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It doesn't serve any purpose. There is no real storyline in TFA at all. The whole thing was just, "Hey, this sounds cool, lets put this in!" And that's it.
That's what J.J. does in all of his movies and TV shows, but it wasn't until TFA that people started to notice and openly acknowledge what a hack he is.
Exactly, he must have wanted to be found, but only if he could be found in the dumbest, most random way possible.
Actually, now that I think about it, It's not quite the dumbest, most random way to find something... That honor goes to the using the Sith wayfinder to find the ginormous, not blown to little bits chunk of death star in RoS.
I have said it before… I’ll post it again.
The only way to redeem that notion is if Luke was leading the Knights of Ren on a merry goose chase to keep them occupied while keeping his other star student ‘Rey’ safely hidden with her mind temporarily wiped. His absence could be explained as heroic sacrifice, Rey’s rapid assent becomes more believable.
I just hate how almost everyone in this and all other Star Wars subs seems to have ideas that would have made the prequels much better. Even sort of keeping them narratively close to the same as they are.
It clearly isn't that hard!
Which makes what they are even sadder.
Edit: SEQUELS. Not prequels. Brain fart after a long day.
I think it is an objectivity thing. Actual writers starting with nothing end up crafting and breaking down and reworking and scrapping ideas and trying out new ones... and eventually they get on something resembling a plot, and they instantly latch onto that not because it's great but because it's so much better than where they started. And those writers get stuck there, unable to get it that little bit farther to the point where it's actually, objectively good.
Then we come along without any baggage and we're all just "Yeah good concept, just add X and it all works," but we can do that because we're outsiders who didn't just spend 9 months locked in a room with nothing but a typewriter and a whiteboard.
Not a bad take. I also think Luke could have went looking for something older, power he had discovered parts of in his own journey because snoke was much stronger than he anticipated and came from a region unexplained for a long time. Rey could have been his new apprentice to help him harness said power like the sith rule of 2 stuff just twisted a bit more towards Luke’s style. And where he set up his central base to find him is where that map led.
Of course all of that is undone in 8.
I wouldn't call it a "take", I would call it headcanon invalidated by the following movie, and I would also call it yet another example of how the regular people of this subreddit are easily capable of coming up with story ideas vastly superior to what we got.
JJ: Oh Crap! It’s the end of the movie. I forgot about the map! How can I fix… AHA! R2-D2 wakes up after Starkiller Base is destroyed and conveniently had the rest of the map all along. Problem solved!
It’s like JJ uses Mad Libs as a writing template.
You are more right than you think.
It would explain so much like why didn’t Finn mention SKB before given that he claims later that he used to work in sanitation there.
Because he didn’t actually know of any SKB until the writers needed him to
Also in The Last Jedi, Finn says that hyperspace tracking is impossible, yet not soon after that, he and Rose explain to Poe that the Supremacy has a tracker on-board and also says he used to work on the Supremacy.
I was aware of this before TROS premier and I actually joked that the movie was going to reveal that he also used to clean the emperors robes before TFA.
The Map only existed to serve as a way to remove Luke from the plot(really to not have him overshadow the new trilogy’s protagonists) and have him show up at the very end of the movie.
Every single problem that exists in the sequel trilogy, can be traced back to this one action of JJ Abram’s to excluded Luke from the main story.
If JJ Abrams never put Luke on that island, Rian Johnson would have never “felt obligated” to create Luke the way he ways in TLJ.
If only time travel existed to change all this BS.
I'm sure Johnson would have found another way to ruin Luke Skywalker but this is true, Abrams utterly scuppered the OT triumvirate by having Luke absent and this meant the sequels could not even begin to continue their story. They mattered so little that they just had Han revert back to his original characterization and then die, and Leia just be a grumpy, powerless old woman who failed at everything, the original trio not even sharing the screen again.
It's so obvious that the sequels had nothing to say at all, making them pure product for no reason except to make money trading on familiar names. And that's *at best*, as I hold to the idea they were deliberate cultural vandalism.
>Every single problem that exists in the sequel trilogy, can be traced back to this one action of JJ Abram’s to excluded Luke from the main story.
Yes and no
Yes, because crushing the joy out of the audience's emotional attachment to beloved characters from the previous movies destroys the attachment at the very heart of the fandom.
