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| Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. |
Last post, we discussed the endless list of ways that TLJ insults your intelligence and bungles basic Star Wars details, but we left Luke, Rey, and Kylo aside for the most part. This time around, I explain how the movie should have worked, and why its treatment of Luke/Rey/Kylo—though it aimed higher and came much closer to Star Wars than the rest of this nonsensical crapfest—ultimately failed in devastating fashion, particularly its treatment of Luke, as even Mark Hamill could attest. If I could have started from scratch, it would be better, but even keeping the basic structure of the movie, it could have been done right.
As with the opening crawl, the movie went wrong with Luke in the very first shot. Here, though, TLJ got many of the trappings right, which makes its failure all the more disappointing. It's like getting a tax-free Ferrari as a gift, only to find out that it has a Prius engine on the inside and a hyena in the back seat. [Unsatisfied with my analogy, Left Thumb adds that the hyena is laughing at you because he sold the Ferrari engine to the First Order. He’s also wearing shades and a new gold chain collar with “RICH DOGG” in big bejeweled letters.]
If they had done it right, Rey would hand Luke the famous lightsaber, and, much as he does in the movie, he would toss it aside. But he wouldn’t do so petulantly and then storm off like a moody 12-year-old who just saw their first crush kiss someone else. Instead, he tosses it aside in a hearkening back to the very last act Luke performed in our view. For those who forget, the last thing he did in ROTJ was cast aside his lightsaber rather than kill Darth Vader. His opening scene could have been a poignant moment, recalling the lessons he had so painfully learned and displayed in the Original Trilogy. Instead, Luke just comes off as a grump, and for all the wrong reasons.
It is fine that Luke did not want to train Rey, and it is tolerable that he has secluded himself on this distant island. But it can't be because he thought about killing his nephew. Luke is the ultimate idealist. It was his idealism that let him succeed where even Obi-Wan and Yoda had failed. Obi-Wan and Yoda thought that Vader had been lost forever. They were too cynical, too worldly, in some sense, to see what Luke saw: he could reach his father. His radical act of sacrifice accomplished what no one else had foreseen.
That Luke Skywalker does not even think about killing his nephew. Rian Johnson wants us to believe that the man who refused to kill Darth Vader was so terrified by an emo teenager's potential that he considered murder? Killing Sith lords to usher in peace is an Anakin/Dooku or Mace/Palpatine move, not something that our hopelessly idealistic farmboy would entertain. He would not suddenly revert back to the moral posture of the prequels. Again, Disney and Co. are so short on ideas that instead of extending what has already been achieved, they wipe away the past and pretend that neither Luke nor anyone else learned anything or achieved anything. The Empire is back and so is moral cynicism.
Instead, if he had done so, Luke would have retreated into obscurity because he was nervous about his own idealism. He tries to erect the Jedi order again, only to have Ben Solo go astray and ruin it all, maybe because Luke asked too much, too soon. Maybe he sent Ben to tangle with Snoke-the-Dried-Prune-Joke and Ben couldn't handle it. Ben had not internalized the lessons of the past; he turned to ego and derring-do as the answer, which Snoke preyed upon and used to turn Ben against Luke. Maybe Luke demanded too much, or maybe he didn't, but he feels responsible. Luke is courageous and virtuous, but passing down those traits is a new challenge for him, and one that could realistically cause him to pause.
Worried that powerful Force-users are forever doomed to this type of temptation, worried that he can never adequately impress the lessons of calm, peace, and self-sacrifice onto the next generation, Luke retreats from the galaxy, hoping to protect others from his possible mistakes. Not because he is afraid of Ben’s power (seriously? Luke is the most powerful man in the galaxy—for all we know, he might be the most powerful man in the history of the galaxy...), but because he doesn't know how to pass down the true Jedi way. Maybe he should retreat like a Benedictine monk, avoiding the terrors of the material world—maybe the greater universe is too corrupting for almost everyone.
Into this maelstrom comes Rey, and Luke sees the same potential for failure that he saw in Ben. Rey comes hoping to discover a way save her friends, to win, to fix things. Luke tosses aside the lightsaber and tries—haltingly, but not curmudgeonly—to explain that he can't give her what she wants. Luke can even keep many of the same lines: he isn't going to stop the First Order with a laser sword, etc.
Rey still has her telepathic conversations with Kylo, which were pretty great. But Luke is unconvinced. He sees that Rey wants to go save everyone, she wants to turn Kylo back to the good side and defeat Snoke, just like he once did with Vader. But she doesn't understand how he did that. He didn't do anything; he gave up control. He gave himself for his friends and his father. And he doesn't want to send Rey off to Snoke and Kylo because he sees it as the same mistake he made when he sent Ben off to Snoke—she isn’t ready, and she doesn’t understand. There is ample dramatic ground for Luke to suffer and recall his past mistakes, like when he left Yoda on Dagobah without any notion of what he was doing.
