Reader Requested: WDW Pro Responds to Rian Johnson’s Latest Last Jedi Defense

Alright, alright, you finally convinced me. I’ll respond to the latest Rian Johnson defense of The Last Jedi.

We were not even going to dignify a recent interview with Rian Johnson with an article covering it. Johnson is still out there defending The Last Jedi and its treatment of Luke Skywalker; perhaps it is the longest defense of a movie in cinema history. Three decades from now, Rian is going to be defending the movie over his lime Jello at Sunnybrook Retirement Center.

So we’ve moved on. Starting with The Last Jedi, Star Wars has been on a clear decline. We’ve documented the decline in the box office, the lack of movies, the catastrophic merchandise sales, and the poor Disney+ ratings for everything not called The Mandalorian. All of this started with The Last Jedi, a movie so bad for the franchise that it permanently divided the fanbase into two warring factions, one of which has mostly just stopped watching now.

But we’ve covered all that ad nauseum. Still, Rian came out with his latest defense, and this time we’re getting requests in private messages to address it. Never one to shy away from telling the truth, here is the statement from the mostly-gone director, and I’ll follow it up with a short response:

I mean… It was also ultimately… To the point where I… I’m choosing my words carefully, not to be diplomatic, but I don’t want to frame Mark’s experience of this through my lens because there’s no possible way I can ever put myself in the shoes of Mark, or Carrie [Fisher], having lived their entire lives being known as these characters. And what it’s like to play them first in their twenties, and then to come back and play them in these movies and have a script handed to you saying, ‘Well, it’s this now’… I can never fathom what that experience is like. It’s impossible.

If Mark Hamill is talking to me about Luke Skywalker, I’m gonna listen to him, and I gotta think about that and argue with him and go back and forth. And genuinely plumb the depths of my soul and what I wrote and figure out if this seems right. Also, though, remembering that, obviously, he created the character on screen, but he’s Mark Hamill, he’s not literally Luke Skywalker.

Luke Skywalker lives as a creation on that screen. He’s a myth. And as such, he only really lives in the minds of people who listen to and in various ways believe that myth. And I know that was me. So, it’s complicated. But I mean, the short answer to your question is, it was f—–g terrifying.

— Rian Johnson to Empire

Listen, when Mark Hamill, who is clearly a raging partisan cray-cray online, is telling you that you’re going too far with a character, you’ve gone fifty miles too far. When Mark Hamill, who is waaay out there with his worldview, is telling you that Luke Skywalker as you’ve written him is not heroic or doing the right thing, you’ve missed the boat and the ocean.

Rian Johnson knows his legacy. There’s no coming back from it. He will forever be the man who broke Star Wars. He’s unlucky in that he was coupled with a Story Group at Lucasfilm that aided him in doing so and he’s unlucky that Lucasfilm was so inept that they couldn’t undo what he had done. But because of those two strokes of unluckiness, he’s the guy who dropped the franchise’s popularity by at least half. And instead of making excuse after excuse, why not just own it? It’s never going to go away. You turned Luke Skywalker from an archetypal hero who rescues his father from his sins by believing good still lies within… into a character who dreams of murdering his own innocent nephew.

There is a point when you have to recognize that you’re not George Lucas. You’re not even close to George Lucas on a bad day. And though George Lucas lost his luster as he became older, he never broke his world. You did. You were so challenged, along with all the people around you, to create something special that you forgot you were playing with something already more special than anything you would ever generate on your own. It was worth care and respect, and you pooped all over it. That’s not avant garde or special… it’s just gross.

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