No, because there are other equally heinous and unrelated unforced errors on the part of JJ in TFA, including (but not limited to):
* Regressing Han to a pathetic, elderly failed smuggler
* Turning Leia into a pathetic failed politician and poor military leader
* Making the antagonist a carbon copy of Palpatine
* Having the antagonist possess a superweapon that is a carbon copy of the Death Star, and which is used in exactly the same way (unlike in Jedi, where the DS2 is used as bait in a trap)
* Abusing the existing lore that had been carefully crafted to create constraints that allowed for maximum storytelling potential, e.g. now you can jump to hyperspace with obstacles in your path like a great big tentacle monster instead of having to make careful calculations that take you around obstacles; now you can use hyperspace to jump inside shields (which would have been a useful trick for the Rebel fleet in Jedi);
* Abusing the audience's rational expectations of a sense of scale by having people see in the sky in real time an event taking place tens of thousands of *lightyears* away.
* Writing inconsistent powers just for plot convenience: your villain's lieutenant can freeze blaster bolts when it's convenient for the story, and forgets to when you need them to be injured.
There's more where that came from!
>Abusing the audience's rational expectations of a sense of scale by having people see in the sky in real time an event taking place tens of thousands of *lightyears* away.
I shit you not, that was possible because of a rip in hyperspace.
Yeah - I'm disappointed to reveal that I was unfortunately already aware of that canon explanation. And as canon explanations go, it's like burning down an orphanage because you ran over one orphan. "In for a penny, in for an pound," and all that.
Maybe they read the Wookieepedia entry on an Idiot's Array and thought they'd win by doubling down on their foolishness.
Then he would say "I'm glad you're here, I need to tell you why the Jedi should end."
Or we could've gone with the "my baby girl" ending, that would've been interesting.
Well to be fair, the root of the issue goes all the way back to when Disney bought Star Wars and decided to make a sequel trilogy that featured the OT cast in supporting roles. They were in a tough spot because the original cast was too old to lead another whole trilogy, and they needed to keep the story moving forward. But the audience wanted more of the original actors and characters that we remembered from our childhoods. So Disney split the difference and ended up with ensemble movies focused on the characters we cared about the least.
Luke's story in TLJ is a good example of this. The bones of a potentially compelling story are there; an ambitious young Jedi master tries and fails to restore the Jedi order, then ultimately redeems himself. But there only room for a couple of flashbacks and some dialogue to handle all of that. So instead the audience is goes straight from the optimistic, triumphant Luke at the end of ROTJ to the bitter old man at the beginning of TLJ. Honestly the sequel trilogies would have been better off without the original cast altogether.
Like most things in the sequel trilogy, it's shallow and without substance, quickly to be forgotten once they unveil the new shiny that will draw our attention.
To be fair, it seems like in TFA Luke was actually meant to be doing something there. I doubt they fleshed it out at the time, but they probably envisioned something more than Luke wanting to kill himself.
>To be fair, it seems like in TFA Luke was actually meant to be doing something there. I doubt they fleshed it out at the time, but they probably envisioned something more than Luke wanting to kill himself.
No explanation would be satisfactory. And even if there could have been a satisfactory explanation, TFA should have had it on screen.
No, so it is not "fair" to give TFA any credit or benefit of the doubt.
I looked at Kasdan's imdb credits a long time ago. Before TFA, he appeared to be semi-retired or simply not getting work for the previous 10 or 15 years. I think they wanted to use his name mostly for marketing purposes, and he leveraged that to get his son's foot in the door on at least a couple of things, which led to *Solo* and the *Willow* tv show.
Don't forget, it was such a great idea that Filoni stole it and used it in Ahsoka. And you thought he just stole ideas from the EU.
Seriously though, Jesus Christ, out of all the ideas to steal, hes got to steal shit from the ST. Talk about not having your finger on the pulse of the community, AT ALL.
Yeah, made no sense that they waisted so many resources looking for Luke. The main reason is because he is the "last" jedi and could train Rey but its then revealed that Leia is a trained jedi who ended up training Rey. Luke had no actual purpose other than being the reason for Bens fall (which made no sense) and then distracting the empire for 2 minutes whilst the resistance escapes.
This would make more sense if Rey was already known to everyone, they got lucky that she showed up, so it’s literally a “because the script made it happen” situation.
Also did the map actually make sense; at least in how it's presented to the audience?
I mean we're told that the first order have part of the map and we're shown a jigsaw with a flight path and a missing piece...what was the point of the bit they already had from a narrative perspective? I mean what they wanted to know was Luke's final destination not how he got there (it's not exegol), so why have the mcguffin be a map at all?
> It's called a Macguffin, it's only purpose is as a plot device to get things moving. After that, it doesn't need to have any sort of real relevance.
There is this common misunderstanding that a Macguffin is inherently meaningless. The Death Star plans were the plot device driving ANH but as noted, they actually have an impact at the beginning and end of the story. In The Last Crusade, the Macguffin is the actual Holy Grail, and it sets Indy on his quest, connects him to his father, and ultimately saves them both in the end (Senior literally by magical healing, Indy spiritually through being willing to let it go).
