[mjn.mixael]

Meh. We'll never know for sure, but watching his statements leading up to the film's release it seems just as likely that the suits who wrote his contact told him to stop being a Negative Nancy in public. Mark Hamill bashing a Star Wars film before release is not good business.

[The E]

We will never know for sure, true. But at the same time, we cannot ignore that these are statements he made, and that some were made before he saw the finished product and others afterwards.

[Luis Dias]

TLJ outright mocked these people, and as a film it's of course "artistically" allowed to do that, but as a business practice it's never a good idea to insult your own base audience. Somehow I've seen this same kind of audience/customer mocking in contemporary video games too, but that's a totally different topic.

One has to wonder what is the motivation behind this "mocking". TFA only gave a laughable 10 seconds of Luke, and in TLJ the character was first ridiculed and then killed off. Leia almost had memorable and emotional death on-screen that we all expected after Carrie Fisher's death, but instead she turns into a flying superman and is still unceremoniously killed off-screen before IX. Han Solo is dead and he never got to meet old Luke. With the old cast gone, the reason to see IX is gone for many.

Wtf are you banging about? "mocking" ?? For ****s sake, I can't facepalm any longer. "oooh they wrote the characters I loved so much in a different way, they're mocking me!!" What the hell is this, are we in kindergarten again? Jesus F Christ.

[Mongoose]

I will never for the life of me understand for an instant how anything that happened in TLJ "destroyed the character" of Luke Skywalker.

[Turambar]

I will never for the life of me understand for an instant how anything that happened in TLJ "destroyed the character" of Luke Skywalker.

They just turned him into a total disappointment who peaked at Return of the Jedi and gave up at Jedi training when he had a student go dark.  Book Luke dealt with like 3 batches of dark students and was never beaten down into submission the way movie Luke was.

[General Battuta]

Book Luke's students literally blew up several stars, turned the new republic into a fascist state, and murdered his wife. He does far worse in the EU than in TLJ.

[Turambar]

Yeah, but the point was that he didnt let that get him down or convince him that the galaxy didnt need Jedi.

[Luis Dias]

Oh the marvelous Jedi that utterly ****ed up in Anakin's time? Those amazing idiots that never stopped giving Luke bad advice that he fortunately kept ignoring?

I like the idea of the Jedi, but let's face it, they completely blew it, and when Luke also managed to blew it with Ben, he decided the whole idea was complete crap. I find his disilusion 100% believable and on the money, especially given how he knows how the Force works, and realised that whenever there's an imbalance, it tries to bring everything back to the equilibrium (if you think two seconds about this whole thing, you'll realise how horrible a world it is they live in), although there are some interpretations that vary from this (some will point out that "bring balance to the force" actually means to defeat the Sith, but I digress).

[Scotty]

Yeah, but the point was that he didnt let that get him down or convince him that the galaxy didnt need Jedi.

TLJ outright mocked these people, and as a film it's of course "artistically" allowed to do that, but as a business practice it's never a good idea to insult your own base audience. Somehow I've seen this same kind of audience/customer mocking in contemporary video games too, but that's a totally different topic.

One has to wonder what is the motivation behind this "mocking". TFA only gave a laughable 10 seconds of Luke, and in TLJ the character was first ridiculed and then killed off. Leia almost had memorable and emotional death on-screen that we all expected after Carrie Fisher's death, but instead she turns into a flying superman and is still unceremoniously killed off-screen before IX. Han Solo is dead and he never got to meet old Luke. With the old cast gone, the reason to see IX is gone for many.

Wtf are you banging about? "mocking" ?? For ****s sake, I can't facepalm any longer. "oooh they wrote the characters I loved so much in a different way, they're mocking me!!" What the hell is this, are we in kindergarten again? Jesus F Christ.

[The E]

Yeah, but the point was that he didnt let that get him down or convince him that the galaxy didnt need Jedi.

Because it never occurred to the writers that the Jedi were a flawed institution?

Hell, even after the prequels happened, the EU still wanted to keep the Jedi inviolate as a thoroughly and fundamentally good organization; barring a few standout entries like KOTOR 2, noone amongst the writers Lucasfilm tapped to write the novels ever considered the ramifications of what the Prequels said about the Jedi as an institution.

