We saw a Star War! Last Jedi spoiler thread

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A much better explanation regarding tlj.
I think I might be ready to go watch it, if only to be able to finally say my goodbyes to something I consider very important and only now am I willing to let go.
A merry Christmas to you all!

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[Majoru Oakheart]

Just seems very odd to me. Folks seem mad at this movie for using what TFA established, and for NOT using things that fans speculated about after TFA.

I would have expected anyone that had such strong expectations about this movie wouldn’t ignore what had actually been established.

Here's what we knew from TFA:

Luke had a student destroy his Academy and then left, presumably to find the First Jedi Temple, like Han said. That's all we really knew.

So that has us asking: "Why did Luke leave?" "Why go to the First Jedi Temple?" "What can be found there that he's rush off to find it without really letting his friends and family know where he went?" "Why didn't he come back?"

My answer to all that was that he just had a student betray him...Maybe he wasn't a good enough teacher. Maybe he went to learn in order to find a way to train students better in the future or maybe there is some hidden wisdom that the first Jedi had that would allow him to bring Kylo back from the Dark Side.

If he didn't find any wisdom, maybe he is deep in meditation looking for answers within the Force itself or maybe he got confused by the lack of answers and was despondent. He wants to help, but he doesn't know HOW anymore. He could just need someone to come along and give him a pep talk so that he can pull himself together enough to help.

Maybe the Force told him that he'd need to train a new student but he would need to wait for the right moment, after the Awakening, before that was possible.

Maybe he found what he was looking for but somehow lost his ship and couldn't get back.

The trailer said "The Jedi have to end" so my pet theory was that he found some information in the First Jedi Temple that made him lose faith in the Jedi philosophy. My reigning theory was that the Jedi originally used both the Light and the Dark equally by learning to accept their emotions rather than get rid of them but that an apprentice nearly destroyed the Jedi a thousand years ago and the Jedi became fearful of tapping into the Dark Side. So fearful that they started teaching that you could never feel fear or anger so as to never even slightly tap into the Dark Side, since it consumed one person and that nearly destroyed them all. Luke discovered this and realized that everything that Yoda taught him was wrong. That it was nearly impossible to get rid of fear or anger entirely and that if you learned to accept those emotions you were stronger. That's what he did wrong...but it was too late to save Kylo. So Luke blamed himself and was wallowing in pity over it. But at the same time he was wallowing, he was learning about the original Jedi ways and needed to find a new student to teach...and the Force delivers one to him.

All of those things were possibilities. The one where he had actually given up entirely on Jedi, on helping, and on life entirely was one that NEVER occurred to me. That was too obvious after seeing the trailer. It had to be tricking us into something else.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Goodness, I have no idea where this concept of Luke you guys seem to have came from (maybe the books?), but the actions Luke takes in the OT are not those of the hero you seem to idolize.

I've explained this in previous posts, but to summarize. That was the Luke from the first 2 movies. In Return of the Jedi he shows up and his calm, confident, intelligent. He plans the entire rescue of Han multiple layers deep. Han comments how Luke has changed so much, he couldn't imagine the old Luke planning that. It's been 3 years since the previous movie and fandom has tried to figure out exactly what happened to Luke in that time but it seems VERY important, since he is still pretty much a whiny farmboy at the end of ESB but his Force power, his maturity and his mentality have changed entirely in RotJ.

He realizes he needs to face Vader and the Emperor calmly. He allows himself to be captured because he's now trusting the Force. He believes that it won't let him come to harm. He also believes his father can be turned.

The Emperor is very good at saying the right things to get under people's skin so he taunt him repeatedly. Luke doesn't fall for it over and over again until he realizes that his friends all might die. That's his one weakness. He cares about them too much. That drives him over the edge and he attacks. Because of his fear for his friends he ALMOST goes too far. He gets angry. But before he can cross the threshold, he realizes what he's done and he pulls back.

I've always gotten from that moment that he finally faced his weakness, his anger and his fear and finally beaten it. That's why he declares himself a Jedi on the spot. He's had the breakthrough he needs to officially decide that he is a full fledged Jedi, no longer swayed by fear and anger.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Of course he grew, no one's claiming otherwise, but he didn't become a wise Jedi on-screen in any of them. He was still a hot-headed risk taker in RotJ, as evidenced by the continual set of risks he ran from Jabba's Palace through Endor to the confrontation with Vader and the Emperor. None of that was what a calm, collected, and centered Jedi Master would choose to do.

The argument you're making here doesn't deflect from the fact that Luke of teh OT isn't how you (and others) keep trying to portray him: as someone who would never have a moment of weakness.