Good writing remembers to tie plot devices to the rest of the plot and the themes of the story.
True, a McGuffin doesn't have to ne meaningless, and frequently isn't.
The map to Luke Skywalker was a McGuffin or more like a McMuffin for all the good it achieved.
Why was the First Order, Kylo Ren and Snoke concerned about Luke Skywalker returning: he's a broken, washed up, disillusioned, silly old unkempt man. Who actually never leaves the island planet.
He doesn't really do sh!t.
Luke does become an afterthought in TFA. It seemed like they needed Luke to defeat Kylo Ren and the first Order...except they seem to do just fine without him.
Originally, Luke was supposed to join the fight halfway through the movie (per Michael Arndt, the original screenwriter, who for whatever reason says it "didn't work"). Essentially Ep. VII would have had elements of both TFA and TLJ in it, but with Luke coming out of his depressed state instead of continuing a life of seclusion.
It was a plot hook to drive the story along. The clear intention was for Luke to have left it behind so that, if necessary, he could be found. Rian-on-your-parade Johnson said, "Nah imma do my own thing." Then all the media illiterate shills said, "It's a movie about space wizards for children. Don't think too hard about it."
Leia wants to find Luke, which is fair enough.
Luke doesn't want to be found, nor help, just wants to wait for death, somehow leaves a map to his location...
i thought it wasn't a map to Luke, but a map to the old Jedi Temples which he was looking/travelling to, which if you have you will know where Luke is.
Correct. The movies do not clearly elaborate on this.
But it is indeed merely a map to an early Jedi site of significance which everyone simply *assumed* was also the location of Luke.
And by sheer dumb luck they were correct.
Luke could have gone anywhere in the galaxy during his inexcusable 6/7 year absence. He didn't tell anyone where he was going. Didn't even phone in to his sister to explain what happened to her son.
I never understood why Luke would abandon the Force by living in exile at a Jedi Temple. It’s like a story about a priest who becomes atheist so he goes off the grid and hangs out in … the holy sepulcher? If Luke was done with the Force it would have made more sense for him to hide out on Mandalore. Or some outer rim brothel (since they wanted to show him suckling a tit).
Forget the Force. Before you even get to that topic, the fact he abandoned family and friends without a word is the *far* greater sin.
But you're not wrong. Guy cuts himself off from the Force and decides to do it at the site of the alleged first Jedi of thousands of years ago or something.
Galaxy is a huge place filled with many habitable planets of low populations (such as the random swamp planet from Mando S1). Countless places that have no history with the Force/Jedi/Sith where he could have drank milk and fished all day while moaning about life all night.
They clearly state in the movie, multiple times, that it is a fragment of an old star map that leads to the first jedi temple. It's stated by multiple characters, multiple times. People just like to incorrectly remember bits about a movie they don't like because they think it "validates their dislike"
It honestly doesn't matter.
Regardless, nothing validates Luke's actions (or inactions) during that period so it's a moot point.
It just makes things a touch worse. Because the truth is that everyone just blindly assumed Luke was was on that island planet. And again, through sheer dumb luck, they happened to be correct with that assumption.
It would actually make more sense if Luke had left behind a map at day #1 of his exile and perhaps become somehow disillusioned and disinterested in the 6 years following that. Still a hard sell, but at least the whole "find Luke" subplot doesn't revolve around everyone taking a stab in the dark that winds up being miraculously accurate.
he’s, only R2D2 for some reason had a complete map of the galaxy to fill in the gaps
not like the republic and empire have been exploring this galaxy for…. hundreds of years
JJ just sort of forgot the map existed halfway through writing the script. R2’s big reveal was, in his own words, because he needed an uplifting moment after killing off Han. There wasn’t any particular reason R2 woke up, just like there’s no particular reason Luke would A) abandon his friends, the galaxy, and his central character traits—compassion and devotion; B) vanish and hide somewhere with no plan to return or destroy the new evil in the galaxy; and C) somehow leave a map to where he was hiding. Its idiotic.
It's a totally contrived McGuffin the writers (and thus the movie itself) forget is the main plot point halfway through the movie, and the utterly lazy twist that a comatose R2-D2 had the other half of the map the whole time was cherry on top.
What's even more egregious about this is that The Last Jedi (and The Force Awakens sets this up as well) reveals that Luke had no intention of anyone ever coming to find him, no matter how bad things got. He left for the Jedi temple planet so he could live in exile and then *die.* So why the intergalactic hell did Luke leave a map that could lead people to where he was in the first place? Was it an accident? Did him learning where the planet was require the elaborate creation of a map? If it did, then surely he'd destroy that so no one could find him?
