Luke says some stuff about how the Jedi allowed Sidious to destroy them, which means they apparently deserved to be destroyed, for some reason? He says the legacy of the Jedi is failure, despite the fact that the Jedi had been able to keep the Republic together and thriving (for the most part) for thousands of years. And he says that the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi, which isn’t some groundbreaking statement. Everyone already knew that. The Jedi never claimed that the Force belonged to them.
The Jedi never claimed to own the Force, but if you wanted to be trained in the Force, you became a Jedi. That was your only avenue. If the goal of the Jedi is to preserve peace and justice in the galaxy, this makes a lot of sense. It’s harder for someone whose goals are counter to peace and justice to become powerful in the Force if the only place they can learn is from the Jedi. But it creates one single point of failure, and if the Jedi themselves fail, the whole galaxy falls. This is exactly what happened in the prequels.
There’s also the fact that Luke, given his unconventional path to knighthood, would definitely not have been the traditionalist, prequel-like Jedi the new canon portrays him as. He would have reformed the Order to correct its flaws, rather than just throwing the whole thing out without trying to change anything. But, I’ll save that for another post.
It’s really dumb that the New EU seems to make Luke kind of traditionalist, but even in the context Rian Johnson was writing in, where Luke’s Academy is mostly undefined, it doesn’t matter how much reform Luke brings to the Jedi when the fundamental function of the Jedi remains the same. Luke recreates the same point of failure that led to the fall of the Republic simply by trying to bring the Jedi back.
I get that the point is that Luke is supposed to be wrong, so we can see him have a change of heart at the end.
It isn’t so much that is ideology is wrong, but that his solution is. Luke’s ideology in the movie, that positioning the galaxy to rely on heroes to solve their problems for them isn’t a good idea, is absolutely right (and that’s why it’s so mind boggling that TRoS ends the same way as RotJ without addressing this). But he was wrong in thinking that it meant the Jedi, or something like the Jedi, have no place in the galaxy.
Stardust1138 said:
… but as long as films like Marvel and what Star Wars is becoming are successful the storyteller will be pushed out of the equation.The MCU is light years ahead of the Star Wars franchise where consistent story and vision are concerned. Casting, writing,
The MCU’s “writing” is like the “writing” of a porno or an 80s video game. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important. It’s weak and barely existent because story isn’t the point. The point is to push your buttons for a bit, and the story’s only there because people aren’t yet ready to just watch two hour long SFX sequences like they are now ready to just play games and watch people having sex.
Star Wars, for what it’s worth, is at least supposed to be about the story. The overarching story may now be a train wreck, but the only reason the MCU isn’t a train wreck is because there’s nothing in the train to wreck it.