Five Points of Controversy in Star Wars: The Last Jedi That are Actually Beautiful - Part IV (Spoilers)

4. Not my Luke Skywalker

Acknowledgement: “Not my Luke Skywalker” is a hashtag gaining momentum. I doubt it will ever rival the somewhat entitled sounding “not my president,” but clearly those who use the hashtag feel just as passionate. Maybe even more.

I laughed when Luke tossed the lightsaber over his shoulder. Rian Johnson trolled me and I guess I just like that sort of humor. Andy Kaufman would have been proud. I will admit, The Last Jedi had me worried about Luke, and I thought, “Oh no . . . Mark Hamill was right.”

I think if you found this blog you probably know about Mark Hamill talking in several interviews about how he fundamentally disagreed with what Rian Johnson had in mind for his most iconic character. Just in case you didn’t, here is one of several hundred Youtube videos on the subject. Of course, this isn’t the best way to promote a movie, but I think Mark was honest when he made sure to start talking about how he had come around to Johnson’s vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djJ6GAplhFU

 We all could kind of predict Luke would not want to train Rey at first, and then he would grow and give in. However, we all assumed Luke had gone looking for the first Jedi temple because he wanted to correct his mistakes somehow. Come to learn he intends to just live out his days as a hermit until he dies. We all wanted Luke to be inspired by something, pick up his saber and go help Rey. We all wanted bad ass moments with him taking down the Knights of Ren, or maybe crushing First Order Walkers. We did get a blaze of glory moment, but despite the incredible final act, I can understand how it would feel underwhelming. Even Yoda didn’t fade into the force until Return of the Jedi. For years we have been reading stories, which are now legends, on how Luke managed to find himself a wife, have a son, and take down several more threats to the galaxy. We didn’t necessarily expect to see all of those things, but we wanted a hint of them. We were hoping for two more movies with Luke as a mentor for the next generation. We still might see him around in the next film, just not the way we hoped. However, when the story is examined in a big picture context, the poetry of Luke’s arc in this film is gorgeous.

How Luke was written: Considering the flashback sequences, Luke hasn’t been gone for twenty years. It seems like maybe two or three at the most. His failure with Ben Solo is relatively recent on the time scale. It leaves plenty of room for some of the badass stories we were hoping for to still be back into canon. What we have to come to terms with as fans is this: The Last Jedi is the story of the final days of Luke Skywalker. It is the story of how he placed his hopes in a young girl and decided to let his legend give hope to the galaxy. It is the story of how he came to terms with becoming more powerful than we could ever imagine, by moving from this life into the next. Han Solo was a mentor for Rey, but he doesn’t have the power to be her spiritual guide.

Luke does.

Since this trilogy as a whole is about the new generation, it is a fitting place to be. If I am Rian Johnson, I have to imagine how Luke would react to feeling responsible for losing Ben to the dark side. I also need to include things like how Luke probably found out about the old Jedi order and how his father fell. I will have to trust my audience to understand what my worst fear might be as a Jedi Master losing his student to the dark side without explaining them. The circumstances surrounding the fall of Ben Solo will be the final section in this series, so I am only going to state the obvious here. Considering the context of the moment of doubt Luke had that caused him to even consider the unthinkable, the person Luke becomes makes total sense.

 He is a man racked with guilt. Even touching a lightsaber again must disgust him even more than it disgusts us to see him milking weird space walruses. As a writer this broken man is who I build my story around. I can’t just have Rey show up and suddenly he changes his mind. I can’t have him return to heroics for his buddy Han Solo. So what really brings Luke back to us?

The Point of View of Master Skywalker: The real moment of triumph in this film is a quiet one. It’s when Luke opens himself up to the force again. This happens after R2D2 takes his “cheap shot” and shows Luke is original call to action. Something about his training with Rey prompts him to reach out to Leia. Her pain and suffering might have caused him to want to go to his sister, but as Luke rushes to find Rey he walks in on her and Kylo Ren physically touching through the force. All his fears come rushing back, and he does not respond well.

He tells Rey to leave, but she is determined that Kylo Ren could come back to the light. Luke tries to tell her not to go to him, but she won’t listen. However, Luke is open to the force now, and a certain green Muppet can at last make contact. Yoda is more than a cameo. He is the turning point in the film. Up to this point, both Luke and Kylo Ren are trying to burn down their past in different ways. Luke is trying to hide from his greatest mistake, and Kylo Ren is trying to literally destroy his past to gain power.

However, Yoda offers the balance. It is fine to destroy your past, as long as you learn from it.

“Failure is the greatest of teachers,” he says.  

