Quote:
Originally Posted by njdevil254
What bothered me the most was the film's treatment of Luke Skywalker. I understand that the director wanted to throw curve balls to mess with our expectations, but he did so at the cost of all of the strong characterization built up before he took over. Luke is literally nothing like the character that I grew up watching. I feel like Johnson went out of his way to do the opposite of everything that fans expected just for shock value. Hopefully Abrams can close out the trilogy strong, but he's cleaning up quite a mess.
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I know that I'm in the relative minority in that, while I admit that it was not a perfect film, I did like The Last Jedi overall, and if ranking all of the movies from best to worse in my opinion, the original OT films would be in the top 3 spots, with TLJ being in 4th place above the rest.
I won't overly rehash the issues with the prequels, but between the very bad direction that led to stiff performances from actors who have had great roles in other films, some things barely lining up with the OT by a weak thread, and the introduction and character development of the characters new to the prequels often being handled terribly (we never hear of Dooku until Ep 2 and he doesn't actually appear until about half way into the movie, in Ep 3 suddenly General Grievous is an important character that we had never heard of before in the films), there was just a lot going on there that didn't work well IMO.
With The Force Awakens, it was IMO too much of a rehash of A New Hope. I felt that way about it from my first time seeing it. However, while that was an issue, I did actually like the new characters, particularly Rey, Finn, and Poe. They were well handled and acted. The Disney era films, for the most part, seem to mostly get right what the prequels got wrong, but also get wrong what little the prequels got right.
After the disappointing prequels, which it was hard to not have at least some basic expectations of going into them since they were the back story of the films that we already saw, the thing that I was looking forward to the most about a sequel trilogy was it being an "open book" or "blank canvas" so to speak. Within reason, they can go in pretty much any direction. And what I wanted most was to be surprised.
For the most part, that it was The Last Jedi did in my opinion. On my first viewing, the movie definitely starts out slow. A lot of the time with Rey on the island with Luke does tend to drag. But once we get past that and things really get going, I loved most of what happened. I was thrilled that they went in a lot of unexpected directions. People get upset about Snoke dying because we didn't know much about him. But just because he is dead doesn't mean that we can't learn more about his backstory in the next film. And what is there really to tell? In the original trilogy, we really didn't know much about the Emperor. People only seem to be concerned about knowing more about Snoke because we got Palpatine's backstory in the prequels, but even that can be summarized as him being a politician who manipulated the in universe politics to allow him to become the Emperor.
Snoke may have rose to power in more or less a similar manner, or at least one that can be just as easily summarized. The only real difference between Snoke's death and the Emperor's death (and how much we knew about them at the time of the releases of those respective films) is that Snoke's happens roughly in the middle of the second movie of the sequel trilogy, while the Emperor's happens towards the end of the third film in the original trilogy.
As for Luke, I'm of two minds about how he is handled. On the one hand, I do understand, up to a point, people being disappointed in how he was handled and wanting him to be more heroic. At the same time, I think in many respects how he was handled here actually makes a lot of sense. The only part that I really had an issue with was him throwing away his/his father's old light saber that Rey hands him with it being played off for laughs. Regardless of how much he may want to keep certain things in the past, I would think that suddenly having that show up after he lost is roughly 30+ years beforehand would have made him wonder how she got it.
But in terms of his overall attitude and characterization, I get it. And I think the main reasoning for it is summed up in when he talks about the dogmatic ways of the Jedi, how that essentially allowed for Palpatine/Sidious/The Emperor to emerge into power, etc.
In a sense, the events of the prequels are in large part what effects Luke's views. In the original trilogy, while he learns the ways of the Jedi (i.e. using the force, handling a light saber), he really only gets a very basic, minimalistic, and in some ways inaccurate history of the Jedi order.
In the OT, the Jedi are built up as being this heroic group that was brought down by betrayal and evil... which is true
from a certain point of view. But it really makes it sound like the were this almost perfectly heroic group that went down fighting, but were just largely overpowered by the opposition.
In reality, the Jedi as a whole don't really come off looking all that great in the prequels. They ARE very dogmatic. They rely on the force to a fault, despite the dark side "clouding everything," and fail to see what basic non-force-based logic and deductive reasoning easily should have revealed to them. They are so caught up in their ways that it is more so to their detriment. In the OT, Obi Wan described Anakin as a good friend, etc. But even once we see him as an adult in Episode 2, from the get-go he is an arrogant a-hole. There are very few hints of this great friendship that they shared. And while Anakin is overly hot headed and should learn to follow instruction better, at the same time the Jedi's dogmatic ways (i.e. not allowing a Jedi to have a romantic relationship) force him to hide his relationship with Padme and actually helps his decent to the dark side since he can't really be open and honest about his relationship and rely on the Jedi to help him through these feelings rather than just forbidding them.
We, as the audience, found out this information after the OT because the PT was released afterwards. Luke, similarly, learned about most of these details after the events of the OT. In essence, Luke hates the prequels (or more accurately the events that transpired during them and how the Jedi come across overall). In many respects his stance and attitude makes sense given how those films played out.
He tried to create a new Jedi order, and when he found that his nephew seemed to have the dark side in him, it made him want to let the Jedi order just end. Honestly given the info that he came to know in the time between the OT and TLJ, this in some ways makes more sense than him just being a near perfect hero who will just show up with a laser sword and save the day.
My biggest issues with the two sequels so far (beyond TFA being a rehash of ANH) is that with Rey, Finn, and Poe more or less being the new Luke, Han, and Leia, they are never all together it seems, and Poe doesn't formally meet Rey until the end of TLJ. The other issue is that while I didn't completely hate Rose's character, the part where she stops Finn from sacrificing himself to save everyone else and says that we have to save what we love was stupid because he was trying to save everyone else.
While the Finn and Rose subplot (beyond keeping him separated from Rey, etc.) didn't go to plan, the fact that it didn't go to plan didn't really bother me. Not everything will work out as intended. But there are still things about that which could have been handled better.
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