well... (Off-Topic)

by EffortlessFury , Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 08:09 (728 days ago) @ Ragashingo

In The Force Awakens, the ultimate goal is to find Luke Skywalker. Making finding our old hero the beginning and end of the movie and doing that triumphant shot on the top of the cliffs set expectations of finding a hero or at least a mentor who was willing to help. When Luke tossed the lighsaber in The Last Jedi, it felt like a betrayal. Because he'd been built up in the previous movie as someone worth finding.

To me, it wasn't that Luke was taken in a direction I didn't expect. It was he was taken in a direction that nobody on the writing team thought was important enough to foreshadow. If Rey had been sent to find Luke but with the knowledge that she would need to be the light to pull him out of his self-imposed exile... it might have been a more interesting movie. If the whole Knights of Ren plot had first been given some screen time or a tv show or its own movie, MCU-style, I would have much better enjoyed where Luke was coming from. Instead, they went for the shock value of that lightsaber toss with nothing to support it.

Perhaps there's something wrong with me, but I see value in things that are not deliberately foreshadowed, but can be seen to make sense when you really think about it yourself. You're absolutely correct that Luke's intro in TLJ was a betrayal. It was as much a betrayal to the audience as it was to Rey herself. She thought he was someone worth finding, we thought he was someone worth finding...but arguably there was no actual reason to believe he was worth finding! Everyone, whether it be the characters in the TFA, or the audience, believed Luke was worth finding...for no reason other than he's Luke and we need him. No one had a specific reason they needed him, a plan that he filled a key role in, nada. Everyone just assumed we needed the hero.

But when you stop to think about it...this dude exiled himself. He ran. A dude who peace'd out and exiled himself has abdicated responsibility. Why did anyone think he'd be worth finding at the outset? The man we were going to find was never going to be a hero and we should've realized that was a very real possibility from the moment we knew he'd exiled himself.