The crux of the movie becomes that Luke needs to break free of his existential quandary. He needs to burn down the past of his failures, but he also needs to realize that he has learned from them, so that he does not have to be in constant fear of them happening again. This is the balance for Luke. To continue to pass on what he has learned to a new generation to include the lessons of his failures. Yoda bonks Luke over the head with his ghost walking stick—and it hurts. Then he destroys the tree. These two acts give us a new perspective on what Force Ghosts can achieve, so we should be perhaps a little excited that Luke no doubt becomes one.

 As for the texts, we learn at the end of the film that Rey has already taken them. Yoda knows this, so it is symbolic of the Force placing its trust in Rey to be the balance of the future. But Luke has also placed his faith in Rey. He knows his final act will create a legend, but he also knows he will not survive the effort it will take to project himself across the galaxy. He is both inspiring hope to the galaxy and placing hope in his last student. I find this notion beautiful.

I want to point out that we couldn’t get these motifs done correctly if Luke is physically at the final battle. Luke cold have destroyed the squadron of walkers, but he would still have to lose. Some people would have perhaps like to have seen him go out in this blaze of glory, or even sacrifice himself to Kylo Ren the same way Obi Wan did to Vader. This all sounds good in theory, but I think in execution we would have not been as pleased with the result. People would argue, “If Luke was so powerful why he couldn’t have just crushed Kylo Ren and ended the threat right here?”

We would never have bought Kylo Ren besting Luke in a duel. Could you imagine the outrage compared to the sort of small squabble we have over Luke’s death now?  Moreover, from the point of view of the character of Luke Skywalker, sacrificing himself might be significant for Rey, because he would be able to talk to her as a force ghost. Yet the rest of the Galaxy would see Luke Skywalker be defeated. Nor would he have been able to keep the First Order from advancing. Even if he could destroy several walkers it would not have bought enough time in my mind. Hope might have been in danger of being extinguished. 

Instead, Luke chose to goad Kylo Ren into a fight he could not possibly win, even with all his might. I became the kid at the end of the movie, creating my own legends of Luke Skywalker in between the films while still in awe of the way he showed us why he is one badass Jedi Master.

Five Points of Controversy in Star Wars: The Last Jedi That are Actually Beautiful (Spoilers)

PART 1 of 5

        A small boy recounts the legend of Luke Skywalker facing down an entire battalion of giant First Order walkers, and how he came away without a scratch. He does this with some homemade toys as his friends look on with a mixture of skepticism and amazement. A bulbous, angry, alien slave master barges in to ruin their fun. One of the boys runs outside to the peace of the stables on Canto Byte, where he absentmindedly calls a broom to his hand with the force. He stares up at the night sky as a shooting star flashes by overhead. The John Williams score swells, and the silhouette of the boy looks a bit like a Jedi holding a lightsaber. The credits roll, and the audience applauds. I sit through the scrolling names and try to process the film I just watched.

            I am in love. There is much to ponder—so many layers. I feel like I am seeing modern myth go to a place it has never dared. I was not prepared for anyone not to feel the same. Never in a million years would I consider that I would step outside of the theater, pull out my phone, and find an internet full of youtube videos titled, “Why the Last Jedi Sucks!”

            One Youtuber with a Star Wars-themed channel hates the film so much he decides to quit making videos. Quit. He stops doing something he loved, just like that. Poof . . . gone. In his farewell address, he blames Disney. Disney has de-monetized his videos for using John William’s score. Disney has catered too much to young kids in other Star Wars media. The Last Jedi is the final straw, proving to him that Disney is ruining Star Wars.

Maybe he will come back to youtube in time. My youngest brother had many misgivings about the film as well, and I have been able to shed new light on The Last Jedi for him. I hope I can do the same for anyone who reads this blog. I will acknowledge that I understand why some people have deep emotional problems with the film. I have found five different points of contention. I intend to examine each one from the standpoint of a writer, and from the context of the characters within the Star Wars universe. However, first I would like to share a section of a movie review from the Washington Post on May 23, 1980.

…when light entertainment is done well, someone is bound to make extravagant and unsupportable claims for its being great art. You will hear that this sequel to "Star Wars" is part of a vast new mythology, as if it were the Oresteia. Its originator, George Lucas, has revealed that the two pictures are actually parts four and five of a nine-part saga, as if audiences will some day receive the total the way devotees now go to Seattle for a week of immersion in Wagner's complete Ring Cycle.

Nonsense. This is no monumental artistic work, but a science-fiction movie done more snappily than most, including its own predecessor. A chocolate bar is a marvelous sweet that does not need to pretend to be a chocolate soufflé; musical comedies are wonderful entertainment without trying to compete with opera; blue jeans are a perfect garment that shouldn't be compared with haute couture. There are times when you would much rather have a really good hot dog than any steak, but you can still recognize that one is junk food and the other isn't.

