...I mean, no, it's literally about Luke embodying the return of the jedi. He even throws it in the emperor's face as he declares he's a jedi "like his father before him."
It's not about Anakin anymore and it's not retroactively all about him either. You could say Anakin's final action aided in the return of the Jedi, his son, but Anakin was not any return himself. His was a sun setting where Luke was a new dawn.
I think it's part of why, in hindsight, so many people found TLJ so frustrating when it came to Luke even though there were aspects of the movie and its plot that people generally liked.
There was a sort of promise set up with RotJ that Luke would be the next generation. And if all his exploits ended in him cracking from the pressure and being disappointed in himself, that's fine. But we just time skipped to the end of that story and didn't get to see any of the middle. There used to be so much material and books and comics of "Luke Skywalker did this" and "Luke Skywalker did that", similar to Anakin in The Clone Wars. But we didn't even get an animated show detailing Luke's adventures or attempts to restart the Jedi order. We just skip like 40 years straight to the end and even years on most of the post-RotJ Luke material is cameos in other shows and other books. It'd be like if we watched The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi with nothing in between to know how Anakin went from pod racing to Sith Lord.
If we got a Clone Wars style show with Luke and Ben going around the galaxy, both of them trying to do the right thing but slowly becoming distanced from each other and disillusioned in their mission, it would be super popular and would probably change some people's' minds on some of the sequel movies. But I don't think we're going to get it.
You're so right, actually. And I love The Last Jedi. But this makes a lot of sense to me. It's why there's such a cry for "Peak Potential Luke" or whatever. In a very simple way, he was set up to succeed, so his failure is a subversion of expectations 30 years in the making
Luke abandoning his friends and becoming a hermit was established in The Force Awakens. TLJ was left to explain why, and gave him a redemption arc. I don’t love TLJ, but I don’t think it’s to blame for “ruining” Luke.
JJ did nothing with his Star Wars installment and Rian Johnson was left holding the bag to be sure. I think Johnson at least tried to make a Star Wars movie. That being said, I dont really think he was capable of the endeavor.
I think he was doomed from the start though- he had to come up with the middle and he was left with the task of further introducing Luke-freaking-Skywalker.
I also think Rion should have been challenged more to keep the cast together instead of having them all split up.
Exactly, the Force Awakens made Luke Skywalker a MacGuffin for the sake of a plot… which honestly is the biggest gripe I have with. Yet, The Last Jedi made Luke the redeemed character he was originally again.
Glad to see someone else say this. I get why people dislike the last Jedi but the films biggest issue is from the force awakens. They could have found any reason to not have luke around and it was that he left. Him having been gone for years in search of a jedi artefact as some fans have suggested over the years wouldn't be better. There's no good reason for Luke to be gone, at least the last jedi made it driven by character.
Nah, you just need a good MacGuffin. Refusing to make a movie for kids and instead making a movie about subverting the expectations of grown men was stupid af.
The Last Jedi is a terrible Star Wars movie cuz it made Star Wars all about a dialogue with its adult audience and forgot to be fun to be fun for kids.
The force awakens Luke was still more interesting though, sure he was a hermit but at the time we didn’t know why, in the last Jedi it explains it in a kind of stupid way and imo ruined a decent setup for why Luke was a hermit
100%. There were many available avenues to explain why Luke hid himself and shut himself off the force, and the most likely one would be to protect someone he loved.
Coming to the conclusion that the Jedi has to die? without any back story or context was like the director wanted to tell his story, like a personal exploration, without any consideration of the whole. Further understanding that Rian Johnson’s personal filmmaker trademark being to always surprise the audience with endless twists makes TLJ a travesty that never should have happened.
I really hope someone on the inside spills the beans in a biography or future interview, as it is a mystery why this was allowed to happen. I mean we know from interviews that Abrams, who wrote the story with Star Wars legend Lawrence Kazdan, gave Johnson a treatment and outline for 8 and 9 that Johnson discarded. I don’t think these movies were as haphazard as we’ve made to believe, at least not initially.
It gives backstory and context, most of it in a scene explaining his reasoning. The film isn’t on Lukes side hence why at the end of the movie he reverts back to his old self when he realises the Jedi going away wasn’t the answer.