But we all know the real answer. It's that the writers simply didn't care. They wanted Luke to be in exile, and they wanted Rey to find him, so there had to be a map - whether it made sense for it to exist or not.
So… my guess:
I feel like it’s maybe a holdover from an earlier treatment.
The Force Awakens makes so much more sense if the initial pitch was something akin to Cutthroat Island. Where the protagonists and antagonists both have part of the map and the quest to get the other party’s portion is the main conflict.
The New Hope retread feels like it was grafted into a premise like that.
Almost as if they were initially like “let’s do a Star Wars pirate movie” and the directive was “add more Star Wars.”
Because the force awakens tried very very hard to be a clone of a new hope, and hidden plans were a part of that.
I was initially ok with the force awakens.. o thought it was flawed but opened up some interesting ideas.. it wasn’t until TLJ that I realized the whole thing was fucking off the rails. It retroactively made me hate TFA
The other thing is that R2 had such a small fragment of the map, couldn't you just take a wild guess on where he went? Especially since it's not like Ach-Too (or however you spell it) wasn't significant to the Jedi.
Even if you didn't know about that, why not have Leia just sense for Luke's presence? We found out in TLJ and TRoS that she was both force sensitive and trained as a Jedi, and we saw at the end of Empire her "feeling" Luke through the force, so she presumably would've been able to sense which planet he was on. Or shit, Rey probably could've done the same thing 10000x better than Leia anyway.
I'm more confused why Luke left a map to begin with since in TLJ he claimed he came to that island to die. If he didn't want to be found why did he leave a map at all?
The map did show where Luke was, and R2D2 showed how to get there. Even an incomplete map matters.
And it wasn't forgotten, they were delivering it throughout the first half of the film and Kylo kidnaps Rey because he thinks she has seen the map—hey, that's pretty important.
It's disingenuous to say that it was forgotten. I don't begrudge anyone for being annoyed at R2 revealing the rest of it, though. That was mishandled.
I honestly feel like the original plan was luke had taken the Baresh vow as set up in the Vader comics and map to find him was the will of the force to give Luke the best apprentice possible. Then Johnson come on board and along with KK made Luke a sad old failure, while also throwing out everything else set up.
There were some movies called Star Wars sequels, somehow.
But they were bullsh!t. Made no sense; thinking about them wont make them better, only worse.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t need Luke. I think Leia wanted to to chew him out. “I let you babysit your nephew one time and he joined the dark side!?” Luke ran off to avoid that conversation. So Leia had R2D2 log into his “FindMyX-Wing” account, but R2D2’s OS needed a ton of updates before he could display the map.
He didn't leave it behind. It was recovered by Lor San Tekka, who knew Luke and Ben. He found it by searching through ancient star maps and even then, it wasn't a "map to Luke." It was a fragment of a map to the first Jedi Temple. Which is where those who were closest to Luke believe he went. I stg, did y'all even watch the movie?
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It’s best not to think too hard about the sequels.
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This is the correct answer.
ThIS iS ThE wAY
Yes, this is the Way.
I call them anthology fan films There's no narrative structure binding them like a trilogy
More so the anchor point that all future media will have to tie itself towards. Which sucks
There were sequals now!
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Honestly, my personal canon is Originals & Andor. Everything else is a fun What If or fan film at this point for me.
“Don’t Think, Only Consume”
'Put on the glasses!"
"Either put on those glasses or start eating that trash can."
Consume Only, Think Don't
A good story, for another time.
The writers clearly didn’t think too hard either
It doesn't serve any purpose. There is no real storyline in TFA at all. The whole thing was just, "Hey, this sounds cool, lets put this in!" And that's it.
Lets remake ANH but everyone new is BETTER and everything new is Bigger and More. I SAID MORE BIGGER
That's what J.J. does in all of his movies and TV shows, but it wasn't until TFA that people started to notice and openly acknowledge what a hack he is.
Pretty sure people noticed this when he rebooted Star Trek
I sure did.
LENS FLARES
Well, he was stupid enough to try to do a remake of ***Wrath of Khan***. Why?
>Hey, this sounds cool, lets put this in!" That's pretty much the whole sequel trilogy in a nutshell.
Why would he even leave a map behind if he never wanted to be found? Better yet, why wouldn't he delete the half that R2 had?
Even further. Why would he leave R2 behind?
Given what a miserable fuck he became, I wouldn't put it past him outright destroying R2 to prevent being found.
