The latest fantastic Star Wars tribute video from Hero Fan Productions (you have to subscribe to them on YouTube) features something not often dwelt upon when you think of the Jedi. They are awesome. They are heroic. They are also…possibly the worst educators in fiction. Yoda trained Dooku, Obi-Wan trained Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda barely trained Luke, Luke botched training Ben, and gave Rey 48 hours or so of instruction before Ghost Yoda had to show up and whack him over the head with his ghost stick (which apparently you can do if you’re a ghost…now).
Of course there were extenuating circumstances in all these training failures, and the hubris of the Jedi Order was what ensured its downfall from Palpatine (who was, all things considered, probably a better teacher than any of them). Those who can do; those who can’t teach. What the Jedi needed were a lot more mediocre doers who made better teachers. I’m sure Rey will take all the magic broom kids from Canto Bight and turn them into a new generation of Sith if the pattern holds. Still, it’s a wonderfully edited look at the lessons of failure in the Star Wars Saga from The Phantom Menace through The Last Jedi.
This video was awesome! I actually teared up. God, I hope there is still a possibility of Luke in the next movie!
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Mark Hamill has flat out said he’s done with Star Wars and wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy in pushing The Last Jedi. But in the end, I think it comes down to Carrie and Harrison being gone. I think the Star Wars he loved is gone for him.
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He must have been distraught when he first read the script and saw that his iconic role was being dishonored. While it makes sense he would want to be done, there are still may fans like me who hold onto a sliver of hope that the next movie will “fix” what happened to him in The Last Jedi.
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“Distraught” doesn’t quite seem to cover it. The initial script for TFA before the rewrite had a large part for Luke, and his initial reaction tot he TLJ script doesn’t seem to have changed. I’ve included two links to his comments on the TLJ press tour and it’s sad to see him so soured, justifiably, on what is his biggest on-screen legacy and part of what he loved in Star Wars that he clearly feels is ruined.
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Knife to the heart!
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I know. I hate to see him that way. He was such a trooper and a cheerleader after TFA. Johnson just broke him. It’s not just that he hated TLJ, he doesn’t seem wild about Abrams or Disney in general, so Episode IX doesn’t seem possible. If they need a force ghost, Ewan McGregor might oblige them if they give him his fricking movie finally lol.
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TLJ rebooted SW as a trendy, overstuffed, overlong, Disney property. Luke is gone now, simply so that he can be forgotten as thirty more films are made. And he wasn’t even given a good death. Luke is what Mark Hammil has, yet he was forced to participate.
Disney wants “Star Wars” to be as quintessentially Disney as “Winnie the Pooh” (see what I did there?). I’m enough of an idealist to believe that Disney will not succeed in making people forget to roots of the franchise. But Hammil was a part of the 20th century’s greatest myth, and they treated his character like a piece of meat. I’m sure he’s inconsolable.
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I’m hearing a lot of buzz that Disney is not happy with Kathleen Kennedy in the wake of TLJ and they expect Solo to outperform Rogue One which seems ludicrously optimistic given when they’re opening it. Honestly Solo would have to be amazing to snap me out of my SW funk and I honestly have very little interest in IX. We started out so well but I don’t see how the missteps of TLJ can ever be overcome by future projects. What a difference six months can make from the anticipation of Episode 8 to kinda being over SW. I hope Solo blows me away but I am afraid if it doesn’t my personal SW journey will end chronologically with ROTJ.
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They made a mistake with a sequel trilogy. Lucas did an amazing thing, he told a single story over the course of six films. The story of Anakin Skywalker is an everyman myth with a beginning, middle, and end. And it’s impactful that the Jedi are flawed. There is a reason that the Jedi are partially culpable in the rise of Palps. There is a reason that Obi-Wan is partially culpable in the creation of Vader. And it’s tragic, and we feel it. But when the theme begins to endlessly repeat, when Luke for example makes the same mistake with Kylo Ren, and makes an Empire rise——again!——it’s about on par with InGen’s judicious decision to open the park. It’s beyond ridiculous.
Disney should have just plunged into stories like Solo and Rogue One, that had nothing to do with the training and turning of Jedi. It would have been better all around. The missteps of TLJ can SO be overcome with other projects, if the other projects focus on other places and times, and get away from the Skywalker dynasty and its friends, and the various ways that they shape and ruin the galaxy, over and over again.
Solo will be GREAT. How can I tell? Disney’s confidence is real this time. They’re not spouting propaganda about giving the director a separate trilogy BEFORE anyone has even seen the current movie. No, they’re going to screen the film during Cannes, and the review embargo is going to be lifted like ten days ahead of the release. But also, I just have a good feeling about this. The trailers have been fantastic but have not given away anything close to the plot, plus we’re going to see legendary things go down (Han freeing Chewie, Han winning the Falcon and playing SABACC FOR THE FIRST TIME), the new villains look marvelous and creepy, Jabba will probably be in it, we’re going to see Correlia, there will be a futuristic train heist, and I’ve never seen Woody give a bad performance. In anything. Of course, balancing this out will be a wild card that could torpedo the whole thing. I forget what that is. But you get my point, it mostly looks like it has everything going for it.
I pray that Solo is fantastic, both for the sake of the franchise and my own emotions, but if it isn’t, I won’t give up hope completely, you never know what the future holds. I’ll just cling to a more civilized age, until a good Star Wars movie finally comes around again.
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Do not discount the fact that Solo will be a standalone movie with no direct connection to the plot points of the larger saga, and very likely no Force users. It will reference previous films, but won’t involve anything you could call a “mythology,” any more than the Ocean’s 11 films comprise a mythology. If it really is just a fun adventure, with no strings attached, and nothing ponderous about it, it could be exactly what the franchise needs.
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Reblogged this on mellow pumpkin.
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Awesome, thanks so much!
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