"The Force Awakens" (with SPOILERS)

Hooray! I can write on something that doesn't redirect me every 20 seconds to some spam site.

Spoiler

I haven't seen it written about yet, but as I referred to above, it's pretty clear that this movie completed Luke Skywalker's "Christ figure" arc. Initially, of course, Luke was famously just on a "hero's journey," which was self-contained within "A New Hope" and had to be stretched out and unspooled further as time went along and more movies were made. Abrams/Johnson - and I think it's obvious - figured that the only appropriate way to close his loop was to have his journey end up mirroring the journey of history and literature's most famous hero figure. Luke is hidden at birth. He is tempted repeatedly by the "Dark Side." He performs miracles and maintains a religion. He retreats to the metaphorical desert - here Ach-To. He doubts. He sacrifices himself so that mankind, i.e. the Resistance, aka "The Light - can live on.

It's clear as a bell.

Interesting that @Double Down said that Luke is a "much maligned" character. Maybe that's the case. People say he was whiny in the first movie - he was! But less than being maligned, I think that he has never been given the credit he was owed by the fan base, which prefers to fixate and obsess over peripheral characters like Boba Fett. Being a Luke Skywalker fan is like saying your favorite band is the Beatles.

That said, the scene on Crait was one of the finest climaxes for a movie or television character I have ever seen. My bitch about Luke in the past has been that we are supposed to believe he is this greatest Jedi master of all time, but when have we seen that? Even against the Emperor, he needed Darth Vader to bail him out. Luke Skywalker needed this scene because the first three movies we simply saw him on the path to becoming a Jedi warrior. In this one, we saw full badass Luke Skywalker in action. The crowd went absolutely fucking nuts at my theater when they cut to him back on the island. Both the arc and the scene were something that a lot of us didn't realize we needed until we got it, and then it was like, "Yes, that's it!"

A lot of the rest of the movie is just filler to get us to those few minutes. This was Luke Skywalker's movie. The next film will be Rey's.

 

One more interesting thing I thought of:

Spoiler

I didn't understand why Yoda was seemingly in physical form rather than glowing blue Force ghost form. I think, though, it was because Luke at the end would have felt like a cheat otherwise. They needed Luke's spirit to seem human. But for continuity, Yoda's spirit needed to look human, as well.

 

It's fun talking about this here with normal people who understand good storytelling.

Next weekend, I'll be with my cousin for Christmas, and he'll be in full geek mode. He'll explain how Rey is really going to be the sixth-cousin twice removed from Lando Calrissean and how Luke didn't really die because A, B, and C and Snoke is actually Darth Maul and he is going to show up in the final scene it's all totally obvious what's wrong with you don't you think it's obvious?

 

Spoiler

I thought Yoda looked like he was glowing, although I agree he was more "solid" than he appeared at the end of ROTJ. I just chalked that up to better special effects. I disagree that they it had anything to do with Luke's "projection" at the end. Luke wasn't dead yet, so there's no reason his projection would have to look similar to Yoda. Luke was projecting himself to look a certain way. He wasn't projecting himself to look like a Jedi who had passed.

 

I'm seeing more and more about how there is a coordinated campaign to "review bomb" "The Last Jedi." Some combination of being pissed that there are women and minorities featured prominently and being pissed that Rey's origin story isn't interesting enough to them.

 

There are already 107,000 reviews for "The Last Jedi" after one weekend.

There are about 97,000 for "Rogue One."

There are about 61,000 for "It."

There are 223,000 for "Jurassic World."

There are 200,000-plus for "The Force Awakens."

175,000 for "Captain America: Civil War."

 

@Dick Whitman Would you agree we saw "Badass Luke" during the Jabba the Hut scene(s) in "Return of the Jedi?"

 

He was on his way, but this is the greatest Jedi in the history of the galaxy. He's a legend. He had to do things that weren't merely really excellent swashbuckling. He did them in this movie.

 

His reality didn't live up to the legend, at least not in the original trilogy. That was one of the few strengths of The Phantom Menace. We finally got to see what a Jedi can do, and a Sith Lord for that matter. But it also fits into one of the themes of The Last Jedi.

 

Saw it this weekend; really enjoyable, probably #3 after original and Empire for me. I was a sucker for the possibilities this one played out and how they took different turns.

Spoiler

Really enjoyed the tension between Kylo and Rey plus how the "training" of Rey and Luke was much different from Luke's training with Yoda.

The kid at the end was a nice finish, although there were several opps to shorten film. Well done Mr. Johnson/Disney.

 

I think "greatest" is kind of all in how you look at it, though, which is kind of a common Star Wars trick. Like, Anakin ended up bringing balance to the Force... but not before slaughtering some Jedi younglings, and being turned back to the light with the help of his son, and then throwing the emperor down an exhaust chute. Luke was the catalyst for that, which is awesome, but I was always under the impression that his actual powers weren't that great because he wasn't really properly trained for a proper period of time.

Last Jedi spoilers:

Spoiler

The projection thing is a neat trick, but I kind of wonder if it would have had such a big effect on a "classically" trained Jedi, or one that had been using his powers regularly. I'm not sure if it was a conscious decision, but the new crop of Force users (Rey, Kylo) all seem to have problems controlling their powers to one degree or another, which you can also argue that Luke is somewhat responsible for. (He didn't have complete training himself, and now he's trying to train them.

 

You're thinking too much like a geek. (I use that term endearingly.)

The scene was supposed to show Luke, the Legend, at the full scale of his powers. Full stop.