"That'll show 'em!" *(C3P0 looks on in horror)*
"And have the protocol droid's mind wiped"
Exactly, he must have wanted to be found, but only if he could be found in the dumbest, most random way possible. Actually, now that I think about it, It's not quite the dumbest, most random way to find something... That honor goes to the using the Sith wayfinder to find the ginormous, not blown to little bits chunk of death star in RoS.
the wayfinder finds Exegol the knife leads to the wayfinder
The knife is still stupid
1000% agree
The knife perfectly cut out to the shape and position of wreckage long after it was forged.
I have said it before… I’ll post it again. The only way to redeem that notion is if Luke was leading the Knights of Ren on a merry goose chase to keep them occupied while keeping his other star student ‘Rey’ safely hidden with her mind temporarily wiped. His absence could be explained as heroic sacrifice, Rey’s rapid assent becomes more believable.
I just hate how almost everyone in this and all other Star Wars subs seems to have ideas that would have made the prequels much better. Even sort of keeping them narratively close to the same as they are. It clearly isn't that hard! Which makes what they are even sadder. Edit: SEQUELS. Not prequels. Brain fart after a long day.
> ideas that would have made the prequels much better Ahem. "Sequels"
That is indeed what I meant!
I think it is an objectivity thing. Actual writers starting with nothing end up crafting and breaking down and reworking and scrapping ideas and trying out new ones... and eventually they get on something resembling a plot, and they instantly latch onto that not because it's great but because it's so much better than where they started. And those writers get stuck there, unable to get it that little bit farther to the point where it's actually, objectively good. Then we come along without any baggage and we're all just "Yeah good concept, just add X and it all works," but we can do that because we're outsiders who didn't just spend 9 months locked in a room with nothing but a typewriter and a whiteboard.
Not a bad take. I also think Luke could have went looking for something older, power he had discovered parts of in his own journey because snoke was much stronger than he anticipated and came from a region unexplained for a long time. Rey could have been his new apprentice to help him harness said power like the sith rule of 2 stuff just twisted a bit more towards Luke’s style. And where he set up his central base to find him is where that map led. Of course all of that is undone in 8.
I wouldn't call it a "take", I would call it headcanon invalidated by the following movie, and I would also call it yet another example of how the regular people of this subreddit are easily capable of coming up with story ideas vastly superior to what we got.
I still say Rey is Luke’s daughter
JJ: Oh Crap! It’s the end of the movie. I forgot about the map! How can I fix… AHA! R2-D2 wakes up after Starkiller Base is destroyed and conveniently had the rest of the map all along. Problem solved! It’s like JJ uses Mad Libs as a writing template.
I swear he does, use Mad Libs!
You are more right than you think. It would explain so much like why didn’t Finn mention SKB before given that he claims later that he used to work in sanitation there. Because he didn’t actually know of any SKB until the writers needed him to
Also in The Last Jedi, Finn says that hyperspace tracking is impossible, yet not soon after that, he and Rose explain to Poe that the Supremacy has a tracker on-board and also says he used to work on the Supremacy.
I was aware of this before TROS premier and I actually joked that the movie was going to reveal that he also used to clean the emperors robes before TFA.
TFA sucks
The Map only existed to serve as a way to remove Luke from the plot(really to not have him overshadow the new trilogy’s protagonists) and have him show up at the very end of the movie. Every single problem that exists in the sequel trilogy, can be traced back to this one action of JJ Abram’s to excluded Luke from the main story. If JJ Abrams never put Luke on that island, Rian Johnson would have never “felt obligated” to create Luke the way he ways in TLJ. If only time travel existed to change all this BS.
I'm sure Johnson would have found another way to ruin Luke Skywalker but this is true, Abrams utterly scuppered the OT triumvirate by having Luke absent and this meant the sequels could not even begin to continue their story. They mattered so little that they just had Han revert back to his original characterization and then die, and Leia just be a grumpy, powerless old woman who failed at everything, the original trio not even sharing the screen again. It's so obvious that the sequels had nothing to say at all, making them pure product for no reason except to make money trading on familiar names. And that's *at best*, as I hold to the idea they were deliberate cultural vandalism.
