Ever since Luke disappeared, people have been looking for him…he was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, turned against him. Destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible. He just walked away from everything…people that knew him best think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.

–Han Solo, The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens ended with Rey flying the Falcon, with Chewbacca and R2-D2, to a distant and lost planet where apparently the Jedi Order first began, on a rocky island in a wide ocean. Here she finds Luke Skywalker, who has disappeared. Rey approaches him and offers him a lightsaber–his lightsaber. His original lightsaber, the one that his father carried when he turned to the Dark Side, the one that Obi Wan Kenobi recovered after defeating Vader on Mustafar, the one with which Luke first fought Darth Vader before losing his hand and seeing that lightsaber plummeting down the central shaft of Cloud City.

In The Last Jedi, we continue this exact moment. Luke takes the lightsaber, looks at it, looks at Rey, looks at the lightsaber again. It’s his new “Hero’s Journey,” his new call-to-adventure–and he immediately rejects it. He tosses the lightsaber over his shoulder and walks away. Luke has no intention of returning to the fight. He tells Rey that he has come here to die. He really did give up on everything. He has come to Ahch-To, the first Jedi planet, to bring it all full circle. When he dies, the Jedi will have begun and ended in the same place. Luke didn’t come to the “first Jedi temple” to find some special wisdom or motivation. He really is giving up.

I am not really a big fan of this notion in itself. The Luke Skywalker who refused to give up on the idea of some small bit of goodness still flickering in the heart Darth Vader, his father and the most terrifying Sith Lord of all? That Luke Skywalker? And having the failed Jedi student be none other than Han and Leia’s son? No, I am not a big fan of that development. It doesn’t resonate with me. But Rian Johnson’s script for TLJ treats the idea with respect and logic, which I appreciate. It’s an old archetype in itself, the tired and weary onetime hero who has to drag himself out of his final, bitter retirement for one more attempt at glory. Decades after Ben Kenobi looked Luke in the eye and said “You must come with me to Alderaan,” along comes Rey to call Luke Skywalker to adventure again.

The problem I have–which Rian Johnson attempts to address, with varying results–is that we’ve seen Luke’s heroism before. We’ve seen him at his heights, and we’ve seen him when he’s already hit rock bottom and been in the pit of despair. We’ve seen him triumph, and yet here he is, utterly defeated. But we have seen nothing of his defeat. We haven’t seen him lose, we haven’t seen his failure. As deftly as Johnson handles Luke’s version of the Reluctant Hero and Mentor, he can’t do it total justice because the preceding film hasn’t done the heavy lifting that it needed to do to justify this story. Johnson tries his best with some flashbacks and a nod to Rashomon, but I am still left wondering the thing I wonder so many times in this sequel trilogy: “How can this be the way it all turned out?”

It’s hard to really get invested in a story when I don’t buy its premise in the first place.

So Luke has come to Ahch To to die. Fine…but is he sick? Has he become “old and weak,” like Yoda was? Or is he planning to live however many years it takes in seclusion on this island? And if he has come to die, then what of the “sacred Jedi texts”? Does he plan to burn them at some point and he just hasn’t got around to it? Or does he plan to die and just leave them there on the shelf? Eventually they’d get found again. Maybe he has those weird caretaker beings sworn to the task of destroying the texts if and when he dies.

As near as I can figure, Luke is trying to break the cycle. His father fell to the Dark Side, and his nephew has as well. He is weary of the whole Light Side/Dark Side dichotomy and the endless yin-and-yang of Jedi-and-Sith. He has come to resent the idea that the Jedi and the Sith hold the only claims to be able to speak for the Force, which penetrates all living beings in the universe. In an interesting moment, Luke openly acknowledges the events of the Prequel Trilogy (how that must have rankled some fans), noting that the Jedi at the height of their power still failed to notice the rise of Darth Sidious in time to keep him from utterly destroying them. He gets this wrong, of course (the Jedi of the Prequel era were not at the height of their powers; far from it, actually). But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Luke is sick of the cycle of Light-to-Dark-to-Light again. He wants a new paradigm for relating to the Force, and in the absence of that, he’s content to let the old paradigm die.

The only way to win the game, for Luke, is not to play.

Luke’s story in TLJ isn’t just a second Hero’s Journey; it’s a redemption story. Luke blames himself for Ben Solo’s fall to the Dark Side (more on that whole story, which is one of my least favorite aspects of these new films, in a later post). It takes an appearance by Yoda to make Luke realize that he has a chance for his own redemption, and it is not by somehow redeeming Kylo Ren. Instead his task is to truly serve as a Master for Rey. She is already tremendously powerful, beyond even Luke’s abilities. Yoda takes Luke to task for not actually passing on what he has learned, and for being stuck himself in the very paradigm that he is trying to move beyond. Yoda acknowledges that the old ways of Jedi-dom should probably end, but he also points out that this doesn’t mean ending the entire thing, forever. He also makes one of the film’s wisest points in one of its finest moments when he says to Luke: “We are what they move beyond. That is the burden of all true masters.”

