Yes, this too. (Off-Topic)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 16:26 (2493 days ago) @ Kermit

Also don’t forget that Luke in the OT gives into Fear and Anger on multiple occasions, especially during the end of the Vader duel in RotJ, and is only stopped from hacking his dad apart by the realization that this is the path he would be led down because he chapped off Vader’s hand.

Luke succumbing to a moment of weakness and stopping himself isn’t outside of the character established in the OT. Especially when he is doing it with a notion that he is protecting something.

He's also prone to giving up, feeling defeated, acting recklessly... Really, the way some people talk about Luke in the OT is very different from the Luke that was actually shown in the OT. He was always deeply flawed, but came through when it mattered most. Which is exactly what he does in TLJ.

He was driven to anger in the OT, yes, but what we witness is someone about to commit premeditated murder.

I think it’s very important to remember that Luke stopped himself. It was, as he points out, a moment of weakness and of panic.

In my eyes, one of the main themes of TLJ was the weight of time and expectations. The young heros grow up under the weight of crushing responsibility. More than anyone else, Luke is seen as the “saviour of the galaxy”. He feels the burden of ushering in a new time of peace, while also facing the far more personal responsibility of taking his nephew under his wing. For him to look into his Nephew’s heart and see something WORSE than Darth Vader, to see the threat Ben would become, and to realize that it all developed right under his nose... that would be enough to damage anyone. And then for Luke to have his momentary panic push Ben over the edge, leading to the murder of all Luke’s students and whatever other havoc Ben proceeded to cause... for me, that fully justifies Luke’s apparent transformation. He was right and wrong at the same time, and his failure to handle the situation properly led to murderouse consequences and the metaphorical loss of his nephew.

On top of that, there’s the very accurate realization that Luke repeated the mistakes of Yoda’s Jedi Order. Considering the circumstances of everything that went down, I can totally understand how Luke could convince himself that the Jedi need to end.

Yes, Luke has always had his insecurities, and BECAUSE OF THAT I have trouble believing he can be 100% sure he must murder his nephew in cold blood. Kylo hasn't been presented to US as wholly evil--he obviously has his own struggles making himself do the evil thing that must be done, which makes it that much harder to buy this Luke-must-kill-baby-Hitler backstory. I can see Luke being beside himself with grief over failure. I can't imagine him as the flippant, pessimistic, bitter old man he is in The Last Jedi. The Luke I knew was human, sometimes easily frustrated (most often with himself), but the concept of the Jedi and the idea of becoming one was obviously his most fervent wish. That he would abandon that idealism so completely is a big deal. We don't see his optimism appear and be broken. We see a brief flashback and hear a description of events, but otherwise we're asked to accept his personality change without question. The kindness and goodheartedness that was his nature is gone and we don't get to see it leave.

This is just my read on the OT, but Luke never struck me as particularly optimistic. When we meet him he is more naeve, rash, and impulsive than anything else. Pretty typical of his age, really. He agrees to become a Jedi not out of some deep commitment to the cause or the order, but because he wanted to leave home anyway and this opportunity was right in front of him. Plus he was angry about what happened to his family and wanted some revenge. And it wasn’t optimism that drove him to confront Vader at the end of RotJ. It was a pragmatic decision (Vader was tracking Luke through the force, so Luke needed to draw him away from Han and Leia), plus Luke felt an emotional obligation to reach out to Vader, given the internal conflict he’d already sensed. Luke went with Vader expecting to die while buying his friends some time. Heroic, but certainly not optimistic. In fact, I’d say his lack of optimism is directly tied to the magnitude of his heroism in RotJ.

It's jarring and off-putting, and like I've been saying, seems part of a larger pattern where confounding expectations is the entire point of the film.

I agree that confounding expectations was a large point of TLJ, but I personally think Johnson was very smart about picking the correct expectations to flip or dismantle. I think he went after the expectations that were suffocating the franchise and limiting the storytelling potential of anyone involved in making new Star Wars movies. The message to me was “stop emphasizing things that done matter”. Rey’s parentage doesn’t actually matter. Snoke’s backstory is irrelevant. Poe being a hotheaded lose cannon isn’t actually a good thing. And no, Luke isn’t the beacon of hope and optimism that Star Wars fans have retroactively turned him into. If anything, the true beacon of hope through the OT was Leia, and I felt TLJ finally hammered that point home.