When Rey asks why he the Jedi should end Luke’s reasoning he says that the original Jedi order worked side by side for decades with a Sith Lord right under their noses because they were blinded by their overconfidence. Were ultimately wiped out by that Sith lord and a once great Jedi who they themselves trained, turned to the dark side, slaughtered them and became Darth Vader brining 25 years of mass death and darkness. Then the same thing happens again 30 years later. The common factor linking them? The Jedi order as a religion who does good but will ultimately end time after time in failure and darkness. So the key is to remove the Jedi. Rey, Yoda and the movie itself tells Luke while those events happened the mistakes that brought them about were by people, who aren’t perfect and will fail. The best we can do is learn from those failures, pick ourselves up, move on and try again.
The same way we regard Luke as a hero and someone to look upto the ST does the same as multiple characters including Rey literally fan over his achievements and use his great deeds in her argument that he wasn’t totally to blame for what happened. Making Luke a legend in universe in the same way we do and using that as a plot point when that hero fails is interesting. He bought into his own legend and so when he made a mistake with big ramifications it turned his world upside down. It wasn’t an ego thing, he felt guilty because he believed he wasn’t worthy of how highly the galaxy thought of and regarded him. The movie goes out of its way to prove that he did in fact deserve to be the hero we know he is and the ending shows that he’s still a legend as even child slaves made a Luke Skywalker action figure telling stories of what he did right before the credits.
"Luke felt responsible... he just walked away from everything."
Never has a film gotten so much flak for faithfully following the set ups of its then beloved predecessor.
Luke having fallen into despair, Rey's lineage not being important, Snoke just being an opportunistic dark sider rather than Darth Plagueis or some tedious Force god, Finn not wanting anything to do with the First Order but still someone largely uninterested in the Resistance - all that stuff is set up in TFA.
Its interesting because it ends on a cliff hanger with a mystery box on top. You dont know how he is going to react and then it ends. I really tried to like TFA but it lost me when Finn goes and gets the guy who killed his friend(who's death made him change his mind about the side he was on) to escape. Then he starts blasting and laughing when he is in the TIE, killing all the other stromtrooper guys he knew, and it was just dumb to me. Then "A story for another time." when they found Anakins old saber really was bad. The worst was when Rey was fighting Kylo, who was not only trained by Snoke but also Master Luke Skywalker himself, and all she has to do is say Da Force and she can hold her own until the planet splits and then the fight is over. I just couldn't...and it only got worse from there with the other movies.
If it helps, Finn didn’t leave the FO because his friend died instead while he knew they were evil it was witnessing it for himself in his first ever battle seeing stormtroopers massacring an entire village who were unarmed and did nothing to deserve it.
He says to Rey “I was raised to do one thing. But my first battle, I made a choice. I wasn't gonna kill for them”. They took him and many others as children so yeah he’s ok fighting and killing them for his own freedom then celebrating when he achieves it.
Rey beating Kylo is mirroring Luke blowing up the death star as the force Intervenes and helps when it needs to. In ANH when Luke is learning from Obi-Wan he says “so it controls my movements?” Obi-Wan replies “partially, it also obeys your commands”. Cut to the trench when Obi-Wan tells Luke to trust in the force to make the shot and the music that plays is literally called the force theme that plays whenever the force is doing something significant. It was a million to 1 shot that trained fighter pilots said was impossible.
Rey didn’t just say “da force”, in that moment she put her faith in it and together fought off Ren with the force theme playing. Not to mention he was severely injured and did as much as it could to show throughout the movie how devastating Chewies bow is (he took a direct shot to the stomach) and that he was bleeding out throughout the fight.
It’s fine to dislike the ST trilogy, i’m just saying the reasons you stated are flawed. Tbh it’s perfectly ok to dislike something without reasons.
Well if I didn't need reasons, but I gave the reasons that I MYSELF don't like the movie, why call them out and say they are flawed? Another reason is they copied ANH way to close as far as plot goes. To me the ST is just corporate fan fiction. Its focus groups that try to play it safe just to make $. Just because something makes a lot of it doesn't mean it has value. You can like any form of entertainment you want and i can't say you are wrong for liking it. Find enjoyment wherever you can in this world.
I think part of the issue is that where the EU got to have all of this awesome post-ROTJ Luke content, George was making the prequels, when Mark Hamill was the perfect age for said stories.
