well... (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, December 01, 2022, 17:42 (725 days ago) @ EffortlessFury
edited by Kermit, Thursday, December 01, 2022, 17:48

...that the best thing to come out of it is from a guy who's not a fan of it?

Not trolling. Genuinely wondering.

From what I can tell based on interviews, Tony Gilroy adopted a learner's mind, dug into the lore, made sure he thoroughly understood the bones of universe, took his time with his section of the world building, then populated that section with believable human beings.

Contrast this with Rian Johnson, who thought he understood it going in, and was mainly interested in the artistic ways he could subvert its tropes.

Both were interested in showing something new, but one approach added to what was there, while another took away, destructively, IMHO.

I suppose you could call it destructive; I might call it deconstructive. The Last Jedi, at its core, addressed a lot of the issues I've always had with the series. It pulled up a bunch of elephants in the room from the prior films and held a mirror up to them. Perhaps people were happy to let those elephants chill for the sake of what the series did otherwise, but I personally appreciated the movies finally explicitly pointing out things like the Jedi's hypocrisy and especially the flawed "do or do not, there is no try" mentality. Yes, practically speaking, this is true, but failure is a necessary step in the process, and the Yoda of Episode 5 didn't seem to share that sentiment. (ironically, The Last Jedi fails in this regard by having Rey continue to fail at absolutely nothing lmao but that's another subject)

Much of The Last Jedi's execution could be improved, but I still liked the core ideas, and I actually think Luke's arc was mostly well done. "Recidivism" (used loosely here) is a thing; any tendency we have, even if we work to oust it, can recur. If you're trying to kick a bad habit, there's a good chance you'll fail to kick it completely. You will relapse, but that's okay, as long as you get back on the right track. Luke was tempted to kill his Father and nearly did so, but refused at the last second. The same scenario played out with Ben, but it didn't end quite so well. Just because Luke rejected the Dark Side once doesn't mean he wouldn't be tempted to do the exact same thing again at some point in the future. Unfortunately, many folks think that Luke had completed his struggle in Episode 6 and should've been an unassailable paragon from that point forward. I understand that's what people had built up the expectation for in their head, but it's incredibly unrealistic (and boring tbh).

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 don't want to overstate the value of George Lucas's warmed over Buddhism, but there's something predictable and juvenile about smugly picking apart Yoda-isms, and burning the holy books because someone smelled hypocrisy. (I'm sorry, but saying the books don't matter because Rey contains all their wisdom is an idiotic dismissal of the value of recorded wisdom and the process by which wisdom is acquired and maintained.) OG Luke or Yoda would've known better, and middle-aged aesthete directors should've, too. Star Wars became a phenomenon because of what it said when. In the gloom of 1977, Star Wars said, we can see evil clearly, and anyone, ANYONE can defeat it. Sadly, I can't get too worked up about people forgetting the beating heart of the original trilogy. The whole mythology was FUBAR the moment someone said the word midi-chlorians.