Luke Skywalker takes us on an emotional journey in STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Warning: I'm going to be discussing everything about Star Wars: The Last Jedi here. Consider this your Spoiler Alert.

As one of the authors of THE MAKING OF STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII, I was curious to see how much of the film Brian Michael Scully and I correctly guessed now that the film is in release. Turns out we nailed it, all of it. Don't bother to check, just take my word for it.

I'm led to believe that most boys growing up tended to dream about being Han Solo more than they did Luke. Han was the cool guy, the hot shot pilot who got the girl and always had a witty line to say. His cocky aloofness was apparently far more appealing than Luke's pureheart earnestness.

I was one of the kids who wanted to be Luke Skywalker.

After a film's worth of build-up we finally get to know the modern version of Luke Skywalker in writer/director Rian Johnson's THE LAST JEDI as Rey arrives at the first Jedi Temple to ask for his help. Arm outstretched, she delivers his lightsaber, his father's lightsaber. Luke takes it, studies it for a moment... and then chucks it over his shoulder.

This is not going to go the way we think.

There are a lot of plot threads winding through THE LAST JEDI (too many, to be honest), but the most consequential and controversial is the Luke/Rey thread, as the young would-be Jedi learns what drove Luke into exile and why he's none too eager to come out of it. After Rey ignores his first few admonishments to go away, he tells her, "I came here to die."

I don't think that claim entirely holds up under scrutiny, but I'll come back to that in a moment.

We already knew that Luke disappeared after Kylo Ren went bad, killed all of his students and destroyed Luke's Jedi Academy. What we didn't know was the confrontation that set this off. Luke visited the young Ben Solo as he slept and looked into his mind. He discovered that the darkness in him was greater than he feared, too great to be stopped at that point. In a moment of impulse, he ignited his lightsaber, ready to end his threat now. It was a reaction he almost immediately reconsidered, but Ben awoke, saw this and attacked Luke. By the time Luke woke up, his students were dead.

So Luke's guilt is three-fold:

1) He feels he should have caught Ben's turn to the Dark Side sooner.

2) He shouldn't have momentarily considered killing him.

3) He shouldn't have FAILED to kill him.

And yes, 2 and 3 set off a logic feedback loop. That's part of the issue.

Also, let's consider the fact that Luke was the guy who still believed there was enough good still in conflict with Darth Vader that he could be salvaged. How dark must Kylo Ren's soul be for Luke to think even for a second that he was beyond saving?

I suspect that when Luke went looking for the first Jedi Temple, it was with the intent of using that ancient knowledge to figure out where he went wrong so badly that he allowed the rise of another Vader. He needed to understand what he could do differently to keep his students safe from the Dark Side. Clearly, what he learned about the Jedi and the Force was that this susceptibility was less of a bug than a feature. That would have to be what drove him to see the Jedi legacy as one of failure, and one that the galaxy would be better off without.

It's not the future we envisioned for Luke when we left him in RETURN OF THE JEDI. Having defeated the Emperor and redeemed his father, his Jedi ascension came with the promise that he would be the one to restore the Jedi without making the mistakes of the past. This was only further reinforced by the prequels, which deliberately showed the old Jedi as stiff and formal, almost rigidly constrained by their own dogma. Luke was to be a new breed, possibly more spiritual and less orthodox.

Luke represented the hope of a new post-war generation, ready to move past the mistakes of its parents and ready to begin a new golden age. Only now, another fascist faction has risen, democracy has been destroyed and all the mistakes that older generation were supposed to have put in the past are now the responsibility of the younger generation to fix anew.

Oh, wait. NOW I totally relate to what sent Luke out to that island. And if I was Rey, I'd be all over him like, "Are you kidding me, dude! Get off your ass and fix this mess you made! It can't be ALL on the next generation!"

I actually understand the reaction from fans who feel that THE LAST JEDI undermines Luke's entire story. The original six films paint a picture of an archaic Jedi Order that needed to evolve in order to survive. Luke was the redemption of all of that, to the degree that it's the entire point of the six-film arc. TLJ tells us, "Yeah, that's not true at all."

I'll be honest. I'm still processing that. The movie doesn't let Luke off the hook by having Rey open his eyes to the good of the Jedi. A surprise visit from Yoda serves only to reinforce Luke's perspective that the Jedi cannot go on as they used to. It's very easy to take from this film the idea that the galaxy would be no worse off than if Luke Skywalker had never been born.