From what I got in the movie was that between ESB and RotJ, Luke basically got 95% of the way to being a Jedi. He learned to be at peace, to plan instead of being reckless, and he realized that winning meant converting his father, not killing him. So most of his growth was completed. He went on the mission knowing he would be captured and that he would be brought before Vader. He wanted to in order to convince him to come back to the Light Side.

This was a complete turn around from his failure in the cave where he saw Vader and pulled out his lightsaber immediately to kill him. We see Luke in that movie not acting out of hatred or fear. He literally walks into the place he fears the most in order to save someone, not kill them.

As I said in the previous post, he lets his anger take over briefly...but it passes. He has won and become a Jedi. He is strong enough to not have moments of weakness in the future now. He got the last 5% of the way to becoming a full Jedi.

Torn down?

How so? The Jedi Order is still going on, the New Republic still exists, if badly hurt, and there's still a chance that the son of Han and Leia will turn back to the light (I'm not sure what I hope about this, honestly). Did you really want a trilogy where everything was as awesome as you imagined it, with Han and Leia being happily-ever-aftering and Luke being a kick-ass Jedi Master at the head of a new Jedi Order? What, praytell, do you think would the conflict be? With all of the superheroes around, what could possibly function as a suitable crisis? Invasion from outside the galaxy (obviously EU sarcasm is obvious)?

There's no Republic anymore. The Senate and all their ships were destroyed. There are individual planets left who used to belong to the Republic, but it's gone. They make that clear in TLJ. The First Order will take over the entire galaxy in a matter of weeks according to the movie, since there's no one left to resist them.

The Jedi Order doesn't really exist. The Jedi Order implies rules, a power structure...and more than one Jedi. There's one person out there who can use the Force who has a bunch of books on the Jedi philosophy. The Jedi Order is destroyed. But she isn't even a Jedi yet.

As for problems. Lots of problems can show up even with the Republic intact. There are like 100 books each with problems in them while the New Republic exists. You could have an attack from another Galaxy, yep. You could have part of the Republic breaking away and doing a civil war...though that's likely too much like the prequels. You could have some hidden dark side users becoming essentially terrorists and they have to stop them. You could have the First Order show up, but rather than have the ability to destroy the entire Republic in one shot, you could have had a huge war between large fleets.

You could have Kylo run off with his Knights of Ren and have a cool battle between them and all of the Jedi Luke trained. There's lots of stories that can be told.

To tell a hero's story, the hero has to fail at some point. They have to face that failure and overcome. We can't have the cast of the OT be perfect from the get go, they needed to be in crisis to tell a compelling story. Anything else leaves them as utterly fake.

They don't HAVE to face inner conflict. Writing theory tells us that there are 3 types of conflict: Man against Man, Man against Nature, and Man against Himself. You can have a compelling story where all of the growth comes from the conflict between someone and their enemies. A large number of movies do it all the time where the main character doesn't really "grow", they just survive and win against whatever is against them.

These characters already finished their three part journey in order to find their flaws, stumble because of them and then finally overcome them. You are suggesting that they need to give them back the same flaws they learned to overcome just so that they can overcome them a second time. We've seen that already. Let's do something else.

So, Han's crisis is his son. He rises to the occasion by reaching out to Ben, and dies for it (and I'm pretty sure he knew that was a likely outcome, so double points). Leia's crisis is the Republic. It has to be in jeopardy for her to have something to fight for. She rises to the occasion and doesn't back down. Luke's crisis is himself, as it's always been. And he rises to that occasion and shows that he's truly earned the title Jedi Master only at the end of TLJ, where he accepts himself finally.

Han's crisis was that he didn't care about anyone other than himself. He treated everyone like pawns, he only cared about money. He learns to care about the galaxy, about the Rebellion and about Leia. He learns people and connections are important. That's his story arc. That's how he grew in the 3 movies.

So, the new movie picks up with Han having given up on his family. His son betrayed everyone and ran off and he left, breaking their family even more. He no longer helps with the cause and has gone back to just making money for himself. Literally everything he learned in the old movies was brought back to the starting point. His character growth was reversed...just so we could see him do it again.

Leia fought to destroy the Empire so she could establish a new Republic. Her growth was mostly external but her defeat of the Empire IS one of her moments of growth. The other ones were learning to care about Han and her brother and learning that working together was the best idea. So where are we left? The Republic she worked to create is destroyed and she no longer has Luke or Han. Her moments of triumph are still fighting for the Republic, looking for Han, trying to reunite her family and seeing Luke again. Those are only triumphs because they ripped them away so they could reestablish them again.