Luke didn't let his failures get him down because he was one of the EU's protagonists, and protagonists going through a crisis of faith is hard to pull off, but them remaining steadfast and bouncing back quickly out of any crisis (so that the next writer could tell another story with that character) is easier to write and easier to sell.

Luke had an important role in TLJ, but he was never one of its protagonists, and that freed everyone involved to look at him in more human terms instead of being the happy smiling avatar of youthful innocence he was in the OT.
After RotJ, Luke's heroic arc was done. He achieved what he set out to do (and a lot more besides he had no idea he had to do), but there's little more that he could achieve as a heroic character, so TLJ put him into a mentor role to give pointers to the next set of heroes.

[Mongoose]

Yeah, but the point was that he didnt let that get him down or convince him that the galaxy didnt need Jedi.

If none of that "got him down," then his character was horrifically written.  (Which should be no shock considering the EU...)  Luke in TLJ was absolutely in keeping with what happened to him beforehand, and his arc throughout the film matched perfectly with the OT.  Luke has always been a character who exhibited poor judgement but later redeemed himself.  Have you forgotten the Luke of ESB, who ran off half-cocked from his training only to nearly get himself killed?  Or even better, how about in ROTJ, where he was mere moments from murdering his own father and completely losing himself to the dark side?  Are you telling me you couldn't see that same Luke having a terrible premonition about his own flesh-and-blood pupil, letting himself once again succumb to weakness, and then being devastated by the tragic consequences?  Everything Luke built crumbled at his own hands, and you're trying to say that couldn't break him?  It's called being human.

Like, I genuinely cannot understand why so many people were oblivious to this.

[karajorma]

Yeah, I've heard people try to claim that Mark Hamill was pressured into toeing the company line by Disney.

[Luis Dias]

Of course you did, you, me, and everyone else who had the unfortunate luck to get poisoned in their eyes and ears, if only momentarily, by this new market niche that is "The Hatred of Everything New in Old Franchises". Hamill said he was unsure of where TLJ was bringing Luke until he saw the result, then he "got it".

We can all speculate on his "true feelings", but that is a war that only the retard fandom can really win, because reality to these idiots is anything they imagine it to be, so of course Hamill hates TLJ, we "know this for a fact" and every other silly **** these ****slingers love to say every time this is discussed.

I prefer to go where his statements end, and I don't really so much care about his "true feelings" (I'm not a ****ing telepath woopsie****ingdo), but much more so about how he approached it. See, for instance his latest interview, where he likened Luke's downfall with his own generation's downfall, which was 1000% much more insightful and interesting than any of this **** stirring these idiots crank up.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06/26/mark-hamill-on-the-weirdly-tragic-trajectory-of-luke-skywalker

“It is tragic. I'm not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he's involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation - ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.

“I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I'm one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.”

[Akalabeth Angel]

How many people would care about Luke's character in TLJ if not for his comments?

I've never thought as Luke as being "youthfully optimistic" and even if he were, the key part of the descriptor is "youthful", something which one loses over time.  In A New Hope Luke is a big whiner, he wants to get off the ****hole planet and is depressed with his life, in Empire he's a big negative nancy with Yoda saying things can't be done and he's asking too much, and in Jedi he has faith in the idea he can save his father but otherwise is pretty neutral.  What part of the line "I'm endangering the mission, I shouldn't have come" is optimistic?

I honestly think a lot of people heard Hamill's opinion and simply adopted it as their own without thinking things through.

[Akalabeth Angel]

In fact let's play a game, I'll list some lines from star wars and you tell which ones are optimistic

"It looks like we don't have much of a choice but I'll remind him"
"Biggs is right I'm never going to get out of here"
"Well if there's a bright centre of the universe you're on the planet that's farthest from"
"It looks like I'm going nowhere"
"I hate the Empire but there's nothing I can do about it right now!"

"Oh, no.  We'll never get it out now."
"You want the impossible."
"But Han and Leia will die if I don't."

"I can't do it, Artoo. I can't go on alone."
"I'm endangering the mission. I shouldn't have come."
"Then my father is truly dead"

He's optimistic about his father, because of what he feels. And he's optimistic about what he does or he wouldn't do it in the first place but so are all of the characters  in the rebellion.

