Luke Skywalker was Never an All-Conquering Badass
the people who supposedly honor the original Star Wars trilogy the most appear to have never watched it
Longtime readers may know that I’m part of one of the most despised groups on the internet: I quite like The Last Jedi, the eighth Star Wars film and the second in the Abrams-Johnson-Abrams sequel trilogy. That’s among the most tiresome conversations you can have on the internet, at this point, and I don’t ever want to have it again. I do however want to point out that the film’s most voluble critics seem to demand a return to a Star Wars that never existed.
If you’re not aware, The Last Jedi got sucked into our all-devouring culture war, as a group of fans complained that it was a product of “Woke Disney” that unfairly sidelined the hero of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, and in his place force-fed us all a woman (Rey) and a Black guy (Finn) and a Hispanic guy (Poe) and an Asian woman (Rose). These complaints were problematic for a variety of reasons. The funniest and most telling problem was that these “hardcore fans” insisted that the supposed marginalization of Luke disrespected George Lucas’s memory, but it was revealed that it was George Lucas who came up with the idea of Luke as an embittered hermit. It was just about the only idea of Lucas’s that JJ Abrams kept, and that really torpedoes the whole “honoring George’s vision” thing. And besides, while there’s plenty of unartful forcing of checklist “diversity” into Hollywood movies now, getting enraged at the presence of women and characters of color is very lame and annoying. There are of course perfectly legitimate to dislike any movie, and people have many complaints that have nothing to do with identity. But the “Fandom Menace” really went hard on those complaints, and on advocating for a Lucas-forward vision of Star Wars that had nothing to do with the Lucas-made films.
The whole point of the sequels was to move on from the original trilogy heroes, who were played by actors who had become senior citizens. (I mean, Carrie Fischer literally died before the trilogy was finished.) If the movie was all about Luke, they wouldn’t have been minting new heroes for the franchise to grow with. That didn’t work out anyway, but the general approach was sensible for both artistic and practical reasons. (This problem, where the original generation of relentlessly-rebooted franchises starts dying off, is only going to become more widespread.) The question I always want to ask that camp is… what did you want to happen? What was the story that you thought would be a good Star Wars sequel, that would have “honored” the original films? And the best answer that I can glean is something like, “And then, Luke Skywalker comes out, and he kills all the bad guys with his lightsaber! Radical!!!” Which doesn’t just demonstrate ignorance about what makes for good stories, but also that they never really understood the character in the first place.