It’s evening, my wife is not at home and the kids are asleep, time for another post about Star Wars Episode 8. In the last post, I’ve covered the movie until Rey’s first contact with Luke and will continue from there as in the last posts, although Matthias told me Luke’s fall to his knees was a little bit over the top, but hey… I’m not the one who called Star Wars a space opera 😉
Just to get you back into the topic, here the list of plot points I will discuss today:
4. […] / Luke does not want to see them
5. Poe is demoted / TIE fighters attack the Resistance’s fleet / Leia falls unconscious after playing Mary Poppins
6. Luke sort of agrees to train Rey / […]
The last thing I’ve discussed in the last post was Luke disappearing after Rey handed him the lightsaber. The rest of Rey’s arrival at Ahch-To is actually quite okay-ish. Luke hides in his hut and says all those „Go away!“ things, interrupted by Chewbacca who unhinges the door and shouts at Luke in Shyriiwook. As always, no one understands what he says, but it does not sound too nice. Then Luke asks where Han is and it is somehow revealed that he has disconnected himself from the force, because otherwise he would’ve known that Han is dead. Then more „Go away!“ talk. If one accepts that Luke has been broken by his loss of Ben Solo to the dark side, that’s pretty much what you could expect.
Meanwhile at the Raddus, the Resistance’s main star cruiser: Poe is demoted by Leia for ignoring her orders to let the Dreadnought be. That’s right from my point of view, because rules are important, even in an organization like the Resistance. And Poe has simply broken those, therefore: demotion is okay. Shortly afterwards, the Raddus is attacked by a fleet of TIE fighters, which is sent from the star cruisers of the First Order, which arrived through hyper space. Apparently, the First Order can track ships in the hyper space, which is actually in line with previous material, as in Rogue One that technology is briefly mentioned. While the fleet of TIE fighters, which is led by Kylo Ren, causes heavy damage to the Raddus, Ren itself does no damage at all. During the whole scene, he is torn between serving the First Order, which is headed by Snoke who scoffed him, and sparing his mother’s life. Finally, he decides to cancel his attack, only to see another TIE fighter blowing up the whole bridge of the Raddus – with Leia on it. I remember sitting in the cinema and thinking „WTF have I just seen?!“, but, given Carrie Fisher’s death, it would have been comprehensible to let Leia go for good… but then LEIA GOES FULL MARY POPPINS! WHAT! THE! ACTUAL! FUCK!?
Unlike other scenes that make no sense, that was not even visually pleasing. I mean, I can accept that Leia shows her force powers at death’s door, after all she’s Anakin Skywalker’s daughter, but I did not know that there is a force power that keeps you from freezing to death and at the same time allows you to get rid of that annoying oxygen addiction. As far as I know, Leia was never trained in the canon material and therefore that outburst of force powers does not make sense. Not at all! And it does not only make no sense from that point of view, but the whole scene is meaningless. Let’s take it for granted that Leia can do that, so why is that never ever mentioned again in the movie? We see Poe and some other folks standing at a door’s glass window, watching her fly and falling unconscious, and then no one talks about that ever again. Since I own the special edition Blu-ray, I was able to verify that this is not even mentioned again in the cut scenes. So it seems that it was not even planned to make anything out of this. So, why even creating a scene like this, that leads to nowhere? The same effect could have been created with her falling unconscious directly when the bridge was attacked and just leaving out all that Mary Poppins stuff.
Parallel to all that, a dialogue is presented at the bridge of the First Order’s main cruiser which goes something like this:
Hux: What is the point of all this if we can’t blow up three tiny cruisers?
Whosoever: They are faster and lighter, Sir. They can’t lose us, but they can keep at a range where our cannons are not effective against their shields.
Hux; Well, keep up the barrage. Let’s at least remind them that we’re still here.
Whosoever: Very good sir.
Hux: They won’t last long, burning fuel like this. It’s just a matter of time.
First, as far as I remember, in vacuum you only need fuel to accelerate, but then it’s free floating forever unless you hit something. So, why should it be the case the the Resistance burns „fuel like this“? Second, if the cruisers of the Resistance are faster, then the distance between the Resistance and the First Order should increase. That whole set up is bullshit! Yeah, I know that I already wrote something about physics in one of my previous posts, but the more I think about it, the more it bugs me…
Before I think even more about physics, let’s go to Ahch-To, where Luke sneaks into the Millennium Falcon. He wanders around in the ship and finally meets R2-D2 who awaits him. R2-D2 shows Luke the old recording of Leia that we have known since Episode 4. That’s actually a great moment! After having seen that recording, Luke leaves the Falcon and goes to his hut, where Rey waits. He then tells her „Tomorrow at dawn. Three lessons. I will teach you the ways of the Jedi and why they need to end“. That’s okay, again, but actually I would have expected – or at least wished for – for a more dramatic turn of events. Either Luke sticks with his previous behavior or he changes it and tries to help Leia, whom he has seen in the video after all. But at this point, I don’t get how teaching Rey that three lessons (which turn out to be two lessons, because the third one was cut from the theatrical version of TLJ…), will help Leia… Maybe it’s just too late today to understand the workings of the force, so I’ll just end it here for today 😉