It's hard to watch Luke become a cautionary tale of his own, but Mark Hamill plays the broken Jedi Master perfectly. In his early scenes, Luke seems to have gone a bit loopy in isolation and even when he gives in to offer Rey insight into the Force, he's far from the serene mentor we might have hoped he be. (In one interesting bit of potential foreshadowing, he notes with fear that she didn't even hesitate about diving into a reserve of Dark Side power. Is there darkness in Rey? Or will she learn it's possible to wield the Dark Side without being corrupted by it?)

While it's taking apart our expectations of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, THE LAST JEDI works to subvert our assumptions of what a STAR WARS film should be. In a shocking late film twist, Supreme Leader Snoke meets his end during a confrontation between Rey and Kylo Ren, when Ren betrays his master and murders him. Snoke seemed poised to fill the void left by the Emperor and so long as he lived, there was reasonable hope for Kylo Ren's redemption. In one of the film's most delicious ironies, Ren kills his dark master and THAT is the thing that conclusively shows he's too far gone to be saved.

This means we go into the final chapter with the First Order led by a dangerously unstable man-baby. Twice in the final battle he's shown to be unhinged, as when he orders all ships to pursue the Millennium Falcon and then later when he has every gun trained on Luke Skywalker. The First Order isn't in for the most considered leadership and it almost makes one wonder if Ren's eventual downfall will come as the result of a coup.

And to be clear, I never thought Snoke was going to be revealed to have some secret connection to past characters or anything of that sort. I'm glad he didn't turn out to be some kind of Emperor clone or anything else that would have made this universe smaller. Some fans may be upset he got taken off the board so early... I'm ecstatic!

By the same token, the film resolves the mystery of Rey's parents in the only way that would have really made sense - they were nobodies who sold her for booze money and who are buried out in the desert. As someone tired of the "Chosen One" trope and "small universe syndrome" I'm thrilled she didn't turn out to be a former student of Luke's who had her memory wiped, or a secret daughter of Han and Leia, or Luke's daughter, or any other theory that fans built up over the last two years. She's no one, and that gives her more impact than any lineage they could have tied her to.

Not everything works here. As much as I like Finn his entire subplot does little but go in circles. He and Rose have a fun rapport, but by the time their story's resolved it ends up changing nothing about the main narrative. Benicio del Toro brings an interesting energy to his part, and the diversion lets Rian Johnson get in an interesting layer about war profiteers in the STAR WARS universe, but in a movie that's two and a half hours long, this extra baggage brings down the pace a bit.

Leia's storyline is a little more interesting, as the First Order pursues the Resistance, Leia's capital ship finds itself in a slow speed chase. One attack kills most of the leadership and leaves Leia in a coma, prompting her replacement (played by Laura Dern) to clash with Poe. This story is a little more engaging, mostly because it provokes some growth in Poe. It also pays off in one of the most stunning visuals of the new trilogy when the enemy flagship is taken out. I've seen nitpicks of the "science" here, but STAR WARS is the last franchise you should try to bring any kind of science realism to.

Carrie Fisher's final appearance as Leia is as emotional as you'd expect. In one wonderful sequence she appears to have been killed after being sucked into space, only for her Force abilities to manifest long enough for her to propel herself back to the ship. I still feel it was a major missed opportunity to apparently not have Leia explore her Force abilities at all in the intervening years, but this one moment mitigated that slightly. (And, had Carrie lived, possibly could have set up an advancement of that storyline in Episode IX.)

Adam Driver continues to do incredible work as Kylo Ren. We're basically getting the Anakin arc done right this time, and that plays well against our expectations. We keep expecting the redemptive moment even as the film tells us twice that this only can end with his death. I'm looking forward to seeing him go full-on megalomaniac in the third film, and especially how that'll force Daisy Ridley to raise her game even more to match him.

It's remarkable how much the new characters have already taken over this franchise. Chewie, R2-D2 and C-3PO are all present but even more in the background than THE FORCE AWAKENS would have led us to expect. Chewie gets some of the film's better moments, though, including his interactions with the Porg creatures on Luke's island and a late-movie moment where he flies to the rescue. As dark as this film gets, all it took is the Falcon riding in, Rey in the gunner's chair, and the Falcon theme from the first film blaring for me to feel like I was 8 again.

