Luke’s Character Assassination in TLJ
The main things that bother me are thus:
I can actually just barely bring myself to believe that Luke ignited his saber over Ben, but then the fact that, after he unleashed this evil on the galaxy (literally the reason he ignited his saber in the first place--because he was scared that Ben would destroy all he knew), he simply nopes off to the far end of the galaxy to die.
That is not Luke. Luke would have done everything in his power to bring Ben home. I had always been assuming that's what happened--Luke tried to bring Ben home, met Snoke, was defeated, and was on the first Jedi Temple to find away to defeat Snoke. Now, do not mistake this for my expectation not being met. That's not what happened here. If I had seen, onscreen, a Luke I recognized, I would have been fine. I did not need my theories to pan out. There are some people crazy enough to hate the film just because their theories didn't pan out, but they are *few and far between.* Those of us who dislike the film have a huge number of quite similar reasons we dislike it, and "expectations" is never, ever one of them--at least from the huge number of people I've discussed it with.
The way Luke acts in Last Jedi is horrifically heartbreaking for me--but it is something that I could have been okay with.
I would have been okay with it if the film had actually earned this "development" (which I am going to stress so hard that this is not development, it is regression, and Luke ends the film the same way he was the last time we saw him--there is no purpose to this arc except to serve Disney's new characters--it does not "humanize him," as according to popular belief, because Luke was already human, that's literally the point of his story in the OT: watching an everyman grow into a hero). But the fact is, this film does not earn this development.
Three short flashbacks (only one of which was actually real) and a small smattering of expository dialogue is not enough to earn a complete 180 character shift. Character continuity in stories is a very important thing--and if you produce a sequel to an original story, one which was already complete and had finished the arc of its main character--then, in the event you wish to give that main character another character arc, you must continue from where it left off.
(Bear with me here because I'll be using Samwise instead of Frodo for this example, as Frodo is in the Undying Lands)
It would be like if someone with the rights to the Lord of the Rings universe pitched a trilogy of original sequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the movies went into production. They come out, and fans realize very quickly they are not good. The first film is a rehash of Fellowship, Samwise Gamgee has gone into hiding--supposedly on an ancient Elven ruin off the coast of Middle Earth--and one of his children became the Mouth of Sauron to a new, unknown Sauron-like figure who had started a new Mordor-esque empire in a strip of volcanoes on the far edge of Middle Earth.
In the second film, our new protagonist, a woman wielding Samwise’s Elvish rope, shows up on Sam's island, and hands the rope to him.
He tosses it over his back and tells her to go away. Throughout the film we learn Samwise is a grumpy old man now and provided the catalyst for his own son's turn to Mordor when, while they both slept for a night in Lothlorien (reasons unknown, bear with me), Samwise looked into the Mirror and saw his son destroying Middle Earth and drew his sword, raising it to strike at his son, lying below him. He, of course, stops, and is about to sheath it, but his son wakes up and fights back, then runs off and murders several people and takes some other with him--perhaps some of them were Sam's own children, and they were all there for a vacation.
We fastforward to now, learning this has all happened in the past, and Sam, after that night, simply left and came here, and has been waiting for a near a decade--and will continue to wait--to die. He never went after his son, never tried to get help from Merry or Pippin or Aragorn--no, he just left to a secluded place to go die, supposedly wishing not to be found. But if Sam didn't want to be found, why did he follow an existing map leading to the very first Ancient Elven city? Why would he go there? There's a map to it. Why does he not simply row out to sea looking for a random island? Why a very prominent location on Middle Earth? And if he wants to die so bad, why not kill himself? His quality of life must not be very good.
So Samwise tells the protagonist his son is lost to Mordor and the temptations of the New One Ring. Samwise refuses to come back. The protagonist runs off to turn his son but fails, and the entire Realm of Men is about to fall, when Samwise shows up and stalls his son, finally acting like the Sam we know, only to die within minutes--but we, the audience, are told that he died with peace, and he's a legend now and he's saved the Realm of Men.
I don't know about you, but that sounds like character assassination.
Honestly, you can like it all you want and make any assumptions you want--even if you think they are simple "two and two makes four" connections that you think everyone should have gotten--about his backstory, but the fact is that if this had been done to nearly any other Fantasy story's main character, we would all cry out in terror knowing it to be character assassination--and, unfortunately, Luke's character in TLJ looks to me to be classic character assassination. It exhibits all the features of it. I simply was not willing to believe that he had become this person without Rian Johnson actually earning that for me. It's alright if you were.
One final note: It is not JJ's fault Luke is this way. Rian did not simply "do the best with what JJ gave him." JJ set up Luke being on an island. Rian decided he was there because he wanted to die. That's alright, I guess, but it's a dangerous game to reintroduce a famous character to the masses with a complete 180 on his established character and then only spend a few minutes actually telling us how he got there--and as I've already demonstrated from my "theory" and as fans demonstrated for the two years between TFA and TLJ with their DOZENS of theories, there were so many routes to take. Luke did not have to be like he was for the story to work, and, arguably, because so many people hate this film, Luke shouldn’t have been this way. If Luke had been someone everyone would have recognized, we wouldn't have the most divisive Star Wars film on our hands.
