Luke was always quick to action and even in ROTJ, took a moment to do the right thing. So I don’t see any problem with the way he told it to Rey the second time. It fits his personality.
Here’s the thing, even if Luke messed up like that, I can’t fathom that he would not immediately do everything in his power to make it right. His most important distinction as a character was that he is the ONLY ONE that didn’t give up on Anakin. Here he just gives up and goes into exile. And I don’t care if in a novel or whatever it says that he went on a journey that made him realize whatever, the movie starts with Luke already altered and no glimpse of how he got that way is ever shown. Something that important should’ve been in the movie.
And his first lesson with Kenobi was to act on instinct.
That’s precisely it, that was at the beginning of his arc. Luke evolved throughout the OT movies, and then he just forgets ???
And then when Kylo Ren destroys the new school and kills all the students […] Luke is crushed.
Vader directly or indirectly committed genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jedi. His empire killed, tortured and oppressed trillions. Kylo is not even close to how bad Vader was, come on. And Luke still believed Anakin could come back, but not Ben ??
He is a side character there to aid the success of the main characters.
Sure, but he is a legacy character who deserves some continuity to his story. Let’s look at some other characters in Legacy Sequels:
Imagine if in BR 2049 we found Deckard hating and hunting replicants again, going against how his arc ended in the original BR.
Imagine if Maverick had given up on flying in the new Top Gun: Maverick because he lost a wingman even though we had already seen him overcome a similar tragedy in the original.
Now let’s look at Creed. Similarly to Luke, Rocky doesn’t box anymore. But his character is still a fighter at heart, he fights through cancer while training and believing in Creed.
I don’t have a problem if a character changed in the span of years, but the change has to respect the character’s existing journey. And if you are going to drastically change him, then at least SHOW how the change happened. Harvey Dent, Michael Corleone, Walter White, heck, even Spider-Man in SM3 (not that great a movie but it shows the change clearly), they are all examples of stories that SHOW good characters turned bad.
Edit: I don’t think Luke is evil in TLJ. Just contradictorily pessimistic.
And just to clarify, I honestly think TLJ is the best film in the ST. But Luke is just wrong.
Luke is jaded and withdrawn in TLJ (as setup by TFA). He feels his mistake was to follow Kenobi and Yoda’s teachings too closely. They didn’t work for Anakin and then they didn’t work again for Ben. He, like Kenobi, failed to consider that Palpatine was too powerful and both Anakin and Ben had been corrupted, not by the training methods, but by Palpatine. I still think the PT era Jedi had some major flaws and fixing them could have saved Anakin (I feel this in the story and feel it was confirmed by what Dave Filoni related that Lucas had said about Qui-gon in TPM).
Here is where I think they nailed Luke in TLJ. HIS ENTIRE SCHOOL WAS SLAUGHTERD BY ONE OF THE STUDENTS. Put yourself in a teacher’s place. You bring in your nephew who wiped out all the other students. You think you are just going to be normal after that? That is a crushing experience. That is a life altering experience. No one is going to come through that unscathed. Luke sets out on a quest (Han relates part of it in TFA and Lando some more in TROS) and ends up on Ach-to. His reaction to being asked to teach yet another student is immediate refusal. He wants to be left alone to his sorrow. Instead Yoda reminds him that we learn from our failures and it makes us better teachers. Then he bounces back and saves the day in a glorious final stand against his former pupil. Everything about his character in TLJ fits the situation as laid out in TFA. Part of that was Lucas’s doing. I know they said they dumped his treatment, but they didn’t dump all Lucas’s story. They kept a good deal. Luke not showing up until the 2nd movie was done before Lucas sold it to Disney.
And given Luke’s tragedy, his portrayal is on the money. He has reverted to that farm boy again. That unsure student looking for a Jedi Master in a swamp. Rey and Yoda snap him out of it and by the end of TLJ he recovers his Jedi demeanor and faces down Kylo Ren.
Then you have this new series which shows us this same Journey for Kenobi. He is down and jaded like Luke. But it is young Leia, Vader, and the inquisitors who snap him back to himself. A different story but a parallel journey. I bet the similarities to TLJ are what some don’t like. It is one of the things that I like.