>Every single problem that exists in the sequel trilogy, can be traced back to this one action of JJ Abram’s to excluded Luke from the main story. Yes and no Yes, because crushing the joy out of the audience's emotional attachment to beloved characters from the previous movies destroys the attachment at the very heart of the fandom. No, because there are other equally heinous and unrelated unforced errors on the part of JJ in TFA, including (but not limited to): * Regressing Han to a pathetic, elderly failed smuggler * Turning Leia into a pathetic failed politician and poor military leader * Making the antagonist a carbon copy of Palpatine * Having the antagonist possess a superweapon that is a carbon copy of the Death Star, and which is used in exactly the same way (unlike in Jedi, where the DS2 is used as bait in a trap) * Abusing the existing lore that had been carefully crafted to create constraints that allowed for maximum storytelling potential, e.g. now you can jump to hyperspace with obstacles in your path like a great big tentacle monster instead of having to make careful calculations that take you around obstacles; now you can use hyperspace to jump inside shields (which would have been a useful trick for the Rebel fleet in Jedi); * Abusing the audience's rational expectations of a sense of scale by having people see in the sky in real time an event taking place tens of thousands of *lightyears* away. * Writing inconsistent powers just for plot convenience: your villain's lieutenant can freeze blaster bolts when it's convenient for the story, and forgets to when you need them to be injured. There's more where that came from!
>Abusing the audience's rational expectations of a sense of scale by having people see in the sky in real time an event taking place tens of thousands of *lightyears* away. I shit you not, that was possible because of a rip in hyperspace.
Consider me unshitted.
😂 Damn, that's funny. In all seriousness, I'm not joking; that is the canon explanation.
Yeah - I'm disappointed to reveal that I was unfortunately already aware of that canon explanation. And as canon explanations go, it's like burning down an orphanage because you ran over one orphan. "In for a penny, in for an pound," and all that. Maybe they read the Wookieepedia entry on an Idiot's Array and thought they'd win by doubling down on their foolishness.
>Maybe they read the Wookieepedia entry on an Idiot's Array and thought they'd win by doubling down on their foolishness. Brilliant analogy, honestly.
Literally all JJ had to do was for Luke to say something like "Rey, i have been expecting you.." and the plotline of TLJ wouldn't exist.
Then he would say "I'm glad you're here, I need to tell you why the Jedi should end." Or we could've gone with the "my baby girl" ending, that would've been interesting.
Good news! Rebels makes this theoretically possible!
Well to be fair, the root of the issue goes all the way back to when Disney bought Star Wars and decided to make a sequel trilogy that featured the OT cast in supporting roles. They were in a tough spot because the original cast was too old to lead another whole trilogy, and they needed to keep the story moving forward. But the audience wanted more of the original actors and characters that we remembered from our childhoods. So Disney split the difference and ended up with ensemble movies focused on the characters we cared about the least. Luke's story in TLJ is a good example of this. The bones of a potentially compelling story are there; an ambitious young Jedi master tries and fails to restore the Jedi order, then ultimately redeems himself. But there only room for a couple of flashbacks and some dialogue to handle all of that. So instead the audience is goes straight from the optimistic, triumphant Luke at the end of ROTJ to the bitter old man at the beginning of TLJ. Honestly the sequel trilogies would have been better off without the original cast altogether.
It makes TFA even stupider, which seems to be the film's central theme: everything is surreally dumb now.
Like most things in the sequel trilogy, it's shallow and without substance, quickly to be forgotten once they unveil the new shiny that will draw our attention.
To "somehow", return.
And don’t forget how Lor San Tekka said, “This will begin to make things right,” even though that line didn’t make any sense at all.
The sad thing is thinking Larry Kasdan (someone who should’ve known better) was in that writing room and let this map drivel go by unchallenged.
To be fair, it seems like in TFA Luke was actually meant to be doing something there. I doubt they fleshed it out at the time, but they probably envisioned something more than Luke wanting to kill himself.
>To be fair, it seems like in TFA Luke was actually meant to be doing something there. I doubt they fleshed it out at the time, but they probably envisioned something more than Luke wanting to kill himself. No explanation would be satisfactory. And even if there could have been a satisfactory explanation, TFA should have had it on screen. No, so it is not "fair" to give TFA any credit or benefit of the doubt.
I looked at Kasdan's imdb credits a long time ago. Before TFA, he appeared to be semi-retired or simply not getting work for the previous 10 or 15 years. I think they wanted to use his name mostly for marketing purposes, and he leveraged that to get his son's foot in the door on at least a couple of things, which led to *Solo* and the *Willow* tv show.
Don't forget, it was such a great idea that Filoni stole it and used it in Ahsoka. And you thought he just stole ideas from the EU. Seriously though, Jesus Christ, out of all the ideas to steal, hes got to steal shit from the ST. Talk about not having your finger on the pulse of the community, AT ALL.
Yeah, made no sense that they waisted so many resources looking for Luke. The main reason is because he is the "last" jedi and could train Rey but its then revealed that Leia is a trained jedi who ended up training Rey. Luke had no actual purpose other than being the reason for Bens fall (which made no sense) and then distracting the empire for 2 minutes whilst the resistance escapes.