[Snarks]

I do feel that people sometimes so strongly identify with characters to their actors that they don't realize the core of the character's personality, motivations, and so on were actually developed by the creator or writer. I might lend a little bit of credence that an actor will know a character he's playing over the typical general audience that watches the character, but I'd argue that they don't really own the character anymore than a devoted fan. Not to go on too much of a tangent, but Sylvester Stallone in the original Rambo movie (which was actually a pretty good film) was the one who pushed for the film to become the sort of trashy series it would later become in the subsequent Rambo films.

I don't actually know much about Mark Hamil, whether he's someone whose intellectual opinion should be trusted or not. All I know is that Luke felt borderline insane for me, probably because of the completely whacky pacing of the film and the need to crack a joke every 10 minutes.

[Luis Dias]

Then you felt it right. He was slightly insane from isolation, frustration, sadness and numbness. He decided that the best thing for the entire galaxy was for him to seclude himself. His remarks on why the resistance would even care about his being are a good meta-commentary as well, something like "do you expect me to get there and destroy everything with my light saber?", which points to something I always felt was off in the original trilogy: why all the fuss about these knights and so on, when the actual big problem was these giant death weapons and fleets to begin with? Vader would tell me I lacked faith and so on, but the entire trilogy doesn't really disprove the cynical guy at the original death star. They were just lucky that Gin's father placed a loophole at the north pole of that giant sphere.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Then you felt it right. He was slightly insane from isolation, frustration, sadness and numbness. He decided that the best thing for the entire galaxy was for him to seclude himself. His remarks on why the resistance would even care about his being are a good meta-commentary as well, something like "do you expect me to get there and destroy everything with my light saber?", which points to something I always felt was off in the original trilogy: why all the fuss about these knights and so on, when the actual big problem was these giant death weapons and fleets to begin with? Vader would tell me I lacked faith and so on, but the entire trilogy doesn't really disprove the cynical guy at the original death star. They were just lucky that Gin's father placed a loophole at the north pole of that giant sphere.

There isn't any fuss in the original trilogy about Jedi.  The fuss is in the fan base and in the subsequent prequels which were made to cater to the fans.

At its core, A New Hope is about a gifted boy going on an adventure and saving the day with the help of his friends and Obi Wan confronting his old student.  Empire is about a father looking for his son, and the son learning about himself. RotJ is about a son accepting and saving his father.

In other words the stories about Jedi in the first movies are all PERSONAL stories that take place against the backdrop of a bigger conflict.  Outside of a New Hope, neither Luke nor Vader play a critical role in the outcome of any battle.  Vader orders people around, and Luke takes down an AT-AT or two. But the battles are won and lost by the regular soldiers on the ground. 

In fact if anything, the new movies still suffer from this.  Think about Rogue One where Vader busts into the Calamari Cruiser and cuts apart a bunch of rebels. Then think back to a New Hope where he comes into the Blockade Runner AFTER it's been secured.  Think about Kylo Ren leading the battle from an an AT-AT in TLJ and think about Vader coming down to Hoth after the battle was already nearly won. Compared to the original trilogy, jedi in the new movies are front and centre all the time.

[Luis Dias]

That is true, but you're wrong in saying that the original trilogy didn't place these jedi "front and center". In fact, if anything, the "new ones" walked the walk, and the originals only talked the talk. Benkept saying that without Luke, everything would be lost, the empire would win, etc., etc., (while Yoda pointed out there was another) as if this one jedi was the difference between victory and defeat of the whole war between the empire and the rebels. Of course, if you actually watch RotJ, this notion is preposterous. Yes, he convinced Vader to kill Palpatine, but I'm pretty sure the blastwave from the core reactor explosion ignited by the Falcon would also do the trick.

The reason why this matters very little in the originals is that we're human and we like these stories where massive galactic events are actually about family matters and it's all about you and your father and sister and whomever you want to make amends with. And at the end, you end up in a place of love with your family, friends and bonus, you've saved the galaxy. We kinda see the working machinery if we're enough cynical about it, but we still love it.

[Colonol Dekker]

Nahhh vader would've saved the emperor