actualreyofsunshine:heart-speaks-poetry-512:mcavoy:Star Wars: The Last Jedi dir. Rian Johnson Becaus
actualreyofsunshine:heart-speaks-poetry-512:mcavoy:Star Wars: The Last Jedi dir. Rian Johnson Because Luke Skywalker would have abso-fucking-lutely been a text-thumping wingnut who ascribed completely to the ancient Jedi principles because he was always such a staunch Jedi, right?Y'know, denying his love for his friends, having no significant emotional attachments, completely involving himself in his years-long training whilst ignoring that his friends needed him, faithfully and uninterrupted- complete his training, working completely to destroy the Dark Side and not caring at all that Darth Vader was his father, not working at all to save Vader’s soul, and absolutely not 100% embracing his emotions!I…I can’t even be sarcastic anymore…THIS IS NEVER WHO LUKE SKYWALKER WAS EVER SET UP TO BE AND RIAN JOHNSON SHOULD BE PUBLICLY SHAMED FOR INTERPRETING LUKE’S CHARACTER ARC AS THE ONE THAT WAS SEEN IN THE LAST JEDI. I WAITED TWO LONG YEARS TO SEE LUKE SKYWALKER IN ACTION AND HE GAVE ME A WORSE VERSION OF OBI WAN KENOBI! It’s amazing to me just how much of The Last Jedi rests on some really, really poor storytelling, and how much of that poor storytelling comes down to the lack of focus on all of the big ideas that Rian Johnson failed to develop. Case in point, Luke’s characterization in this movie isn’t exactly a bad one on it’s own, imo. It would have worked in some respects, if only it had been given the time and attention that it deserved, and had been developed in a meaningful way. I could see him losing faith in the Jedi as a way to rationalize why Kylo Ren turned to the dark side. He was too hard on Ben, he expected too much from him when he was too young, of course the Jedi Order is at fault here, they were too rigid and suffocating for a small child (look at what happened to Anakin), etc. He’s dealing with an enormous betrayal here, and it would have been an interesting exploration of Luke’s character to see how he would react to that, given that his instinct is to believe that there’s good in everyone. It would have been really neat to see Luke actually grieving for what he’s lost and isolating himself because he feels like he’s let everyone around him down (Ben, Leia, Han, etc.)And it’s especially frustrating because there were definitely threads scattered around the movie that hinted as much, but they were never developed in full. Rian Johnson should have spent some time establishing the idea that Luke’s feelings towards the Jedi order were a reaction/manifestation of his own misplaced sense of failure, and his feeling that because he couldn’t reform them sufficiently enough to prevent his own nephew from turning to the dark side, the Jedi order can’t be reformed, period, even though the truth is that just because he failed with Kylo Ren doesn’t make his failure permanent.Not only would that have made the movie more interesting and meaningful to watch, it would have also helped underscore the advice Yoda gives Luke–the greatest teacher is failure. Approaching Luke’s character from the standpoint of him trying to come to terms with his grief and sense of failure, or even actually focusing on Luke’s character in any capacity, would have made the movie so much more interesting. There were just so many fucking opportunities here to build on these ideas, but Rian Johnson literally just settled for constructing disappointing “parallels” to the original trilogy while insisting that he’s not ripping off them. He literally squandered all of that potential and gave us a snarky, sarcastic Luke who is thoroughly unlikeable without any explanation whatsoever. Knock-off Obi-Wan Kenobi is honestly the best way to put it–even with Obi-Wan, we know why he spent twenty years day drinking on Tatooine. We never get an adequate explanation for that with Luke, which is what makes his character so damn unsatisfactory in the movie. If he had directed even a tenth of the attention that Kyle Ron got for his sob story towards developing Luke’s character, the movie would have been somewhat decent.This is why Rian Johnson is nowhere near the sort of maverick, game-changing director that people insist that he is. He throws a bunch of “profound” ideas that he probably read off of a motivational poster at the audience, but doesn’t go into them with the requisite depth that any of it needs. All of his “big ideas” are only big as far as the shock value. None of them are ever given the attention or development beyond a shallow, superficial level, because of his apparent hard-on for Kyle fuckng Ron, and the movie suffers for it. He’s literally the worst definition of the term “fake deep” and it shows. -- source link