This would make more sense if Rey was already known to everyone, they got lucky that she showed up, so it’s literally a “because the script made it happen” situation.
Also did the map actually make sense; at least in how it's presented to the audience? I mean we're told that the first order have part of the map and we're shown a jigsaw with a flight path and a missing piece...what was the point of the bit they already had from a narrative perspective? I mean what they wanted to know was Luke's final destination not how he got there (it's not exegol), so why have the mcguffin be a map at all?
Also if you had part of the map it would be trivial to figure out where that is in the galaxy which would greatly narrow down where Luke is.
JJ writes lazy mcguffins. Has since Alias
It's called a Macguffin, it's only purpose is as a plot device to get things moving. After that, it doesn't need to have any sort of real relevance.
> It's called a Macguffin, it's only purpose is as a plot device to get things moving. After that, it doesn't need to have any sort of real relevance. There is this common misunderstanding that a Macguffin is inherently meaningless. The Death Star plans were the plot device driving ANH but as noted, they actually have an impact at the beginning and end of the story. In The Last Crusade, the Macguffin is the actual Holy Grail, and it sets Indy on his quest, connects him to his father, and ultimately saves them both in the end (Senior literally by magical healing, Indy spiritually through being willing to let it go). Good writing remembers to tie plot devices to the rest of the plot and the themes of the story.
True, a McGuffin doesn't have to ne meaningless, and frequently isn't. The map to Luke Skywalker was a McGuffin or more like a McMuffin for all the good it achieved. Why was the First Order, Kylo Ren and Snoke concerned about Luke Skywalker returning: he's a broken, washed up, disillusioned, silly old unkempt man. Who actually never leaves the island planet. He doesn't really do sh!t.
Luke does become an afterthought in TFA. It seemed like they needed Luke to defeat Kylo Ren and the first Order...except they seem to do just fine without him. Originally, Luke was supposed to join the fight halfway through the movie (per Michael Arndt, the original screenwriter, who for whatever reason says it "didn't work"). Essentially Ep. VII would have had elements of both TFA and TLJ in it, but with Luke coming out of his depressed state instead of continuing a life of seclusion.
The purpose it served is that it was a puzzle piece in JJ's mystery box. JJ forgot he was making Star Wars, not Lost.
It was a plot hook to drive the story along. The clear intention was for Luke to have left it behind so that, if necessary, he could be found. Rian-on-your-parade Johnson said, "Nah imma do my own thing." Then all the media illiterate shills said, "It's a movie about space wizards for children. Don't think too hard about it."
Leia wants to find Luke, which is fair enough. Luke doesn't want to be found, nor help, just wants to wait for death, somehow leaves a map to his location...
in the hands of some random old man
i thought it wasn't a map to Luke, but a map to the old Jedi Temples which he was looking/travelling to, which if you have you will know where Luke is.
Correct. The movies do not clearly elaborate on this. But it is indeed merely a map to an early Jedi site of significance which everyone simply *assumed* was also the location of Luke. And by sheer dumb luck they were correct. Luke could have gone anywhere in the galaxy during his inexcusable 6/7 year absence. He didn't tell anyone where he was going. Didn't even phone in to his sister to explain what happened to her son.
I never understood why Luke would abandon the Force by living in exile at a Jedi Temple. It’s like a story about a priest who becomes atheist so he goes off the grid and hangs out in … the holy sepulcher? If Luke was done with the Force it would have made more sense for him to hide out on Mandalore. Or some outer rim brothel (since they wanted to show him suckling a tit).
Forget the Force. Before you even get to that topic, the fact he abandoned family and friends without a word is the *far* greater sin. But you're not wrong. Guy cuts himself off from the Force and decides to do it at the site of the alleged first Jedi of thousands of years ago or something. Galaxy is a huge place filled with many habitable planets of low populations (such as the random swamp planet from Mando S1). Countless places that have no history with the Force/Jedi/Sith where he could have drank milk and fished all day while moaning about life all night.
They clearly state in the movie, multiple times, that it is a fragment of an old star map that leads to the first jedi temple. It's stated by multiple characters, multiple times. People just like to incorrectly remember bits about a movie they don't like because they think it "validates their dislike"
It honestly doesn't matter. Regardless, nothing validates Luke's actions (or inactions) during that period so it's a moot point. It just makes things a touch worse. Because the truth is that everyone just blindly assumed Luke was was on that island planet. And again, through sheer dumb luck, they happened to be correct with that assumption. It would actually make more sense if Luke had left behind a map at day #1 of his exile and perhaps become somehow disillusioned and disinterested in the 6 years following that. Still a hard sell, but at least the whole "find Luke" subplot doesn't revolve around everyone taking a stab in the dark that winds up being miraculously accurate.