Rey is frustrated by Luke’s refusal to train her the way she hoped. For Rey, this is about taking up the Legend and doing what Luke did. It would have been nice if the stories had it wrong; if the popular conception, shared by Rey, was that Luke had triumphed over the Emperor in a titanic battle. Again, we can save many of the same lines. Luke can mourn the lionization of what he achieved; it wasn’t about heroism or adventure or lightsaber skills. And maybe Rey sort of understands what he means, but not really; she is convinced she can do what he did, and off she travels to save the galaxy.
But there's a problem. She doesn’t understand. She thought she could save Kylo because why couldn't she? She thought she could persuade him, she thought she had some power over him. But all she does is succeed in helping him destroy Snoke. Snoke, by the way, should have been a tiny, unintimidating trickster, more along the lines of the monkey in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle than a scion of dark side power. He should seem weak and unimportant by comparison, relying on his deviousness and cleverness, not his force of will. Rey thinks she is saving the galaxy by showing Kylo that Snoke is, in fact, a joke: but instead, Kylo kills Snoke only to take his place. Rather than a pointless re-do of the ROTJ throne room sequence, Rey fails where Luke succeeded; Snoke is dead, sure, but he has been replaced by something more tragic and more dangerous.
This would all work even better if the First Order were, as it should have been, an upstart evil on the outer rim. Rey wants to stop Snoke and save Kylo, but in doing so she unleashes Kylo, and only after Kylo ascends to power does the First Order go on a rampage. Only after her failure does the First Order, through Kylo Ren’s power, begin to subjugate worlds and break Republic (or, if we must, Resistance...) battle fleets. Rey has put all of them in danger.
And so now, the great moral question of the Disney trilogy would be established: The prequels showed the folly of the Jedi, the Original Trilogy shows the triumph of self-gift, and the Disney trilogy would be about how to pass that lesson on. How does one maintain faith, hope, and charity, from generation to generation? How does one pass on that type of maturation? How does one, in some sense, “evangelize” rather than proselytize, how does one exert some good will in the universe without turning back into the sclerotic Jedi order of old?
If it had been set up like that, Luke's final exit might have been perfect. The Poe/Finn/Rey/Leia contingent is about to be killed. Rey is crushed and conflicted as she sees Kylo Ren reek devastation on her friends, beyond what Snoke had ever been capable of. Hope seems lost.
Then Luke appears, one last time, to pass on his final lesson in the only way he knows how—giving himself up for his family and friends. He doesn’t bring a “laser sword.” He doesn’t try to “save” Kylo, and he doesn't use the might of the Force to bring the Walkers to their knees. Instead, he says he is sorry, and he refuses to give in to what Kylo wants. He not only refuses to fight, he refuses even to show up to the fight, in any meaningful sense. He relies on Kylo’s own faults—his need for external validation, his need to prove himself, his need to seek vengeance on Luke—to prevent him from seeing the simple truth that Luke isn’t even really there.
With Luke holding off Kylo, Rey leads them all away. And at some point, she has a shot at the kind of success she was seeking earlier. Maybe the Falcon is in weapons-range of Kylo’s shuttle or something, I dunno, easy enough to create the necessary circumstance. But rather than risk the lives and future of the Republic, she Force-skypes Kylo and says that she, too, is sorry for failing him, and she will see him again.
Then, having seen Rey succeed where Ben had failed, Luke stares into the twin suns and the Skywalker theme plays. And even though Rey is not a Skywalker, we cut back to her and she gets the theme music, too, because the Force isn’t truly about bloodlines or midichlorians; it depends on a continual act of self-gift, from friend to friend and generation to generation. And the way to pass that on is not necessarily through training academies or genetically-advantageous marriages but by simply acting for others. Having not only vanquished the Empire but now also extended the Jedi order, Luke passes away, and we fade to black.
* * *
No doubt, The Force Awakens got us started on a bad foot, and The Last Jedi was always going to have to solve some intractable problems. But doing the above, making the First Order the bad guy rebellion, making Snoke a trickster rather than a Palpatine-stand-in, and completely redoing all of the non-Luke/Rey/Kylo stuff could have made this movie great. To be sure, my above summary is rough and imperfect, but it took me a few hours to come up with that; Disney had multiple years to come up with this nonsense. Whether due to monetary concerns, incompetence, or apathy, this trilogy is a massive missed opportunity. It's going to make a gazillion dollars, so mission accomplished, Disney. But no one will remember these movies fondly as paragons of modern mythmaking. They will fade into the cultural obscurity of a middle-of-the-road Marvel movie or Pirates of the Caribbean. They are not worthy of the Galaxy Far Far Away.
I’m Left Thumb and I approve this message.
Actually, more than just approve—reading Right Thumb’s alternative storyline in the middle of the night when I just ate too much cheesecake had more of an emotional impact on me than anything in the whole 150-odd minutes of The Last Jedi itself. Mostly, this whole debacle just makes me sad. As much as I petitioned Disney to get Right Thumb taken on as a screenwriter early in pre-production, I never got any response. I mean, I suppose a restraining order is technically a response, but that was just a misunderstanding.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss George Lucas so much. The Last Jedi is not his Star Wars, and it’s not mine either.
~Right Thumb~ and ~Left Thumb~
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