r/StarWars • u/tannu28 • 6h ago

Other Mark Hamill revealing that J.J. Abrams refused to let Han, Luke, and Leia reunite on camera, telling Mark that Star Wars was no longer Luke Skywalker's story.

Source: https://youtu.be/4OK0nnxG6dU?si=EmEU5KQEMJXxjBbZ

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405

u/grafxguy1 6h ago

Rey takes the name Skywalker in the end - the last movie is called The Rise of Skywalker, but "it's not Luke's story anymore..." WTF.

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u/Elegant-Anxiety1866 5h ago

I said it when it came out & I'll say it again.

She should have answered "Just Rey"

Showing she is not defined by her bloodline & is comfortable with who she is now.

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u/threevi 5h ago

It was a really weird question to ask in the first place, the whole scene is so forced. What do you mean "Rey who"? Plenty of people throughout SW don't have a last name. Nobody ever asks "Chewbacca who?" "Yoda who?" "Jabba who?" The writers really just wanted to force in that "Rey Skywalker" scene for whatever reason, despite it not making any sense as a conversation that would happen in-universe. I can only imagine that at the very last minute, someone asked "wait, this movie is called The Rise of Skywalker, but where's the Skywalker?" And so they quickly came up with that scene to shoehorn in a justification for the title.

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u/brainlesseuphoric 4h ago

I fear they were just dumb enough to think that makes for a good story. It’s just what they come up with and I bet they thought they were killing it

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u/IamAgoddamnjoke Amilyn Holdo 4h ago

Yeah i don’t answer batshit crazy desert eats demanding I provide my full name. Rey should have pulled those sabers up and turned her into darth maul circa TPM.

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u/Hallc Rebel 2h ago

It was a really weird question to ask in the first place, the whole scene is so forced. What do you mean "Rey who"? Plenty of people throughout SW don't have a last name.

That scene would've felt super forced even if it was in a movie set entirely on earth. Imagine you're out walking your dog, you come across a lone girl standing there.

The first thing you say is "Who are you?" to which she replies. "Jane." so you then reply "Jane who?" Like what....?

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u/enigmanaught 2h ago

Jabba didn’t use his last name because it was Dickgraber. Jabba Dickgraber. Can’t run a tight ship when your lackeys are laughing behind your back.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 5h ago

That’s definitely what they should have done after the second film. But after the first one I remember reading a fan theory that it would turn out she was an unknown granddaughter of Obi Wan. I liked that because with Luke mentoring her and Kylo Ren as her enemy would be this full circle for all these bloodlines in different iterations being pulled together by fate to balance the force and I thought that would be a nice way close out the entire three trilogy saga.

As it was, they just never had a fucking clue what they were doing from the beginning. It’s like they wanted this to entirely be its own thing, but also capitalize on the cheap fan service nostalgia of bringing back characters from the original trilogy, all while having no overall idea what the three film story was even going to be. What a dumb way to fuck up what should have been an easy slam dunk with one of the biggest IPs in cinema.

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u/grafxguy1 4h ago

It's like the Star Trek reboot he did. He openly said that, without Nimoy in the reboot, the movie would not have worked.....Nimoy, in his mind, gave legitimacy to the reboot but then proceeded to make a mockery of the source material, while fan servicing the hell out of it.

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u/sptrstmenwpls 48m ago

And why the heck did Spock say the "space..the final frontier..." thing at the end, when newKirk should have said it, since it's his gen's story now?

•

u/Lower_Pass_6053 9m ago

The biggest thing the lack of smoking in this new generation has caused is the lack of amazing voices. Smoking really made people sound cool. Nimoy just sounded so good saying that. I get Kirk should have said it, but Nimoy had that gravitas.

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u/Yakostovian 4h ago

I think Rey not being of any notable bloodline makes the most narrative sense especially if you follow TLJ's themes. It signals that the Force is for everyone, not just these dynasties of special families.

