Let's go back to the island again. I said that it was my favorite part of the
film, but there are problems. One of
them is that Luke's excuse for not going back is that he has no confidence in
his ability to train others. This is
understandable and a good story arc. But
it doesn't explain why HE won't go back.
His own abilities are not under doubt, not even by him. It would have worked better if Luke
recognized an evil growing within himself that he's not sure he can
control. That would give him the fear
that he might turn on the resistance rather than the enemy.
But the real problem was, of course,
when Luke turned stupid.
Most people say it's when he turned
evil, but that's not really the true problem here. Luke sees darkness in Kylo and considers
killing him to stop those terrible things from happening. Had it been only a thought it could be
written off as temptation that Luke overcame.
In fact, I think this was a good climax to this arc. The only thing that would truly cause Luke to
lose heart would be something that he himself had done. Only that huge amount of guilt would keep the
most optimistic person in the galaxy grounded like that. So yes, it should absolutely be about Luke
beginning to turn to the dark side and feeling guilty for it.
But it doesn't mean he had to turn
to the stupid side. Here's what I
mean. Luke has turned on and off his
lightsaber plenty of times during his life.
He knows that it's loud. Yet he
turns it on while standing over Kylo.
And what was his plan exactly?
Was he going o turn it on, expect his prey to remain asleep while he
sliced through him? What would he tell
Kylo's roommate? What about the other
trainees? How about his sister and best
friend? "Sorry I sliced your son in
two, but he was gonna turn bad."
"You didn't kill Darth Vader, and he was already bad!" "Yeah, but, you know. Had to do it."
They could have accomplished this
same goal in a more interesting way.
Instead of Luke lighting his saber, he goes by his home and looks at
Kylor... or Ben at the time. He sees all
the horrors he will unleash and all the terrible things he was capable of
doing. Luke is horrified by all this and
considers killing him. But he stops
himself, realizing that he can have an influence on the boy, and determines to
work on that. He walks away, believing
Kylo is still asleep. But Kylo is awake,
and he entered Luke's mind as well, reading his thoughts on killing him. He either does not notice or does not care
that Luke turned away from the temptation.
He becomes frightened, and that fear becomes anger, which in turn
becomes hate, (sound familiar?) We could
then see the Knights of Ren formed in an extended scene as they determine to
overthrow their master, and then do it through an ambush.
How... fucking... cool would that
have been. And it would have worked
without Luke holding a lightsaber over his nephew ready to slice him in
two. Just sayin'.
Speaking of the force, a lot of
people made a big deal about Yoda being able to call lightning down even though
he's a spirit. This is a very good
point. But there's something else that I
found downright offensive. After Yoda
calls down the lightning, as the tree burns, Yoda begins laughing his ass
off. To this I say to Johnson and anyone
who excuses it, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Look, I get that this movie is
trying to switch directions and get people to move on from preconceived
notions. I admire that. But this tree has symbolized the Jedi order
for over a thousand generations. Think
of that, a religion that has been around for about 20,000 years with a single
temple as its center. Now that temple is
being destroyed. That's a
solemn-fucking-occasion.
Let me put it another way. Imagine if the Vatican was being demolished,
and there's the Pope over to the side laughing his ass off. That would be pretty goddamn inappropriate,
don't you think? And that religion's
only been around for 1/10th the time the Jedi would have been.
And to be honest, I don't really see
what destroying the tree does, anyway. I
get the whole "we have to move on" stuff, but what does destroying it
do? It accomplishes nothing. But considering that pretty much everyone
accomplishes nothing in this movie, I shouldn't be surprised.
Also, Yoda's look is the strangest
here. It's like they took the worst
aspects of both the puppet and CGI and mixed them together.
I should probably at this point
address the elephant in the room.
Throughout this film, and the subsequent talks Rian Johnson gave on it,
it was clear that this writer/director wanted to subvert expectations. He had seen how obsessive fans were with
their speculations, and he had seen how predictable Abrams had made the last
movie by retreading the old ones. He
sought to change all this by subverting everyone's expectations. What Johnson didn't seem to understand is
that it's not enough. One has to replace
the expectation with something more interesting. Subverting an expectation is not an end, it's
simply the beginning of the process.
Or
to put it another way, my expectation was to get something awesome, and Johnson
subverted that by giving me something lame.
No comments:
Post a Comment