"The Empire Strikes Back" has no plot structure, no character studies let alone character development, no emotional or philosophical point to make. It has no original vision of the future, which is depicted as a pastiche of other junk-culture formulae, such as the western, the costume epic and the Would War II movie. Its specialty is "special effects" or visual tricks, some of which are playful, imaginative and impressive, but others of which have become space-movie clichés. (Washington Post, Judith Martin)

             
        This review for perhaps the most beloved of all the Star Wars films is very telling, and there were many like it at the time. Who among Star Wars fans would say this about Empire today? People forget (or were not born) how families used to have heated arguments around the dinner table as to whether or not Vader was lying to Luke about being his father. I find it incredibly interesting that some of the same complaints are being made of The Last Jedi today. Now we argue in a much more self-indulgent and entitled way on the internet as to whether or not Kylo Ren was telling Rey the truth about her parents. We used to scoff at the idea of a nine part saga, and even Lucas gave up on this at one time. Yet here we are in film number eight. What will become of The Last Jedi? Will it stand the test of time like Empire, or has Disney truly gone too far? Let us now examine five different points of controversy in The Last Jedi. 

1. Snoke

Acknowledgement: The name says, “bad guy” even more than Voldemort, Scar, or even Dr. Evil. It’s some kind of weird conglomeration of “Snake” and “Smoke”. This is the most Disney name Disney has ever Disney-ed into Star Wars, and it ruins nothing. His name alone makes him sound like he is going to be the main villain of the series, especially considering how much both Episode 7 and 8 hype him. So I can understand the shock and annoyance some fans have that it seems like we are never going to learn why this guy was such a threat. Sure he plays force marionette with Rey, bops her on her head with the Skywalker lightsaber when she goes for it, and says some mean things to Kylo Ren. Sure he seems really stinking powerful. However, considering he is the reason for our beloved original trilogy characters not getting their happily ever after, we wanted to know more about how he infiltrated the Skywalker – Solo family. We never got to know the half of it. Snoke is gone and with him important information which might have made Kylo Ren a little more redeemable. Or is he?

How to Write Snoke: If I am writing this new trilogy, I have to decide who my main villains are going to be. I have a few options when it comes to Star Wars. I could—as many feared would be the trend after The Force Awakens—redo the same classic story, but with different characters. I could play it safe. Conversely, I could go completely off the rails and just do whatever the hell I wanted. Star Wars is my playground and maybe if I burn down everything that has come before, nothing can stop me from telling my story. This is what many fear is happening after watching The Last Jedi. These fears exist for all five of my points of controversy, not just Snoke.

When it comes to this trilogy, the writer in me gives the same advice Anakin gives Obi Wan when they find themselves trapped in a force field in Revenge of the Sith—"I say patience". Episode Nine will develop Snoke more through the point of view of Kylo Ren and his quest for power. I use this particular example because, like Anakin, I am often not a very patient person.

I advise patience because this was always going to be a nine part story. It is True Lucas called The Force Awakens his divorce from Star Wars. And yet, he showed back up at celebration. No matter how much he becomes old and crusty like Luke is in Episode 8, this story is still the brainchild of George Lucas, and it always will be. This is not blind faith. You can find Lucas’ fingerprints all over The Last Jedi if you know where to look, and it all begins with Snoke.  

Rian Johnson, Gareth Edwards, J.J. Abrams, and anyone else who gets to play in this sandbox recognize where this story comes from. They may deviate from the original vision, and Lucas himself might dislike those deviations, but the people telling this story are writers who recognize that the story won’t work without the key mythology. For example, in my opinion Lucas probably didn’t like the idea that the reason for the fall of Ben Solo was that Han and Leia were pretty much bad parents. He didn’t even want to name the kid Ben. He probably wanted him to be called Sam. Rey was supposed to be a fourteen year old girl named Kira. Much of Lucas’s original vision can be pulled from the visual dictionary of The Force Awakens, and the original villains were supposed to be a group of Dark side people called “Jedi Hunters.”(Force Awakens Visual Dictionary,  2015)

So what was the original idea for Snoke and his Jedi hunters, and how much did Kathleen Kennedy and her Star Wars crew stick to the original ideas? It is hard to say. We can infer the Jedi hunters became the Knights of Ren, but that tells us nothing about Snoke. In order to find clues on Snoke, we need to go all the way back to early drafts of Return of the Jedi. In those drafts, the emperor survives or escapes. In fact, he is not even revealed in person. He is not brought down until episode nine of the final trilogy. (Kurtz Interview, 1999)

