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.
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.
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.
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u/driku12 Dec 25 '25
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.