[SuperMatt18]

Another long post coming...can you tell I’ve watched about 10 hours of Star Wars this eeek and it’s all that’s in the back of my mind.

So after watching this movie and The Last Jedi again prior to it I realized that there were two takeaways that a lot of people (myself included) had coming out of TLJ, that were actually meant to be moral questions for our lead characters but since Rian tried to be a little cute about it, I don’t think it really hit home with people that it wasn’t supposed to be the take away but something that was overcome.

1) Kill The Past

Adam Driver had a strong scene where he try’s to convince Rey to join him and going through it he talks about “Killing the past, the Jedi, Sith, first order, rebellion, all of it”. And due to the tone of the movie I think a lot of people took away that Rian wanted to do this to the Star Wars franchise.

Luke has the similar arc in this movie. Stating that the Jedi and the force must die for the good of people. But in the end he actually realized that he must embrace the Jedi way, confront his fear, and try to atone for his past mistakes by confronting Kylo and helping Rey.

But really the result of that movie was against this theme. Rey still refuses to join him, Luke redeems himself and embraces being a Jedi again, confronts his past, and battles Kylo, and in the end Rey steals the Jedi Books to keep the way of the Jedi alive and Luke becomes one with the force as a Jedi force ghost.

Kylo wanted to forget the past and kill it, but in the end Kylo didn’t convince Rey to join him, Luke was at peace with being a Jedi, and the Jedi lived through Rey.

The past was not killed but embraced, and I don’t think the “want” of killing the past was meant to be theme of the movie, but was something that needed to be overcome.

2. The grey area between good and evil

This part was essential to Finn’s plot but again was not necessarily completed in a clear way by Rian. DJ introduced this thought to Finn, and says that it’s not as clear as good and evil and that there is grey in the universe. You can see that Finn is struggling with this thought, as a guy that abandoned the first order to fight for what he thought was “good”. During the scene it looks like DJ might be right as he kind of gets away scot free, but in the end Finn also rejects this moral question proposed to him. He realizes that he is fighting on the right side with the rebellion, and he enforces that he feels this is right though his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the rebellion. His allegiances were challenged and he landed on the side of the rebellion.

These two plot points were what a lot of the media and critics attached to “Rian taking Star Wars in a new direction” but In retrospect I don’t think that was the intention of the movie. They were meant to be used as plot tools to develop the characters, and as moral questions for the characters to overcome, and in both situations by the end of the movie the main characters had conquered and overcome those internal questions.

I just think that since the plot of the movie moved so slow at the start that when these questions were answered it was potentially a bit rushed, so it felt like they were the key themes of the movie since they were focused on more than the characters answer to these questions. So in the end it wasn’t very clear and people (as mentioned myself included) maybe missed the true intention of the movie.

I think it’s why when I watched the two movies (TLJ and TROS) in pretty close succession it stood out more because those themes and how the characters pushed back on them become more clear in TROS.