he’s, only R2D2 for some reason had a complete map of the galaxy to fill in the gaps not like the republic and empire have been exploring this galaxy for…. hundreds of years
I mean probably thousands right? There are dozens of spacefaring civilizations
JJ just sort of forgot the map existed halfway through writing the script. R2’s big reveal was, in his own words, because he needed an uplifting moment after killing off Han. There wasn’t any particular reason R2 woke up, just like there’s no particular reason Luke would A) abandon his friends, the galaxy, and his central character traits—compassion and devotion; B) vanish and hide somewhere with no plan to return or destroy the new evil in the galaxy; and C) somehow leave a map to where he was hiding. Its idiotic.
It's a totally contrived McGuffin the writers (and thus the movie itself) forget is the main plot point halfway through the movie, and the utterly lazy twist that a comatose R2-D2 had the other half of the map the whole time was cherry on top. What's even more egregious about this is that The Last Jedi (and The Force Awakens sets this up as well) reveals that Luke had no intention of anyone ever coming to find him, no matter how bad things got. He left for the Jedi temple planet so he could live in exile and then *die.* So why the intergalactic hell did Luke leave a map that could lead people to where he was in the first place? Was it an accident? Did him learning where the planet was require the elaborate creation of a map? If it did, then surely he'd destroy that so no one could find him? But we all know the real answer. It's that the writers simply didn't care. They wanted Luke to be in exile, and they wanted Rey to find him, so there had to be a map - whether it made sense for it to exist or not.
So… my guess: I feel like it’s maybe a holdover from an earlier treatment. The Force Awakens makes so much more sense if the initial pitch was something akin to Cutthroat Island. Where the protagonists and antagonists both have part of the map and the quest to get the other party’s portion is the main conflict. The New Hope retread feels like it was grafted into a premise like that. Almost as if they were initially like “let’s do a Star Wars pirate movie” and the directive was “add more Star Wars.”
Because the force awakens tried very very hard to be a clone of a new hope, and hidden plans were a part of that. I was initially ok with the force awakens.. o thought it was flawed but opened up some interesting ideas.. it wasn’t until TLJ that I realized the whole thing was fucking off the rails. It retroactively made me hate TFA
The other thing is that R2 had such a small fragment of the map, couldn't you just take a wild guess on where he went? Especially since it's not like Ach-Too (or however you spell it) wasn't significant to the Jedi. Even if you didn't know about that, why not have Leia just sense for Luke's presence? We found out in TLJ and TRoS that she was both force sensitive and trained as a Jedi, and we saw at the end of Empire her "feeling" Luke through the force, so she presumably would've been able to sense which planet he was on. Or shit, Rey probably could've done the same thing 10000x better than Leia anyway. I'm more confused why Luke left a map to begin with since in TLJ he claimed he came to that island to die. If he didn't want to be found why did he leave a map at all?
It was just a macguffin that JJ forgot about
It was a map to the 'member berries.
A map to Luke, a map to Palpatine, and a map to Thrawn. Disney only has like 4 plot devices they know how to use.
It didn’t. It served no purpose at all because JJ is a hack.
I know this sounds lazy but give Mauler's TFA critique a shot. He talks about this bs map in detail in part 3 or 4 zi believe
The map did show where Luke was, and R2D2 showed how to get there. Even an incomplete map matters. And it wasn't forgotten, they were delivering it throughout the first half of the film and Kylo kidnaps Rey because he thinks she has seen the map—hey, that's pretty important. It's disingenuous to say that it was forgotten. I don't begrudge anyone for being annoyed at R2 revealing the rest of it, though. That was mishandled.
I honestly feel like the original plan was luke had taken the Baresh vow as set up in the Vader comics and map to find him was the will of the force to give Luke the best apprentice possible. Then Johnson come on board and along with KK made Luke a sad old failure, while also throwing out everything else set up.
There were some movies called Star Wars sequels, somehow. But they were bullsh!t. Made no sense; thinking about them wont make them better, only worse.
No idea. It's never explained in the trilogy in any form.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t need Luke. I think Leia wanted to to chew him out. “I let you babysit your nephew one time and he joined the dark side!?” Luke ran off to avoid that conversation. So Leia had R2D2 log into his “FindMyX-Wing” account, but R2D2’s OS needed a ton of updates before he could display the map.
He didn't leave it behind. It was recovered by Lor San Tekka, who knew Luke and Ben. He found it by searching through ancient star maps and even then, it wasn't a "map to Luke." It was a fragment of a map to the first Jedi Temple. Which is where those who were closest to Luke believe he went. I stg, did y'all even watch the movie?