So, in light of all this, what should we make of Luke’s final actions? Are they pointless? All he really does is buy time for the handful of surviving Rebels to escape. But he has a much-needed confrontation with Kylo Ren, and thus he confronts his own past. There is a peaceful kind of determination about him in these moments, and even a bit of cockyness in the wonderful moment when he flicks an imaginary bit of dust from his shoulder. He is by design driving Kylo Ren to a distracted rage, and he leaves his former student with the bitter taste of a victory that was not a victory at all. The Jedi will endure after all, as will the Rebellion. And all this from Luke walking out with a laser sword to face down the entire First Order.

Luke Skywalker’s journey in TLJ is a very layered one. He has been a Campbellian hero before, and now he is the Campbellian mentor figure. But he is also still a hero, and he must walk his own path even as he helps Rey embark upon hers. He has to pass away in this film, because Rey’s final steps must be taken alone. Luke completes his job on Ahch To, sending a copy of himself to face Kylo Ren; then, the job done, he sees the binary sunset of his youth one last time as he goes into the Force and as the Force welcomes him home. He goes, as Rey tells us, with “peace and purpose.”

Luke’s path has always been unique. He was the Jedi who shouldn’t have been, the Jedi who arose outside all the old traditions and structures of the Jedi Order, the one who mostly had to figure it all out on his own. Even at the end, when he is planning to the the Jedi die with him, he does not bow to Jedi orthodoxy; it turns out that he has never read those “sacred Jedi texts,” and indeed he has cut himself off from the Force. But when he returns, when he lets the Force back in, he does so spectacularly, projecting a physical copy of himself across the stars. (And he is physically there, at least partly. He embraces Leia and puts the dice in her hand. Kylo Ren picks them up…before they, like Luke, disappear.) The film does suggest that maybe it’s the sheer effort of this that has led Luke to die, and maybe that’s a part of it. But it’s probably also partly that he knows that his work is done and that he can let go.

Perhaps it’s both.

So, with TLJ, the “Adventures of Luke Skywalker” come to their end. Only two Skywalkers remain, and one will sadly have to die off screen before the next episode begins. But meantime…what of Leia Organa, the last of the original trilogy heroes still alive when TLJ ends?

More on her in Part 3, “We fought to the end.”

So here we are, more than six months after the release of STAR WARS EPISODE VIII: THE LAST JEDI, and I’m only just now working out how I feel about it. I suppose this is is how it’s going to be with me and Star Wars as it moves forward in its post-Lucasian era. I expect that I will feel a bit conflicted about every successive movie that comes out. My feelings on THE FORCE AWAKENS took a long time to crystalize, until I generally settled on the view that it is two-thirds of a great movie followed by one-third of a terrible one. ROGUE ONE I liked considerably more, especially on the rewatch when its fine qualities stood out even more and its minor flaws receded somewhat (still, my only real objection that that film lies in its final two minutes).

Leading up to TLJ, I was in a strange place. I was looking forward to the film because I liked the new characters established in TFA, even if I didn’t care for a lot of the writing behind them thus far. I knew that we’d finally get to see Luke Skywalker again, and I expected some very emotional stuff involving Princess and General Leia Organa, made doubly poignant by the awful fact of Carrie Fisher’s passing after she completed filming. Other than that I genuinely had no expectations regarding the movie. As the TLJ release neared, a week or two out I suddenly realized that I knew less about this movie than I had about any Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. I went into TLJ knowing almost nothing about the story, which was a really interesting sensation. All I knew, literally all I knew, was what I saw in the teasers and trailers.

TLJ makes a lot of interesting choices. Some of its developments are clearly telegraphed, but in such a way as to conceal the telegraphing. Other times, Rian Johnson–our writer and director–seems to be telegraphing things, only to have them never come. Surely I can’t be the only one who, catching that throwaway glimpse of Luke’s X-wing submerged in the Ahch-To sea, expected a scene later when he would Force-raise it from the water, easily and effortlessly, just as Yoda once did for an unbelieving younger Luke. That didn’t happen. The film does contain call-backs to The Empire Strikes Back, but not that one. (In fact, TLJ calls back to nearly every episode thus far.)

For the first time we have a Star Wars film that literally picks up where the last one left off, an interesting nod to one of George Lucas’s most famous influences, the movie serials of his youth. We have a Star Wars film that points out gray areas in the established moral fabric of the Star Wars universe, and we have one of the most narrowly-focused Star Wars films yet. For a film with such an initially epic feel, what results is the most intimate Star Wars film ever made.

