Mark Hamill says 'it's possible' Luke goes to dark side in 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

And for the record, while I was a bit irritated at how badly written Rey was, she wasn’t even the worst part of The Force Awakens. The worst part was that it was a literal rehash of A New Hope with elements of Return of the Jedi and Empire Strikes Back thrown in, and the rewrites in question weren’t didn’t even compensate by actually TRYING to make things sensible (I hated the whole Starkiller Base concept due to just how poorly designed of a plot device it was overall). My extended family may have loved the movie, but my mom and dad were bored out of their minds, and when I saw the film, which I already suspected would retread it thanks to the plot being leaked that pretty much made clear it was that, I wasn’t at all happy with the film and felt it was just getting annoying.

Everybody in the SW universe can fly. We’ve never encountered a single non-droid character that can’t fly a ship (and if you count the escape pod even 3PO has some stick time). The question isn’t can they fly it’s can they fly well. As for Rey she bounced the Falcon off the ground twice, not exactly great flying. Yeah she pulled a loop, loops aren’t that tough, pull up while hitting the thrust and keep it that way, it’s like the first thing anybody does playing a flight combat computer game (cause it looks cool, and you find out of the game will actually let you go inverted).

Again Ren had been gut shot, and he was trying to recruit her. “Look how cool you can be with the Force” is a favorite Dark Side recruitment, and its well established people in strong emotional states can do large, though basically uncontrolled, Force stuff. And that ground cracking probably had as much to do with everybody else blowing up the planet as her Force.

Mary Sues have flaws and get beat. Alice dies in like every other Resident Evil movie. The trick is Mary Sues, like every other hero character in American movies, only lose in a way that’s temporary and helpful to later success.

See this is the part that shows how the anti-Rey Mary Sue argument is silly. Luke shows DRASTICALLY MORE piloting skill than Rey (and most of the other X-Wing pilots) and everybody says “yeah but he flew a skyhopper so it’s not Marty Stu”, Rey bounces the Falcon off the planet twice and they insist she showed super piloting ability. The Mary Sue whiners are trying to have it both ways. The fact is Luke showed much higher levels of unjustified piloting skill. Heck they even wound up “justifying” his piloting skills in one of the novels where young Luke is declared to have “his father’s natural aptitude”. And if my theory on Rey is correct maybe they’ll say the same thing about her.

Rey did NOT hand Ren his butt. He was injured, he fought a slow style, and he still wailed the crap out of her https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWF0f183tSA she spends almost the entire fight retreating for her life, it’s only when he gets cocky and doesn’t finish her she gets an opening.

Again notice Lucas made it “clear” when DISCUSSING the movie that the Rebels were the VC. You didn’t think that when you first watched it, NOBODY thought that when they first watched it. He wasn’t aiming for a blank slate universe, but that’s what he got. There’s often a gap between what an artist thinks they’re putting into something and what is seen by the audience. The makers of Patton insist it’s an anti-war movie, specifically a screed on Viet Nam, meanwhile a largely conservative audience has declared it the greatest war movie ever (because, well, it is).

I’m looking forward to Last Jedi, it looks fun. At it looks like they might be bringing the Grey Jedi (or something very similar) back into canon. Grey Jedi are cool, and fix one of the major sillinesses of the SW universe by saying some people can use the Force and not be either emotionless Zen Jedi or evil scummy Sith, they can just be people with the Force. It’s a cool concept.

Fine, maybe Luke IS a marty stu, but I’m pretty sure one of the reasons why marty stus/mary sues are hated is that they have literally NO flaws whatsoever, meaning they can’t even be defeated at all, not even temporary, meaning, even IF Luke is a marty stu, Rey is even more of one (she manages to easily get out of prison, thus essentially making Han and Finn’s rescue attempt completely unnecessary despite it pretty much being the ONLY reason Finn signed up/planned the mission [as Finn lied about how much he actually knew about Starkiller Base earlier]). As far as anyone flying a ship, don’t recall Padme’s decoy in The Phantom Menace flying a ship, or Captain Panaka, and I certainly don’t recall Admiral Ozzel actually piloting a ship. And for the record, I wasn’t even trying to imply the ground cracking was because of her, I was just giving the details of how the duel went.

