WARNING! In case it wasn’t clear from the headline, this is only for people who’ve seen The Last Jedialready.DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT!Save this page for when you have, and move on.
When Han Solo died towards the end of The Force Awakensin 2015, it was a blow to fans' hearts. But it was also to be expected.
Harrison Ford had been agitating for years for his scoundrel smuggler to be killed off in a way that would “bring some weight to this thing.” Ford was so cranky about the role that made his career, it was almost a mercy killing.
Han’s death at the hands of his own son — tragic Dark Side devotee Ben Solo, a.k.a. Kylo Ren — also propelled the plot forward further and faster than any Star Wars death since Obi-Wan Kenobi was struck down and grew even stronger. There would never be a greater point in the story for the death of one of the main three characters to bring some weight to this thing.
Or so we thought.
SEE ALSO:'The Last Jedi' review: Laughing and crying, Star Wars reaches full throttleBecause now that those who saw The Last Jedion opening night know, I can finally write about the grief of it. Last Jedidirector Rian Johnson has, in the character-killing stakes as in so many things, gone his predecessor one better.
Luke Skywalker is dead — returning as a Force Ghost in Episode IX, we can hope, but never to breathe life on the screen again. The last Jedi Master is gone; the fact that it was the best possible story circumstances, that it was such a beautiful and fitting death that set Rey up as his successor, doesn’t alleviate the blow.
I'll just say it again: Luke Skywalker is dead. For someone who has lived a lifetime with the character’s open-ended story, this is a difficult sentence to get your head around.
Luke seemed eternal; the hero with a thousand faces, too iconic to fail.
The emotional weight of this death is compounded by the sheer surprise that he went before his sister. We all expected General Leia to be the one written out of the franchise, given Carrie Fisher’s untimely death last December.
Carrie effectively played one more uncredited role.
Instead, because Leia “survives” the movie, it’s almost more weight than we can bear, slapping layer upon layer of existential irony on this thing. (As does the scene where Leia finally uses her Force powers one time, to save herself from the vacuum of space.)
Carrie Fisher, a connoisseur of both existence and irony, would have appreciated the heck out of that.
Because of all the focus on her story, Carrie effectively played one more uncredited role. Our loss became the ultimate dramatic misdirection; it prevented many of us thinking about whether a movie called The Last Jedimight do what seems obvious in retrospect: kill off the title character being played by the 66-year old man.
As a script doctor and meta-narrative author, Fisher would have appreciated the heck out of that too.
The Hero Reborn
The man. The legend. The redemption.Credit: lucasfilmIf Luke had been written about in a manner unbecoming to the hero, Star Wars fans might well be rioting in the streets this weekend. But that’s the tarnation of it; the story of his last adventure was a near perfect way to go.
When we meet the Jedi Master on Ahch-to, he’s basically an orphan boy all over again. He has closed himself off to the Force. He has turned into a farmer just like his Tatooine uncle, basically, even if this particular planet is a lot more wet and verdant.
But what has really changed? As a teenager Luke wolfed down blue milk from Aunt Beru's kitchen; as an old man he wolfs down green milk pumped from the breast of a giant sea monster. He lets it drip down his beard when he takes a swig, because why bother?
Luke may have memories of adventures in between -- some with a blue lightsaber, some with green. But those memories are all wrapped up with memories of how Kylo Ren turned to the Dark Side and destroyed his Jedi school, and he doesn't seem interested in memories. "Cheap trick," Luke chides Artoo when the droid tries to tip his heart with that old-time hologram of Leia.
He has also learned the full backstory of the Jedi that took us three prequel movies to get through, and he’s done with their arrogance too. He’s come here to this blue and green world to die, and to kill off the Jedi in the process.
The arrival of Rey, bearing the blue lightsaber he tries to throw away and a vision of him as a hero, changes all that. She reawakens it all, the good and the bad. She extracts lessons from the old master.
And then, through her link to Kylo Ren, she sees a flashback that contradicts Luke’s story: Luke about to attack his pupil in his sleep, his eyes glowing Sith yellow.
Obi-Wan’s former pupil is betrayed … by a certain point of view. But he has a saving grace, a certain point of view of his own. He had seen the evil in his pupil and ignited his lightsaber on a momentary impulse.