This leads me to believe that the avatar of the dark side would go into hiding, rather than be destroyed. This would mirror the way Yoda was forced to go into exile. Snoke can be seen as a stand in for the Emperor who would have survived. However, to give my saga significance, he has to be more than a stand in. He has to be connected. Snoke is the embodiment of a dark side that went into hiding, and of a force that is still not balanced. In the throne room scene with Snoke, we even get the Emperor’s theme song when he is demonstrating the full range of his powers. They are telling us with music that Snoke is connected somehow to the Emperor we used to know. So as a writer, if I am to follow Lucas’ original ideas, I need not just a new villain, but someone who is taking up the mantle of Emperor Palpatine and the dark side.  He even twists Kylo Ren to have a desire to finish what Vader started, and he considers Luke Skywalker to be the greatest threat to him. These are thoughts that perhaps manifest from the Dark Side itself. In other words, the dark side is rather pissed at Luke for messing up its plans. 

If I am a writer and I want to deviate a little bit from Lucas, maybe I make Snoke not a Sith. Maybe he is even more ancient than Yoda, and has been lurking on the sidelines this whole time in the unknown regions. The books and comics are full of clues as to Snoke’s origin, but we shouldn’t need books and comics to flesh out a movie. They should be extra. Still, the books and comics seem to promise a large backstory for Snoke. I do this as an author. I build huge backstories for all my characters. Usually, I only end up using a small percentage of this backstory as the main story moves forward. It has been the same for Snoke. However, from the standpoint of the Force Awakens Era mythology, Snoke still has a role to play even if he never pulls himself together. I believe we stand to learn more of him through Kylo Ren.

  

Snoke as a point of view character. Perhaps the most important aspect we need to know about Snoke is how he managed to manipulate a troubled but extremely powerful child to the dark side. We are given glimpses of a marriage between Han and Leia that for one reason or another did not work out, and we get the impression it may have been over whether or not Ben Solo should be trained in the force (Sent Away to train with Luke). We get the impression that Ben felt shunned or out of touch with his parents. I will touch on this more later as I am working on a whole section on Kylo Ren’s turn and his point of view versus Luke.

The only thing The Last Jedi tells us about Snoke’s perspective is that Snoke “Found” Kylo Ren and that he was surprised by his power. He thought he had found someone “truly special” and he tells Kylo Ren that he may have been wrong in an effort to shame him. We are shown once again the abusive sort of relationship the dark side is known for, and it works. We don’t need any more from Snoke than this as a character. Why does it work?

Because Snoke is so well realized in his short amount of screen time we sympathize a lot with Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi. If we did not sympathize with Ben and his turn to the dark side, then it would be safe to say these films are not working. Nobody is angry about the way Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is portrayed. They were angry because Snoke made our beloved Luke Skywalker look like a fool by stealing his student out from under him. Not only that, but he had Luke so afraid that he considered, even if only for a fraction of a second, that maybe he should end the darkness in his nephew by striking him down. How Snoke managed to do THAT is never fully explained. I maintain that it will be in Episode Nine. The reasons have everything to do with what the dark side is to the saga as a whole.

An underlying theme throughout the entire saga is in the way light and dark achieve immortality. The crux of what the dark side is about is in the Opera Scene between Anakin and Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. The ultimate goal of the dark side is to cheat death, and have ultimate control over life. However, the pursuit of this power, instead of transcending or letting go by becoming one with the force, warps an individual physically. Snoke looks like he does for a reason. He has cheated death time and again. To me, this says he will come back in some form. But even if he doesn’t we will see him again as an avatar of the dark side in some future film, probably that trilogy Rian Johnson has planned.  

The way we will learn more about Snoke if he does not return outright will be through Kylo Ren as he seeks more power. No matter what direction they take the story, Kylo Ren will seek more and more power until either Rey is able to find balance with him through a loving and equal relationship (more on that later), or until he is redeemed or destroyed. He might even literally give us some exposition on some of Snoke’s teachings. However this trilogy ends, the dark side will not be destroyed as it was before, but rather it will be finally left in balance with the light. It will be an interesting and thought-provoking conclusion. However, just as Rey had her Jedi texts, Kylo will have some studies of his own. We will see the meaning of Rey’s vision. We will see the Knights of Ren. We will see the influence of Snoke and the dark side through all of it. No matter what happens, Snoke is never truly gone until Ben can balance the darkness within him and accept Rey’s light. (Or literally, a Ray of Light). This leads me to the next point of conflict for some fans. Rey and her nobody parents. 

Go on to Part II HERE