Luke is the same way, he goes from being impulsive, reckless, quick to anger, and naive to calm, collected, thoughtful and mature Jedi. Where are we in TLJ? He's gone back to being whiny, quick to anger and is quick to decide to kill Ben and quick to decide to run off and die by himself. He doesn't even consider himself a Jedi any longer. 30 years later he's forgotten everything he learned and has gone back to being the Luke with all the flaws we saw in the first movie.

So, no, the OT isn't burned down, because what was built in the OT wasn't those institutions, but rather characters -- characters who were and are flawed, and yet still show up for the job. I love Luke far more now than I ever did, because he was flawed but still showed up. Han, too. His death coming from walking towards pain and danger instead of running away was awesome -- a really summation of the movement he started in E4. And Leia, Leia is the least changing of all of them. She always fought, and she's still fighting, and I am deeply saddened that we'll never see the culmination of her arc the way it should have been. I have a feeling it was moving towards her giving the fight to others to carry, to finally resting.

Luke was flawed before...but he showed up on Cloud city when his friends needed him. He was flawed before but showed up to confront the Emperor in RotJ. He's done that. Watching him do it again is pointless. Han learned to show up when he returned to help them at the end of ANH and joined the Rebellion full time instead of running away, which is what he was doing before and during ANH. He shouldn't have to prove that he can show up. He already did that. Leia was always fighting. True. She WON, however. That's was the culmination of her storyline. Now she had to lose so she could fight all over again. But we've done that already.

The characters were flawed and they grew past those flaws. That was kind of the point of the first 3 Star Wars movies.

 

[smbakeresq]

I see it as Luke became as Jedi in V and VI, just like in the movies. In this movie he transcends even being a Jedi, he gets the big picture, which very few do otherwise we would see force ghosts everywhere.

Its sort of the like the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the martial arts movie. Most of the chambers are about honing your body, but San-Te (and no one else it seems) can to the top until he wanders the world to find himself. You can't get passed your limitations until they are shown through failure.

This is also the central idea of the Matrix, the Architect has reached the limit of his evolution since he can't understand why his decisions fail, and never will. Since he cant understand his failures, he cant fix the problems in the Matrix. In programing terms the Architect is a essentially an expert system, with a series of preprogrammed responses. Neo, being of both worlds, can see his failure and correct them. His is the role of a programmer as he can actually alter the base coding.

 

[hawkeyefan]

All of those things were possibilities. The one where he had actually given up entirely on Jedi, on helping, and on life entirely was one that NEVER occurred to me. That was too obvious after seeing the trailer. It had to be tricking us into something else.

All of those were possible, sure. So is what we were shown.

It’s interesting that you’re willing to come up with explanations for why the movie is “wrong”. Why not try to imagine why it’s “right”?

Maybe Luke had a vision that if he stayed around after the destruction of the temple and faced Kylo again, that it would result in Kylo’s death, and in Luke turning to the Dark Side.

Or maybe Luke is able to stop Kylo Ren, but must kill him in order to do so...and this loss drives Leia over the edge, and she turns to the Dark Side. The Resistance doesn't last long after this, and is extinguished once and for all.

We can come up with scenarios all day long. But I think what we actually saw in the film showed us what we needed. Luke was doing what he thought was best. And perhaps it was best. Perhaps had he done anything else, things would have went very differently, and much worse, and then he would have actually been the ladt Jedi.

 

[pukunui]

As I said in the previous post, he lets his anger take over briefly...but it passes. He has won and become a Jedi. He is strong enough to not have moments of weakness in the future now. He got the last 5% of the way to becoming a full Jedi.

Right. Because once you've earned your Jedi stripes, you don't have to worry about having moments of weakness ever again. You're set for life.

 

[hopeless]

Doesn't explain the Anti-Christ which was how they explained why Luke reacted like he did!
Now had Snoke been communicating with Ben in his sleep that combination when detected would explain Luke come running expecting an intruder finding himself facing Ben.
Stunned it's all he can do to shield himself as Snoke provokes Ben into collapsing the ceiling atop of Luke making Ben think Luke was about to attack him rather than reacting to an intruder.
THAT would make sense not what I've read!

 

[Imaculata]

If I were asked to fix the problems with The Last Jedi (note that I am no script writer), here is what I would have changed:

Reveal Rey's link to the force and to Luke's lightsaber. Have a point to her entering the dark hole, leading to either a wise lesson about the Force, or some dark revelation about herself.

Remove the entire fake out with Holdo. Let the rebels be up front about their plan to escape to the planet Crait, so that Poe and Finn don't not mount some unnecessary suicide plan that ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Let the First Order be aware that they are fleeing to Crait, and be confident that they can crush them on that planet. There's really no way for them to escape from it, so the place is a death trap.

Holdo still crashes her ship into the First Order, but she does it as soon as possible, so the rest can escape to the planet. This way she doesn't look incompetent.