As far as Lucas and the whole VC business, Kojima also aimed for much of the same, and he also wrote in references to Che Guevara in Peace Walker in such a manner that made it seem as though he was like one of the founding fathers of America instead of the psychopath he truly was, and that didn’t impact Metal Gear’s popularity at all despite the obvious left-wing undertones for the games. I can also cite Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where they made it far too clear that Caesar was meant to be a Che Guevara expy, and even had several demonizations of businesses. Effective propaganda tries to be subtle, at least as subtle as possible. How do you THINK Goebbels managed to succeed in doing propaganda? He certainly didn’t do it by comparing Jews to rats. In fact, when they tried exactly that due to Hitler’s attempts at promoting anti-Semitism in Nazi propaganda films, it backfired horribly.

Grey Jedi might be fine, but I’m still not sure about The Last Jedi, especially after the problems posed by The Force Awakens. Rian Johston did indicate that the film’s plot will be weird, but I’m not sure whether that’s an actual good thing.

Also, Vader WAS injured during his duel with Luke (or have you forgotten that at one point in the duel, Luke managed actually cut Vader in the arm right before severing Luke’s saber arm?), and he also WAS using long broad sword strokes specifically designed to be countered in The Empire Strikes Back. Last I checked, Vader won that duel.

Mary Sues and Marty Stus aren’t really hated, they’re whined about. People love to complain. And when it comes to Maries (because really there’s hardly ever any complaining about Marties) the biggest source of complaints is the men rights goobs who just don’t like it when a woman plays something other than a damsel in distress. I don’t know why, I like female action stars, I like taught women flinging themselves around the screen in tight/tattered clothes, but apparently some people find that challenging to their manhood.

The fact of the matter is most American action heroes have no flaws and no defeats. That’s how we like them. We want shallow movies filled with morally simple heroes facing just enough challenge for us to pretend the end is in doubt, only for them to easily win in the end. Pretty much the only thing American movies audiences like more than shallow movies is COMPLAINING about how much American movie audiences like shallow movies. That’s why these movies make hundreds of millions of dollars while everybody claims to hate them. Don’t listen to the voices, listen to the dollars, we LOVE those movies.

Rey gets out of prison because Ren is an idiot. I’m sure Padmes decoy could fly a ship. Again, in SW ships are cars. Everybody in a Bond movie can drive, everybody in an SW movie can fly a ship.

Propaganda doesn’t work when it’s subtle. You can’t actually get the masses to hate a group unless you actually tell them to hate that group. All the “stand in” and “intendeds” in the world accomplish nothing if you’re the only one that knows about it. And Geobbels propaganda worked because he DID compare Jews to rats. They came right out and directly, no equivocation, no subtlety, blamed Jews for everything. That’s effective propaganda. The whole “maybe Ceasar is really Geuvara” (which honestly I laughed at when I read that, it’s just stupid, yeah Ceasar was in the jungle, at that point the parallels end since the humans weren’t really in charge anymore, there were more apes, and the apes were living a more comfortable life). And anybody playing Metal Gear for political messages is... well they aren’t anything, because they don’t exist.

I never said Vader wasn’t injured, because I never talked about the Empire duel. We were talking about the trench battle in 4 when Han shot Vader’s ship. By the time we get Empire Luke’s actually got some training. And while Vader technically won the duel in that he was less injured, Luke didn’t join him and got away. So at best that one’s a draw, though I can make the case Vader lost in the long run.

Maybe Luke is that, but it’s definitely not deniable that Rey is even MORE of that since there was literally no logical reason for her to even do a lot of the stuff she had done, since she wasn’t even AWARE of the Force beforehand (and for the record, no, starships are NOTHING like Cars. If anything, they’re closer to fighter jets, transport planes and/or naval vessels. The closest Star Wars has to actual cars in terms of role are land/air speeders).

