Okay. I think entirely too much about Star Wars and not enough about my investment portfolio but here it goes…
Statement: I wanted either more Luke in Episode VII or none at all. My reasoning is as follows: Either the movie should have featured Luke Skywalker as a main character or left him out entirely, referencing him only where they did in the first 99.9% of the movie. Why did they have to show Rey and Chewbacca getting to the planet to hand him the lightsaber at all? Why not cut it off (ha!) as a true cliffhanger à la Empire Strikes Back.
The last scene as I imagine it: They fly off into space on the Millennium Falcon saying, “We’ll find him, Leia, don’t you worry.” Just like at the end of ESB. Leave us wondering if the whole thing was worth it? Will they find Luke or not? Remember the sense of wonder at the end of ESB that the whole thing hung in a balance and that Han might be lost forever? They could have easily done that at the end of The Force Awakens.
Why do we have to be spoon-fed everything? If Abrams was going to just go ahead and replicate the OT for this movie, why did he not leave us in limbo as to what was happening in the next episode? Why did we need any closure on that issue? That was one of the cool things about Star Wars. At the end of ANH they showed Darth Vader getting away but we never knew where he landed or how he got back to the Empire. Heck, we didn’t even know if there even was any more of the damn Empire! That was the point. Remember in 1977 thinking that the entire Empire might have been on the Death Star and Luke had just completely destroyed it? Did the heroes really just save a galaxy far, far, away or did they just save the day? Who knows? All we know is that Luke blew up the Death Star and Darth Vader spun out of control into space.
And, of course the end of ESB was a cliffhanger. Everything bad happened to the characters in that one and they didn’t resolve any of it in the movie. The Rebel base was destroyed on Hoth. Han was frozen in carbonite and finally taken to this Jabba the Hutt gangster guy he’d been bitching about for two movies. The Rebellion was in tatters and Luke, well, that poor boy got his pride cut down and his hand cut off due to his own hubris. Oh, and that bad mofo controlling the galaxy? He’s your dad. And, the guys who you trusted most, they “forgot” to tell you.
I have no idea why we had to see Luke at the end of The Force Awakens. Maybe it was fan service. Maybe the studio told J.J. Abrams to put Hamill in there. I think it was a bad decision. There’s something to be said for tension, anxiety and mystery in story.
As a writer, I feel leaving him out of that blip at the end would have been more dramatic way to tell the tale than putting him in. Listen, it’s not like it’s the early 1970s and this whole “The Star Wars” movie might not be a big hit so Lucas had to give the first episode (err, Episode IV) somewhat of a closed ending.
We knew The Force Awakens was going to be a big hit. We knew that there were sequels already in the works and for the sake of every midichlorian in Anakin Skywalker’s bratty little body we were all going to go see every damn sequel no matter what! Even more so if we were left wondering if Luke was still alive. Was it a trap? Was it a trick? Now we know. Luke’s alive. He was waiting on that planet and Rey found him. Yay!
You made it to the end of my post. So here is where we answer the question of why Mark Hamill was in this movie.
The answer doesn’t come from me but from a discussion I had with a very smart person on LinkedIn (yes, we discussed Star Wars on LinkedIn!). You can read his comments here. Long story short: Marketing. The movie was made by Disney for a certain generation of people who have been trained to have a short attention span and demand instant gratification. Some of the character development and story that occurred over three movies in the original trilogy were sped up in this new episode. Even the slow (some would say painful) progress of Anakin Skywalker’s character in the prequels would not be tolerated.
Unfortunately, (and embarrassingly for me since I am a marketer) I did not see the forest for the trees. I did not see that Disney was positioning this movie as a marketing vehicle to sustain a multi-billion dollar industry for years to come and needed to quickly rope in the next generation. So they had to deliver the original cast members in this film from the get go. Smart but I really feel like they sacrificed some of the magic of the originals despite the fact that this movie practically mirrored elements from each one of the OT films.