Leia should have died in outer space. I have no issue with her using her Force powers to float to safety. But with the recent death of Carrie Fisher, they had an easy out here. Why didn't they take it? Why have the character whose actress died, survive, and the character whose actor is still alive and well, die?

Instead of having Finn and Rose go to the Casino planet to find some hacker, and then also try and board the Dreadnought unnoticed, have them travel to the Casino planet to activate a distress beacon. It would be easy to set it up in such a way that the First Order is blocking rebel communication, so they can't call for help. Finn and Rose need to get down to the planet to remotely activate a distress beacon that will hopefully get reinforcements to Crait in time. Why over complicate things? The First Order however has a heavy presence on the Casino planet, thus adding extra tension to Finn's adventures on the planet. Throw in a battle with some AT ST walkers while you're at it, and you have everything for an exciting finale.

Rey and Kylo still team up against snoke, but snoke regenerates instantly. Thus his menace is not diminished (plus you can still have him show up in the third movie), and his guards actually have a reason to fight Rey and Kylo. Rather than Kylo immediately turning back to the dark side again, have them both become renegade Jedi. Snoke then sends in the Knights of Ren to kill them, which leaves both Rey and Kylo critically injured, until they are rescued by Luke with his astral projection thingy. Luke then fights the Knights of Ren, giving Rey and Kylo a chance to escape. Although Luke tells Rey to leave Kylo behind, she refuses, and the two escape together on the Falcon, before Luke's clever trick is revealed. Luke then does NOT die after the astral projection, so he can still show up in the next movie. The Knights of Ren will hunt Rey and Kylo in the next movie, and we can now probably squeeze a cool lightsaber fight with Luke and Rey versus the Knights of Ren into movie 3.

The rebels escape to Crait, where an actual battle with the First Order takes place. Because why have these awesome looking AT-AT's in your movie if you're not going to use them? The rebels try and hold back the invasion with their inferior vehicles, but they are getting crushed. That is until Finn manages to call in reinforcements just in time, only to get captured himself together with Rose (which leaves Finn and Rose captured at the start of the next movie). Neither Finn or Rose take part in the battle on Crait, and Rose does not crash her ship into that of Finn. That was dumb.

The rebels take out some of the AT-AT's during the battle, and are eventually able to escape the First Order, thanks to a hidden weapon on the planet that the First Order does not know about (maybe they have one of those hammerhead ships from Rogue One?). Big explosion, they plow through Snoke's command ship right as Rey and Kylo escape, end of movie.

 

[OB1]

Right. Because once you've earned your Jedi stripes, you don't have to worry about having moments of weakness ever again. You're set for life.

So much this.

Power corrupts.

The old Jedi Order knew this, and put an elaborate system in place to try and mitigate the effects of that corrupting influence, identifying and indoctrinating young force sensitives in a rigid training structure to try and ensure they wouldn't fall to the dark side. That is why it took so long to train Jedi in the old way and why Luke and Rey were able to become so powerful so quick.

It worked for a thousand years, but eventually, that power began to corrupt even the Jedi Order when they began fighting in the Clone War, leading to it's demise. Note that this structure wasn't nearly as old as the Jedi themselves, who have been around for 1,000 generations.

It corrupted Anakin, whose strength in the Force was unnaturally strong due to his father being The Force itself. The training of the Jedi wasn't strong enough to overcome that level of power. It wasn't designed to be. Anakin saw the future to clearly, and drew on his power to try and force change.
[MENTION=427]Mojo[/MENTION]ru oakheart It nearly corrupted Luke, who at the beginning of Return of the Jedi had begun to truly tap into the power provided by his bloodline, allowing him to see and prepare for multiple outcomes in Jabba's palace and later confront Vader. Only by the rejection of the power the Force gave him was he able to live. Had he turned, he would have been killed along with Vader and the Emperor when the Death Star was destroyed.

It began corrupting Kylo, who wasn't receiving training and was further influenced by a dark power.

Luke goes on to train Kylo and another generation, but Luke's strong power with the Force and his ability to see the future led him to see the fall of Kylo, and he was so afraid of that outcome it nearly corrupted Luke again. His solution to that was to cut himself off from the Force, to prevent him from being tempted ever again.

But hope still exists, and because of Luke's decision to go into exile, it eventually leads Rey to him, allowing her to leave with the texts of the original Jedi order. And she rekindles hope in Luke, allowing him to use the Force for "Knowledge and Defense" to aid in the escape of Resistance. Rey now has the chance to rebuild, hopefully learning from the mistakes of the Old Jedi Order once the One Ring of the Skywalker bloodline is destroyed.