Luke being reluctant is fine and I was okay with the hermit in exile thing, but never to completely give up hope and go off to die alone on an island. TFA felt like it was pointing in a definite direction, and TLJ felt like it was acknowledging that direction and purposefully going the other way (Johnson says as much in pretty much every interview about it: “subverting expectations”) while staring you dead in the eye like a cat pushing a priceless Ming vase off of a high shelf.
I legitimately don’t know how you can think that TFA was “pushing Luke in a definite direction” that somehow excluded his interpretation in TLJ. Genuinely curious to hear thoughts on this, as I truly can’t think of anything in TFA that contradicts his portrayal in TLJ or suggests it would have been something else.
As for “subverting expectations,” I think people read to much into that to mean Johnson was trying to annoy fans at every turn or something. I think what he actually means is more in the minutiae of the telling of his film itself, feinting one way and going another - not to annoy fans but to thrill them with a story that keeps you guessing.
Well to me it comes across as trickery, a cheat that gives the audience some thrills at the expense of building a real story that stands own its own. The movie essentially keeps telling you not to trust the story trajectory, because the author might yank the steering wheel at any moment, which in my view prevents immersion.
To quote Plinkett:
“The question is why troll the situation at all? Why not take the audience in a completely new direction?”
Once you take away the surprises and the thrills, TLJ exposes the current generation’s Star Wars is self-referential to a fault, and extremely limited in its scope. RJ took the OT’s setups, and believed you can invent a new joke by just adding a new punchline.