FINALLY saw Force Awakens a second time today. I understood the film much better this time, there's subtle things that mean a lot I missed the first time around. I'm in the camp who thinks the movie is great BTW. I disagree with the complaints about the Starkiller being another Death Star plot because that's not what the film is about. Once the First Order destroys the New Republic homeworlds their goals for the Starkiller are done. They don't really need it anymore. The film is really about Rey and Kylo, not the Starkiller.
Anyway two things I wanted to bring up are 1) that the title crawl in Force Awakens calls Luke the last Jedi. We had the Episode 8 subtitle all this time. That makes it much less meaningful IMO. I think The Last Jedi subtitle simply means we'll focus more on Luke this time. And 2) Leia says she sent her son to Luke to be trained after things went bad between them. Now I'm REALLY wondering if Luke trained Leia in the Force, and she tried to train her son to use the Force, then sent him to Luke after SHE failed. I really hope there's some truth to that because I always wanted Luke to pass on what he learned about the ways of the Force to Leia, as Yoda's "pass on what you have learned" request implies.
I'm MUCH more okay with Leia just being a rebel leader instead of a Force user if it's because of her failure to train her son in the ways of the Force. I really felt like I was seeing some serious personal guilt in her performance when I watched it this time, especially in her conversation with Han. I can totally imagine her putting her interest in the Force aside to focus on being a general if she went through all that. It would be turning back to doing what she knows- something both she and Han admit to doing in this film. I can see the two of them turning back to their former lives after feeling like they'd failed with their son, especially since they probably don't understand the Force as well as Luke does.
The other thing I like about this idea, is that it means Luke WASN'T bad at training Jedis. He probably trained his pupils just fine, but couldn't bring Ben Solo back to the good side and maybe it was Ben Solo and his forces that wiped out Luke's other pupils. Kylo did say he wanted to finish what Vader started, and as Obi-Wan said, Vader helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi.
Edited by Cukeman, 07 July 2017 - 05:33 AM.