Still he refuses to help, so Rey leaves in the worst possible circumstances: hoping she can turn Kylo Ren to the light side. Luke meets his other Force Ghost master, and the little green guy uses lightning to set fire to a tree in what I found to be the most problematic moment of the movie.
“Page-turners they are not,” Yoda said of the ancient Jedi texts supposedly turning to ash within. I was about to damn Yoda for a book-burner, until the books turned up safe and sound on the Millennium Falcon at the end. By then it seemed cold comfort.
Luke had apparently returned to the Resistance in its darkest hour; really, he was Force-projecting himself there, making use of a link he’d established to Leia on her sickbed earlier in the movie.
(Cue a potential plot hole that will launch a thousand conversations: How could Threepio, a droid, see Luke if he was a projection of the living Force? In any case, it was worth it just to see Mark Hamill’s wink at his old protocol pal.)
Force projection hasn’t really been seen before in the filmed Star Wars universe, at least not outside the Star WarsRebelscartoon (where young apprentice Ezra is haunted by an apparent Force projection of Darth Maul).
So your ability to accept this ending, and the beauty of the story as a whole, is contingent upon you suspending disbelief over whether Luke even has the power to do that. Some of us would prefer the Jedi to be more samurai than superhero, and that’s fine.
But given that Rey and Kylo were basically Force-projecting themselves into each others’ lives throughout the movie, you can’t argue that it wasn’t foreshadowed. Rian Johnson is nothing if not internally consistent.
In fact, if you look closely, you can see that Luke’s hair and beard have changed in the scenes where he’s supposedly on Crait with the Resistance. He looks younger, just like he was in the flashbacks, just as Leia and Kylo would have remembered him. We should have known the truth of it then, but it’s the kind of thing we only spot on a second viewing.
In any case, this is all a grand excuse for breathtaking scenes in which Luke take on the entire First Order, and then Kylo Ren one on one. And Luke essentially wins, in the sense of allowing the Resistance to escape.
He wins by not fighting, which is a perfect last act for his character. It elevates Luke Skywalker to a hero of nonviolent resistance, the Ghandi of a galaxy far, far away.
Luke’s death itself is handled silently, serenely, beautifully. He’s back on Ahch-to, floating in lotus pose like the ultimate guru. The Force projection has been too much; he’s getting too old for this sort of thing. He collapses. He sees a binary sunset; is that a memory of Tatooine, or does Ahch-to have two suns too? He recovers. We think he’s going to be okay.
And then he disappears.
The Future of Luke Skywalker
He disappears. Just like Obi-Wan. Just like Yoda.
Which similarity suggests we’ll see Luke again in Episode IX, in the same way we saw his old masters — as occasional Force ghosts. But at that point, your role in the story is done. You can only advise for a scene or two, and evidently set fire to a tree or two if things get dull.
Here’s the genius of the thing, though. Rian Johnson also told us that Luke’s role will never be done.
In a beautifully judged final scene, we see the Resistance-aiding slave kids of Canto Bight, the cruel casino planet. They’re playing with rough-hewn toys.They speak only enough words of English — “Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master” — to help us realize they’re acting out Luke’s heroic stand against the entire First Order.
Luke will live on in the Star Wars galaxy as the hero in a story told among the downtrodden through homemade Luke Skywalker action figures.
Take a moment to process that. The layers of meta-meaning get insanely deep at this point, because the Star Wars franchise literally wouldn’t exist without such action figures. Their astounding merchandising revenues came through to Lucasfilm at a crucial point in its funding of Empire Strikes Back. The company was closer to the brink of collapse than the Rebels were.
“It’s poetic,” I wrote in How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, that “millions of children joyfully acting out the further adventures of Luke Skywalker literally funded the further adventures of Luke Skywalker.”
Now the further adventures of Luke Skywalker will fill the fictional sphere too. It has a spiritual cast to it — Wherever hope is most needed, there the New Hope will be — that reflects the semi-spiritual cast around Star Wars in our world.
So as we all grieve and process the death of Luke Skywalker, let us never doubt the power of storytelling to move hearts and worlds.
Especially an epic work of fiction that has now brought so much damn weight to this thing.
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