Mark Hamill’s nerd bona fides need no elaboration. He might be the only one left who’s competent to write a Star Wars movie. You doubt me? Check out what he said about the debacle that was Episode VII’s climax:
Hamill has a lot of thoughts on how Luke might have been reintroduced differently in The Force Awakens. He could have come in during Han Solo’s climactic scene with Kylo Ren, receiving some sort of Force-telepathy distress call from his sister, General Leia, but arriving too late to save Han from death. Or, perhaps, he might have materialized in the snowy forest of Starkiller Base, where Rey duels with Kylo. On his first read-through of the script, Hamill recalled, he got excited when the legendary lightsaber wiggled portentously in the snow. “The moment in the forest, when the saber rattles?” he said. “I go, ‘Oh, baby, here I come!’ And then it flies into her hands? I said, What the hell, she hasn’t even trained!”
In another interview, Hamill elaborated:
“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”
He is absolutely right. the relationship between Han, Luke, and Leia is the emotional core of the original Star Wars trilogy. The fact that we never get to see all three iconic characters on screen together was an unforced error that’s emblematic of TFA’s wretched screenwriting.
Since we’ve established that Hamill knows Star Wars better than the hacks entrusted with the franchise’s future, read his reaction to the script for Episode VIII and despair!
Likewise, after reading Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi, Hamill said, “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character.'”
I didn’t see Rogue One in the theater. I don’t plan to see The Last Jedi at all. I’ll probably read some reviews, though, because it’ll be interesting to find out if the rumored Gray Jedi BS devolves the series into full-blown moral relativism.
This stunning space opera carries you all over the known universe – and outside of it.
-Author Russell Newquist