(The only thing that could have topped it would have been if - when Ren orders all ships after the Falcon - Luke's X-Wing had flown to the rescue and taken ALL of them out. And yes, I wouldn't have objected to a little more fan service in the vein of "Luke Skywalker, Jedi badass.")

All of this leads to something I was sure we'd see by the end of this trilogy, if not this movie: the death of Luke Skywalker. After using the Force to project his image across the galaxy to confront Kylo Ren and give the Resistance a chance to flee, Luke looks across the ocean at twin setting suns, reacts with wonder to something he sees, and vanishes into the Force like Obi-Wan and Yoda before him.

It's a beautiful image, one that brings us full circle with the young dreamer who stared over the horizon 40 years ago as one of John Williams's most affecting scores played. Luke departs this world believing that nothing he devoted his life to truly mattered, that it will be up to Rey to learn from his mistakes and become the new hope he was believed to be. He leaves knowing that there's nothing he can do to save Kylo Ren from himself.

It's a terrible thing for that dreamer to be faced with - a galaxy made worse despite his own best intentions. And yet, despite that, we're told that he was at peace as he went. The trauma that drove him into exile was so profound that he cut himself off from the Force. I'm going to presume that was the reason that Yoda never made a Force Ghost visit until now. Is there still room for Luke to be wrong about what he asserted to Rey? Did his life, despite its failures, still have purpose?

I like to think so, and I'll chose to believe that when he reengaged with the Force, this time with his new insight that it didn't belong to just the Jedi, he gained a deeper understanding of his place in all of this. There was no guilt, no regret to anchor him any longer, and that was the peace that he united with as he became one with the Force.

THE LAST JEDI eschews many conventions and remainders of the past, to the point many fans have seen it as hostile to THE FORCE AWAKENS and the original films. "Let the past die," Kylo Ren says, "Kill it if you have to." We need not assume that because the franchise is moving beyond its beginnings that it's fully denouncing them. I admit, the most reasonable reading of Luke's story allows for that interpretation.

But this is not the last word on STAR WARS, and even though this is no longer his story, I will be surprised if EPISODE IX doesn't bring at least one visit from Luke, and in a way that unifies all the trilogies and shows us that no matter how derisively Luke refers to himself as a "legend," that title is well-earned.

SDCC wrap-up: A salute to Mark Hamill's COMIC BOOK: THE MOVIE and Superman: Rebirth

The older I get, the more my trips to Comic-Con take out of me. This is almost a week past due, but I wrote a piece for Film School Rejects about Mark Hamill's little-seen directorial debut COMIC BOOK: THE MOVIE. It went live while I was at SDCC and had no opportunity to write a post here. However, Mark Hamill himself RT'd the link to it and I'm told that at one point, the article was on the front page of Medium, so I hope you enjoy it.

When I was in college, some friends and I had a ritual we’d do on nights where several of us were bored. We’d grab my friend Joe’s high-8 camera and wander into the bowels of the library to shoot our own improvised movies. These were all done with editing-in-the-camera, meaning we shot in sequence, one shot at a time with no post-production work. We never started with a script, though by the end we were bringing along an array of costumes and props.

None of these were great films, but there was an infectious energy about them. The first film was just myself and Joe, and we took turns holding the camera depending on which of us was in the shot. We had fun but wouldn’t have repeated the experiment had the friends we showed it to not said, “When are you doing another one? Can I be in it?” This goofy time-waster looked like so much fun that its energy transcended its low production values and creative constraints.

Mark Hamill’s 2004 directorial debut, Comic Book: The Movie, is the closest I’ve ever seen a feature film duplicate that energy. It’s an improvised mockumentary in the tradition of the Christopher Guest films like This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show. This is a shaggier effort than those films. CB: TM was apparently shot on digital video, but I’d swear the visual quality isn’t much more impressive than High-8, particular when displayed on an HD screen.

[...]Hamill’s repertory company of players is largely made up of voice actors whose work you’ve heard in shows like Pinky & The Brain, Futurama, Animaniacs and many, many more. But that’s all part of the infectious joy of this film. It really feels like Hamill was hanging out with his buddies and said, “Why DON’T we make a movie about something we all love? And let’s do it in a place we love: San Diego Comic Con.”