As far as female action heroes, I have little problem with female action heroes as long as they actually HAVE a fairly logical/plausible reason for pulling off the things they do (in fact, two of my favorite characters, for lack of a better term, are Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Misty from Pokémon, two girls who happen to be badasses. I guess Samus Aran also counts). I wouldn’t like it if guys pulled off implausible things for no real reason either.

As far as complaints, the complaints should have been proportionate to the dollars (ie, the higher the complaints the lower the box office turnout/success).

As far as propaganda, actually, that’s NOT how propaganda works except under the most shallow aspects, since the entire POINT of propaganda is to use deception. If the propaganda bluntly tells you to hate or love a group, you do a bad job. Hitler found that out the hard way when he meddled with the development of The Eternal Jew where he explicitly compared the Jews to Rats in the most blatant manner, which resulted in it being made into a box office bomb. TVTropes can elaborate on this bit here:

“The Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (”The Eternal Jew”) was envisioned by Joseph Goebbels as an understated and subtle (well, by Nazi propaganda standards) demonstrations of the “evils” of Jewry. Goebbels believed that the best propaganda was primarily entertainment and not obviously propaganda. Hitler disagreed and demanded more polemical material, including laughably crude (even for Nazis) comparisons of Jews to rats. It was a box-office flop, and some viewers fainted at the crudity. Unfortunately, Goebbels would get his way with the much more effective and successful Jud Suss.”

And for the record, even Khrushchev made it pretty clear that they need to rely on deception regarding propaganda if they are to sell their message. I believe he mentioned that if they tried to blatantly tell people to become Communists, they’ll reject it, but if they do it incrementally enough, America will eventually wake up to find out they are Communists.

Peace Walker made the Che love completely obvious, BTW, and if anything, they hid that Che was a monster, as you can see and hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYtK3d2ydk Completely left out the fact that, for example, he had been one of the major reasons why the Cuban Missile Crisis got as bad as it did. And we players are forced to accept it whether we liked it or not, especially when Kojima also hid that little tidbit during development for the game and did not reveal it until AFTER the game was released and we bought it. The game version of “you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”, in other words.

Of COURSE she was aware of the Force, let’s not be stupid here. Everybody knows about the Force in the New Republic era, it’s not like the Empire era when it was a crushed religion. Luke had tried to spawn a new Jedi Academy, the Force was not some big secret. For the record it doesn’t matter if cars are like starships, in the SW universe every single person knows how to fly ships, it’s established. Nobody has ever had to beg off any task because they can’t fly, it is a star-faring universe that has been a star-faring universe for THOUSANDS (really, the Republic is old) of year where everybody has “fly small craft” as a basic survival skill. That’s just a simple fact of said fictional universe, acting surprised that some adult character can is silly.

I don’t care if they’re plausible. The fact of the matter is 99% of everything action heroes do is not logical or plausible regardless of gender. How many times have we seen action heroes get shot and just keep going? It’s just part of the genre. My favorite is when they take a shoulder shot and then say they’re OK because it went through; DUDE a shot that goes clean through your should is breaking at least one probably 2 bones, you don’t get to just stick a bandage on it and keep going. Implausible things for no reason is what action movies are all about, without them they’d be boring as we’d have to have a “2 months later” tag show up on the screen after every car accident.

And there you show exactly what I’m talking about. The higher the dollars the higher the complaints. Because that’s what we love to do. We go see a movie, then we bitch about it. Nobody complains about movies they didn’t see.

Sorry but you’ve got the whole propaganda thing bassakwards. Really I go back to the beginning of that topic (which will also be the end because it’s stupid to talk about it): did you think the Rebels were the VC BEFORE seeing Lucas talk about it? If the answer is no, which we both know it is, you just admitted that there is ZERO propaganda value in the movie. Same with all your other examples, if you can’t tell that’s what they’re referring to based 100% EXCLUSIVELY on what’s IN THE STORY it’s not effective propaganda. And because of that every single example you came up with, and every one you ever will come up with, was bad propaganda. That topic is closed, I won’t be reading or typing more on it.

