well... (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Friday, December 02, 2022, 14:21 (503 days ago) @ EffortlessFury

I said I wasn't going to touch the tar baby again, but I keep thinking about it. Destruction or deconstruction, it doesn't matter. We still end up with pieces that mean less than the whole. To your point, I might have believed the Luke story line had it been given the time it deserved and had it been written well. But part of writing it well would've accounted for who Luke was, as a person. Who was Luke? An idealist and an optimist. Not someone burdened with a unique weakness for the dark side, but a normal person who is tempted (as we'd all be) by the dark side but who was able to summon uncommon strength of character to overcome that temptation and do the right thing. That was what made it satisfying, and that's what made it work. People don't change that much. I simply believe that Luke, facing failure, would not have become the aggressive pisser in the cereal bowl that TLJ made him out to be. I believe pissing in the cereal bowl was the point, though, and was prioritized over caring about who the characters were or what they had been. The director is talking to us, the fans, who so gullibly bought into all this good and evil mythology.

I guess the main difference between your view and mine is that I never saw Luke as someone averagely tempted by the Dark Side. He was very impulsive, and emotional, like his father. I think he had a greater strength of will than Anakin did, but I think he was more strongly tempted than you thought he was. And the truth is that he faced down that same temptation twice, it's not as if he actually went for the killing blow with Kylo. He'd had that same moment of realization that he'd had with Vader in the throne room. It was Luke doing something he'd already done, which, like you said, "people don't change that much." The temptation never went away, and he never fully mastered his control over that temptation, but he still stayed his hand at the end of the day.

All that's fine. When I said, people don't change that much, I meant Luke can't realistically have a personality transplant and become a misanthropic old bastard. Han, maybe, but not Luke. I sincerely believe that whoever wrote The Last Jedi did not understand Luke's character.

Gotta admit, Andor has changed how I feel about the whole franchise. I can read volumes where people have explicated the new trilogy, and I have, but seeing the films should've been enough, and on the whole, they just didn't work for me. They felt cynical, either delivering fan service (isn't insert X just like the first film? ), or cynical as in deconstructing the whole enterprise. I didn't care about the new characters, and felt my love for the old characters was either milked or ridiculed as being a relic of an unsophisticated age. The films ended up being a mess, on the whole, always reaching for profundity with weighty aphorisms that don't quite work (everybody is Yoda in the films, but nobody is). There are those who say I'm a bad person for having this opinion (not you), so I've done my share of second guessing myself. Turns out all it takes for me to like Star Wars again is to hire some talent who can write. Suddenly, I care about characters I just met because they were given a good scene with good dialogue (and sometimes their silence alone speaks volumes). It's not complicated, but it is hard. In the latter half of the series, Luthen gives what is probably the most powerful Star Wars speech ever delivered. Nothing in it fits nicely on a lunch box. There you go.