You can find the rest on Film School Rejects at:  Mark Hamill’s Comic Book: The Movie Shows That Luke Skywalker is One of Us.

In additional Comic-Con news, two of my experiences work as follow-ups to earlier posts. Years ago, I wrote about how when I was in college, I wrote a letter to TV writer Ron Moore (TNG, DS9, Roswell, and Battlestar Galactica) and much to my shock, he tracked me down to call my home and thank me for the letter. It felt like one of the coolest things that had happened to me. Since then, I've always wanted to meet him, even if just to shake his hand and thank him for being so cool. Well, I briefly got to meet him following the Writing for Star Trek Panel and he could not have been a nicer guy. There have been some shifts in positive direction as far as my career lately, and I'm taking this encounter as a signpost of big things on the horizon.

I also attended the DC Rebirth: Superman panel, which focused on the newly relaunched Superman titles. About four years ago, I wrote two very long posts about my relationship with Superman comics and what eventually led me to break up with collecting comics after 23 years of consistent buying. This came a year after DC Comics began a massive relaunch known as The New 52. You can find those old posts here and here.

Well, this May, DC relaunched yet again via DC Universe Rebirth and they knew the exact way to lure me back - Superman writer extraordinaire Dan Jurgens is penning ACTION COMICS, and the Superman of the New 52 is dead. In his place, the pre-New 52 Superman has taken over in this universe and he's not alone. He and his wife Lois have crossed into this new continuity and they've brought with them their 10 year-old son Jon. (This whole story was told in the CONVERGENCE tie-ins and SUPERMAN: LOIS & CLARK, also written by Jurgens.)

I can't tell you how much of a difference this has made. Superman has felt heroic and confidant again, a hero worthy of being looked up to. Better still, his relationship with Lois helps humanize him. The big element the New 52 got rid of was Lois and Clark's marriage, but it also severed ANY real relationship between the two. Superman's romantic interest was Wonder Woman, and it felt wrong to pair him up with another super, as it's always been more interesting to show that Lois Lane is more than up to the task of being Clark's equal.

As much as losing Lois hurt Superman, losing Clark REALLY hurt Lois's character. They're really yin and yang, particularly since the previous two decades-plus where she's in on the secret. No one really seemed to know how to develop Lois on her own and she never had the same chemistry with other characters that she did with Clark when there was romance on the table.

At the Superman panel, Dan Jurgens said that he considers ACTION COMICS #1 to be a significant book not just because it introduced Superman, but because it's also the first appearance of Lois Lane. There are few writers who understand Lois Lane as well as Jurgens and I really believe that she is in good hands with him and Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, who are writing the SUPERMAN title. Fans who are frustrated that Lois's role has only been that of Jon's mother since REBIRTH are advised to be patient, because it was hinted that a few developments are very close on the horizon to restore her to prominence.

Let's talk a little about Jon Kent, who might be my favorite addition to the Superman mythos in a long time. He's got Clark's powers and Lois's inquisitive attitude. It's only been recently that he found out his dad is Superman and both writing teams really have a strong handle on his voice. He's a good kid, but also isn't afraid to stand up to his parents when he wants to be heard. There's something very endearing about seeing Superman as a father, taking his son on a routine rescue and using the adventure as an opportunity to teach him about his powers.

The Superman books have not had this much heart in a long time. Some characters feel too "aged up" when given children, but Superman's always been such a paternal figure that it feels natural to give him a child. I'll admit, in Jurgens's first issue of ACTION, it brought a smile to my face to see Jon cheer "Go Dad, go!" as his father flew off to a confrontation. (Art by Patrick Zircher.)

I can't speak for the quality of most of the other Rebirth properties (other than urging you check out BATGIRL & THE BIRDS OF PREY, written by THE 100's Julie & Shawna Benson), but if you've been a lapsed Superman fan, the stories being crafted by Jurgens and Gleason & Tomasi; drawn by Gleason, Zircher and Tyler Kirkham, are some of the most original and heartfelt tales the character has had in a very long time. It's the perfect antidote to the missteps of the New 52 and the darker tones of BATMAN V. SUPERMAN.

For the first time in a long time, the greatest superhero in comics is in the hands of creators who understand what makes him great, and I for one am enjoying the ride.