TLJ also takes what is perhaps the most elegiac tone yet in a Star Wars film. Revenge of the Sith was pure dark tragedy, and there was quite a bit of darkness in The Empire Strikes Back, but with TLJ we get our truest farewell to the Star Wars of old. We’ve already bid farewell to Han Solo, and now it is time to do the same for Luke Skywalker (at least in the physical sense). All that remains at film’s end of the Star Wars of old (aside from C-3PO and R2-D2) is Leia Organa, and given what’s gone before in this trilogy already it’s hard to imagine that Episode IX would not have depicted her death as well had Carrie Fisher not awfully and finally settled that issue by dying in real life. I imagine Episode IX may well open with Leia’s funeral. The feeling is of a conclusive passing-of-the-torch, an ending to the story that George Lucas began. Whatever stories come now are totally new and of a piece with Star Wars but not a part of it. In some ways I left the theater after TLJ with the same feeling that I left Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country way back in 1991, after seeing those actors’ signatures animated on the screen.

Back in the early 1970s, George Lucas appended a subtitle to one of the early drafts of a script he was working on for “a little science fiction project”: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. But those adventures are now ended, and this final trilogy in the Skywalker family saga feels perfunctory in many ways. Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, is now the only remaining Skywalker blood relative (barring some sort of JJ Abrams bombshell that keeps the Skywalkers going, and honestly, we can’t really rule that possibility out, now can we?).

If George Lucas’s original concept was an epic space opera combined with a closely-focused family saga, then this trilogy, despite being cast as Episodes VII, VIII, and IX of that story, feel less like that tale than an appended three-film epilogue designed more to set the stage for other stories than to the completion of this one. I suspect this is borne of a desire to have it both ways: to please the existing fans, but also to start moving Star Wars into the post-Lucas and post-Skywalker era. This approach is not always successful and may explain a lot of what I see as the questionable creative choices of these films. The best of these post-Lucas films thus far, for me, has been Rogue One, but even that film was severely hampered by a closing two minutes of awful fan service after two hours of very compelling storytelling in which the word “Skywalker” was never uttered.

TLJ ultimately suffers from the issues that afflicted TFA, chief among them the saddening notion that after all the crap that our heroes endured over the course of the Original Trilogy–what Yoda once called “all for which they have fought and suffered”–their hard-earned victory amounts to nothing. Their lives basically go to shit anyway: the Republic never takes hold, a new Empire stirs, Han and Leia have a kid who turns to the Dark Side, Han gives up on everything and goes off to being a space loser, Luke gives up on everything and goes to hide on some planet with some really pretty islands, Leia finds herself right back leading a war effort.

Better, perhaps, if this story had been set not thirty years later but a hundred years later, when Luke, Han, and Leia are but beloved memories instead of the weary, haunted star warriors for whom we are less rooting in their elder adventures than to whom we are saying our slow farewells.

I’ve seen a bit of criticism of Star Wars in general (the films thus far, at any rate) for being too Skywalker-centric. People would speculate on Rey’s parentage, wondering if she was a “lost Skywalker,” and the retorts would come: “Why does EVERYBODY have to be related in Star Wars!!!” Well, everybody isn’t related, but more to the point, George Lucas’s saga was always a family saga. It was one piece of galactic history, told through the lens of a couple generations of this one family. This is nothing new. Dallas wasn’t about the city of Dallas; it was about the Ewing family. Dynasty was about the Carringtons, not Denver. Bonanza was about the Cartwrights, not the entire West.

TLJ is, for all intents and purposes, the real farewell to the Skywalker family saga. Luke and Han are gone, Leia must be, and it seems beyond the realm of possibility for Kylo Ren to carry on the line. Whatever comes of Star Wars now, it will almost certainly not be the story of the Skywalkers. Maybe you think that’s good, maybe not. I’m of mixed mind. I don’t mind the Skywalker story ending…but really, they do seem to have all gone out with more whimper than bang. The Skywalker saga is petering out. It’s a little as if the last season of Dallas follows the last Ewing, a guy named Pete whose last name isn’t even Ewing because of marriages, who has left the oil business, works in a call center in Fresno, and is also an asshole.

I am not saying that Star Wars absolutely has to be about Skywalkers forevermore, until the end of time. One of my favorite Star Wars stories ever is Claudia Gray’s amazing novel Lost Stars which follows two young people into adulthood as their lives carry them through the events of the Star Wars saga, with only a few tangential encounters with anything named Skywalker. I am not opposed to opening the Star Wars universe to new possibilities, new stories…but this approach, right now, does feel like a simultaneous offering to fans and a reboot, not unlike the also-Abrams Star Trek reboot of 2009. He couldn’t just start over from scratch with the characters and say “We’re starting over.” He had to make connections to the “real” Trek to keep the fans happy (jury’s out as to whether it worked), and now we have some of the same thing going on.

None of that is TLJ‘s fault, though–this movie had to start with the ending point left for it by its maddening predecessor. So, how did I really feel about TLJ? Indeed, it’s complicated. I don’t like where the film had to start, and I don’t like the baggage it was forced by the previous film to carry…but given those constraints, I actually did like the film a great deal. I may have even loved it, as unenthusiastic as I am about the general direction Star Wars seems to be taking right now.

Part 2: “It’s time for the Jedi to end.”

(BTW, one reason this review was so long in coming is that I wrote it out longhand first…and I kept writing…and writing…and writing. Seriously, look at this!