With Disney Star Wars is no longer. It’s just pop culture sci-fi pandering to as many genders and victim groups as can be fit into two hours of film.

That could explain why nobody’s heard from him in thirty years ...

Rey was a person who had to scavenge just to survive, often with a very small paycheck, and she is constantly waiting for her parents to return after they ditched her. She is actually VERY unlikely to even KNOW how to fly a starship. A speeder? Sure, but not a starship. And maybe I should remind you that Luke apparently wasn’t even familiar with how interstellar travel worked considering Han Solo had to explain several things about the concept to him in Episode 4.

And for the record, I hate complaints, and in fact, I get annoyed when I actually FIND issues with a film, I expect them to actually meet a high standard, and get genuinely angry both when they don’t and that I even feel anger. Feeling angry is not something I enjoy at all, and I also dislike it when I see others get angry as well.

For the record, I didn’t even know about Che Guevara until Peace Walker mentioned him, and when I did hear of him from the game, I actually THOUGHT he was an okay person. It wasn’t until I read the Politically Incorrect Guide that I realized, no, he was a monster, and I had been lied to by the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima. So no, propaganda is in fact closer to what I said it is rather than what you said it is (if anything, you’re the one who got it backwards). Ion Mihai Pacepa even makes clear that propaganda relies on deception, and he’d know, he worked in the Disinformation industry before defecting from the Soviet Union, which involved making propaganda for the masses. And what they said about Che is EXACTLY the same kind of stuff you would expect to hear in public education and even private universities.

In the SW universe EVERYBODY CAN FLY A SHIP. PERIOD. It’s just part of the universe. Not one single character has ever declared they don’t know how to fly ships. Been that way for 40 years, get over it already.

Luke understood interstellar travel just fine, Han was just telling him to stop whining about them not getting away fast. It wasn’t explaining, it was “STFU”.

Once again we’ll go to the difference between actions and words. You SAY you don’t like to complain, but here you are. ALL films have issues. If you get genuinely angry at every film that has issues you get genuinely angry at every film you watch. If that’s the case and you still watch films you have proven you actually enjoy getting angry.

“In the SW universe EVERYBODY CAN FLY A SHIP. PERIOD. It’s just part of the universe. Not one single character has ever declared they don’t know how to fly ships. Been that way for 40 years, get over it already.”

If that were true, Luke would not need Han to even tell him how to fly a ship or use a Hyperdrive, especially when Han made it VERY clear when he said that hyperdrive usage is nothing like crop-dusting and that you need precise calculations.

And as far as my complaining, actually, I DON’T like complaining, it makes me sick, and in fact, I only watched the full saga up to Episode Six a couple weeks back after a period of several YEARS. And in case you’ve forgotten, I had to live with Star Wars since I was a kid, so it’s not actually easy to just walk away from it. And believe me, if I had the ability, I’d smash everything relating to Star Wars and outright murder the guys who made the series with a single thought, warp reality to ensure that franchise no longer exists, heck, blow up the entire planet just to ENSURE everything wrong is done away with, THAT’S how badly I feel about any flaws I have, and I’m pretty much restrained by the 10 commandments preventing me fro going to those extremes.

And for the record, if Luke actually knew how to fly a ship, why didn’t he just leave Tatooine as soon as he could. It shouldn’t be hard for him to, say, take his Skyhopper and fly away from Tatooine. And why would Luke pressure him to go faster if he knew about hyperspace and its functions? And do I really have to remind you that his family most likely never even set foot outside Tatooine? Luke had to be delayed several years from joining the Imperial Academy to “take care of the harvest” (which is even implied shortly afterward to be an excuse by his uncle to refuse his request), and based on how unhappy he was at this yet grudgingly complying, it’s pretty clear he’s literally unable to leave Tatooine, meaning he most likely doesn’t know about hyperspace or the intricacies of flying starships (if he did, he would have left by that point).