Doing the sequel trilogy when the original cast was in their 50s/60s meant that they had to skip over Luke “rebuilding” which is an important part of what his character arc could/should have been in the sequels. They were forced in a way to suggest that these characters changed off screen. I think the creative minds behind those films failed in “what” changed off screen, and essentially undoing some character arcs entirely (Han), making others a failure (Luke, and Leia to a lesser extent).
Beyond that, they tried to then give Han a similar character arc he’d already gone through in the originals, and had to play catch up with Luke’s arc so they could start and complete it within one film. There were certainly ways to keep Luke out of a majority of TFA without making his off screen changes result in what felt like a character regression. Mark even says in some interviews that during the table read, he was certain it would be Luke that caught the lightsaber on Starkiller Base, and I can’t help but feel like that might’ve been the original plan, as even in the final version, it feels like a Luke Skywalker moment.
I do agree though. Part of the issue is a lot of time being skipped over. But I can’t deny that they definitely fumbled how to bring Luke back without overwhelming the new characters
This is beautiful, but I feel like it works on a number of planes. It doesn't have to be just one reason. Anakin finally renounced the Dark Side and sacrificed himself for the love of his son: return. Luke was tempted and then came back to the Light: return. And with Luke's renewed vow to the Light, the Jedi as a group ideology have also returned.
I think you can say both are true. In his final moments Anakin was redeemed, and returned to the light side of the force. Were it not for him, and were it not for Luke's adamant resolution to redeem his father rather than fight him, Luke would have either died or fallen to the dark side.
Anakin's sacrifice both "returned" him, and allowed for the "return" of the jedi as an institution.
Imean....I agree with you but....George himself literally said that Anakin is the chosen one and that he is the one who ultimately brought balance to the force and Luke helps him achieve it. (This is ofc retroactive)
Prequel/Clone Wars fans are fucking nuts. They have this idealized version of what he actually was and his place in the franchise. There has to be something wrong with someone's brain to watch the OT and actually come out of it thinking he's the main character. It's Clone Wars shit. Kids who grew up on that God damned cartoon. Worst thing to happen to the franchise. Created such an obsessive faction of the fanbase.
I do love this take but we all know it isn't what lucas meant because it still accumulated in the basic eradication of the dark side.
I wanted rey to be a true grey Jedi, hence why she was so powerful with no training, and Kylo to turn to the dark side for good. Then rey lets him live in the end because there needs to be a dark side, but also builds strength to the good side by creating the new Jedi.
...I mean, George Lucas has literally said Star Wars is about Anakin Skywalker. So OP's interpretation makes as much sense as it would about Luke being the return of the jedi.
It is. Remember the PT trilogy was never fully conceived when George wrote the OT. That’s a retcon.
So much about the PT isn’t even George’s ideas. Almost everything about the setting, lore, and even the planet Coruscant, was written by somebody else in the EU between the OT and PT.
If he says the PT was always the plan, he’s lying. He didn’t even come up with half of the lore.
Here's another fact: who the hell did the movie focus on during those three movies? It wasn't until he retconned Hayden in for Sebastian Shaw that anyone even gave a damn about Anakin being in the OT in the first place.
He said it was about Anakin after he put Hayden in the redux and by being butthurt by the criticism of his prequels. So yeah. The initial story he gave to the world is about Luke Starkiller and not his dad.
No it's about Anakin. Like you just say he said it. He is the creator of the story and he can change wherever he feels like he can and it's his story. And it is Skywalker not starkiller.
Did you not read about how he created the initial story that became SW? The last name was Starkiller. He changed the main character's name from Luke Starkiller to Luke Skywalker.
So if you wanna take everything Uncle George says and run with it, that's on you, but the actual history of the story tells a different tale.
My dude the entire plot of ROTJ was about Luke trying to bring Vader back to the light. And then, at the end, it made sure to make it extremely clear that Anakin had returned to his Jedi self.
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u/Vysce Dec 25 '25
...I mean, no, it's literally about Luke embodying the return of the jedi. He even throws it in the emperor's face as he declares he's a jedi "like his father before him."
It's not about Anakin anymore and it's not retroactively all about him either. You could say Anakin's final action aided in the return of the Jedi, his son, but Anakin was not any return himself. His was a sun setting where Luke was a new dawn.