bad because DS2 was a rehash. Also it was bad because Han Solo supposedly had poor characterization and should have died. And Ewoks were poor Wookiee cousins included for unfortunate humorous and juvenile appeal. Similar and more extensive objections made now are considered offensive. I don’t understand that.

Seeing the same visuals and story beats so deliberately performed takes away from a feeling that this is an authentic world. Superficial similarities are inevitable. We can talk about the Hero’s Journey or whatever but of course stories are going to have some manner of similarities. Those seemingly coincidental similarities are not the focus. If one likes that we are seeing the same story beats and the same visuals (with twists), that’s a personal choice. But it is pretty obvious where OT is being repurposed in a fairly methodical way and that won’t feel natural to many viewers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6G_dNCSXfo

As the time passes I’m getting more trouble with this movie; It’s not clear to me up to which point RJ is saying screw you to the OT, or if he is actually saying fuck you to JJ Abrams who left him in this starting position to begin with, a Luke Skywalker that’s not the Luke Skywalker we know from the OT.

Despite his journey in TLJ Luke ends up looking at the horizon and being an idealist.

Surely Luke could have come out of hiding and conducted the war against his nephew, probably it is even within his range of power and knowledge to totally destroy him, kill him. Now think if Luke Skywalker from the OT, the one that couldn’t kill and forgave his beating father would be capable of killing a child of his own blood just because of the moral imperative of galactic politics. To have him do that would be out of character. As it might be out of character to have him go into hiding in the first place, but that wasn’t RJ’s fault at all. Even more, TLJ up to some point fixes the problems of TFA by leaving us in a similar situation to where the OT started: an orphan and a now plainly evil-beyond-redemption villain. By giving us this Luke, he allowed Luke from the OT to still be up to the very end of his life. By dying looking to the horizon, he’s still the same of ESB, who says fuck you to hic et nunc Yoda, and by doing so, to the old Jedi Order going after his friends. And he does again in TLJ. And by setting a situation where it’s Luke who saves the day, it even comes against the very message of the most part of the movie, which is that heroes don’t exist. They do.

Yes, the visual beats that repeat themselves are a trouble and are personally to me the evidence of all this being played, as in a game of mind, on purpose by the writer, in micro and macro scales, as the scene with the iron “landing” over the wardrobe of the first order, he has to make the best he can to answer questions and situations that weren’t his to begin with, and that were made by fan-oriented-marketing strategies that stamp all over VII that now may hopefully be vanquished:

why did Luke go into hiding? (just because it would be cool to rise Luke to the ultimate Jedi Master and make him unaccessible, it would be cool to make him the mcguffin of VII)

why did Kylo had to be a fan of Star Wars (because it would be cool to have another villain with a helmet. Johnson voices Snoke -because being that TFA is a commentary on the fans (and Lucas warned it, they made something for the fans) its continuation couldn’t be less than a commentary on that commentary in order to let the thing breathe again): Take that ridicoulous helmet off.

Why did Kylo had to be a complex, layered, gray bad guy? because it would be cool and it would sell (literally) to have a layered, relatable vilain: Vader proved and widened the notion of antihero as a figure of admiration.

What can you do to solve those starting points without flattening the most beloved character of the saga into a person responsible of killing a stupid boy? Strangely, ironically and due to how those three aspects are defined linked, make him capable and of killing a boy. But ruminate of where the movie starts and where it ends.

As a writer, in order to preserve the essence of Luke, he had to change him to somehow justify an unjustifiable writing decission. And in doing so he closes another counterdiction in the movie, which makes it richer. Once F. Scott Fitzgerald said a mind of first class is that one that can enclose two opposite ideas at the same time.

By leaving, he can come back.
By refusing Yoda’s teachings in ESB, he becomes a Jedi
By refusing to be a Jedi, he ends up being the Last of them
By being the Last One, he seeds the future.
By meditating and looking within, he reaches beyond Ach-To, or the opposite
By reaching the exterior world, he reaches inner peace.
By coming back to life, he dies.
By dying, he ascends into the Force and lives forever.

Having Luke be in two places simultaneously is not only stating the most powerful force trick we’ve seen (and hope no one undermines this achievment in new installments of the saga makin it a random power) but as well it is the visual statement of the misterical duplicity of some human being’s destiny and the very counterdiction TLJ, and Luke Skywalker is in this level.

In this sense, and only in this POV, kudos to Johnson for what he has crafted after TFA.