*And believe me, if I had the ability, I’d smash everything relating to Star Wars and outright murder the guys who made the series with a single thought, warp reality to ensure that franchise no longer exists, heck, blow up the entire planet just to ENSURE everything wrong is done away with, THAT’S how badly I feel about any flaws I see, even those within myself, and I’m pretty much restrained by the 10 commandments preventing me fro going to those extremes.

You can’t have it both ways. If Luke needed Han to explain space travel to him then his piloting an X-Wing is way more Marty than Rey’s mediocre Falcon flying. Take you pick. Meanwhile, out here in reality, as I already posted but you didn’t bother to read: HAN DID NOT EXPLAIN SPACE TRAVEL TO LUKE. He was telling Luke to stop whining that they hadn’t gotten away yet.

If complaining makes you sick you must have been in the bathroom for 2 days now. You demonstrably LOVE to complain. Because that’s what you’ve been doing. All your hyperbole is proved to be a lie by the fact that here you complaining and complaining and complaining and complaining. If you didn’t love it, you’d just stop.

Really? That’s like the stupidest possible question, especially for somebody that claims to have paid attention to all the “incidental” dialog. Luke hadn’t left yet because his uncle was killing him with family obligation. Also there’s that whole gap between being able to fly a ship and being able to GET a ship. Luke pressured him to go faster because they were taking fire and it was go faster or get killed.

“You can’t have it both ways. If Luke needed Han to explain space travel to him then his piloting an X-Wing is way more Marty than Rey’s mediocre Falcon flying. Take you pick. Meanwhile, out here in reality, as I already posted but you didn’t bother to read: HAN DID NOT EXPLAIN SPACE TRAVEL TO LUKE. He was telling Luke to stop whining that they hadn’t gotten away yet.”

Fine, then, he’s a Marty Stu. Happy? And I DID read, and last I checked, he still told him that hyperdrives aren’t like crop-dusting, not say “STFU” or even a simple “Shut up.”

“If complaining makes you sick you must have been in the bathroom for 2 days now. You demonstrably LOVE to complain. Because that’s what you’ve been doing. All your hyperbole is proved to be a lie by the fact that here you complaining and complaining and complaining and complaining. If you didn’t love it, you’d just stop.”

No, actually, I’m being honest. I really do hate complaints, whether by me, or by anyone else. If I see an argument on TV, I actually get tense and actually at times say out loud that they should stop. If I can’t even handle arguments being done on TV, I certainly can’t handle it in real life (in fact, when my parents argued, I even requested that they get a divorce if they’re going to argue, which, BTW, they didn’t, and when Dad was yelling into the phone at one point, I used my getting fries as an excuse to get away. I even nearly ran away from home when mom started yelling due to stress.). My parents can even confirm all of that, as they witnessed those actions. And for the record, doing that kind of stuff all the time =/= loving it. Most kids go to school all the time. Last I checked, most kids HATED going to school. And I’ve also witnessed a few teachers who actually HATED teaching and more than made clear that they hated it, more than a few times, one even declaring openly that he’d rather be at an OWS Atlanta rally than proctoring exams. Just because you might love to complain doesn’t mean everyone does.

And yes, I am aware that Luke is bound by his aunt and uncle and probably can’t afford a ship, but on the other hand, he DOES have that T-45 Skyhopper.

Never mind, the T-15 Skyhopper doesn’t work in space, I’ll concede the point there.

Also, I don’t use hyperbole. I try to be as honest and accurate as possible, so, yes, I actually DO mean I would destroy everything, no hyperbole, just to get rid of all bad things, at least, I would if the 10 commandments didn’t constrain me.

I might as well add, regarding your comment about propaganda, that it was Joseph Goebbels who said, and I quote, “A lie told often enough would become truth.” And bear in mind, Goebbels was the head of the propaganda department of Nazi Germany, meaning he KNEW a key ingredient to propaganda is outright lying to people.