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.
Plenty of movies zig zag and play with expectations. It’s an extremely common device, used in everything from the recent Mission: Impossible to the original Star Wars. There’s nothing that’s a “cheat,” about it, it’s a tried and true storytelling conceit.
The problem, I guess, with mega popular franchises with Star Wars is fans try to outsmart it. “Oh I know everything about Star Wars so in this 2 hour video I will lay out everything that will definitely happen in episode VIII.” When they’re totally wrong, I get why they might feel “cheated.” But trying to predict what’s going to happen and actually watching what is happening are two very different things.
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.
The idea that the film is “trolling” says more about the viewer making the claim than the film itself. And I get it. A lot of people who go to see a sequel do so for the comfort of the familiar, they just wanted to be satiated with what they already know. So I can see how curve balls can get them angry. They don’t care if they’re dramatically justified or not, they just want what they know and love, how they want it.
The idea that TLJ relies solely on self-reference to tell it’s story is just plainly untrue, and again says more about the viewer, latching onto and commenting on the things that relate to the familiar, while completely missing what’s right in front of them - that which makes the film unique.