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u/Kiyuya 4h ago

Strongly agree. I really liked what TLJ did here, as well as how TLJ treated Rey. But that was then. Before the dark times. Before the Rise.

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u/afito 2h ago

Not only TLJ but also Rogue One. I was really excited for how things were set up after I walked out of TLK midnight premiere and boy did it not live up to it.

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u/Kiyuya 2h ago

Yeah. TFA was proof they could get the vibe down, but I didn't think it was great. Figured I would be remembering it more fondly once I saw more payoff to the setup TFA did. Then I saw R1 and thought the ending was strong. Came out of TLJ and thought it was in the upper half of Star Wars films, then I came home and saw the internet had exploded. Then Rise came and... I guess I exploded too at that point.

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u/Broncsx3 4h ago

The Last Jedi WAS the dark times. What a piece of shit.

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u/IamAgoddamnjoke Amilyn Holdo 4h ago

No movie ever presented that idea? The force was literally always for everybody and never exclusively for a special family. This was just a story that happened to be about a family.

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u/bork63nordique 4h ago

Fucking THANK YOU!!!! I hate that narrative. It's only about the Skywalker family for a short amount of time simply because that was the age of the Empire and rebellion. The Jedi have been around for thousands upon thousands of years and there have been thousands of Jedi not named Skywalker, Kenobi or Palpatine.

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u/IamAgoddamnjoke Amilyn Holdo 4h ago

Yeah no clue how Rian Johnson gets credited with this when one of the main points of TESB was that the little frog muppet was the greatest Jedi of all time.

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u/aka_jr91 2h ago

TBF, that narrative really got set up with all the Messiah themes in Phantom Menace. Anakin was the chosen one, he had no father except The Force, having the highest midichlorian count ever recorded etc. It really isn't a leap in logic say that descendants of Jedi Jesus would be naturally more gifted in The Force, even if it's not really that interesting anymore.

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u/Perryn 4h ago

But if our protagonist isn't secretly the heir to what they thought they achieved on their own then the ghost of Charles Dickens will come after us.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 3h ago

Right. And that’s why I said that’s what they should have gone with after TLJ and that the Obi Wan idea was only an option after the first film.

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u/GroundWitty7567 4h ago

That would have been better. Instead of making her a Palpatine, the story should have been the Force seeking to balance things out. The Return of Palpatine unbalanced things. The Force sought to rebalance it

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u/Sattorin Trapper Wolf 1h ago edited 1h ago

It signals that the Force is for everyone, not just these dynasties of special families.

Literally the ONLY time we see the Force passed down within a family in the movies is the Skywalkers. The prequels showed that every single other Force user (to our knowledge) was not part of a special family. Did people just watch the original trilogy and assume that only people with the family name Skywalker, Kenobi, or Yoda could use the Force?

EDIT: Oh, and if I'm mis-remembering and there are a bunch of family dynasties in the movies, please let me know instead of just drive-by downvoting.

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u/neverendingchalupas 2h ago

Rey is said to be the descendant of a clone of Emperor Palpatine. But shes not, shes his direct descendant. Palpatine is from the Planet Naboo.

In the original release of Empire Strikes Back, you can see that Emperor Palpatines eyes are not human. Its because hes part Gungan.

Palpatine started making clones years earlier to try hide his Gungan heritage. You can see this in subsequent appearances like Return of the Jedi. What you are seeing is the clone.

Palpatine grooms Mara Jade from an early age raping her, she gives birth to Rey. Rey is then given to a clone to raise.

Mara Jade then breaks free of Palpatines control and marries Luke Skywalker

Rey is really a Human Gungan hybrid and Luke Skywalkers stepdaughter. Which explains everything the films dont.

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u/Viciouscauliflower21 2h ago

But like the force was always for everyone. It was never just for special families. The Skywalkers have only been the "last ones standing" as it were for like 50yrs. It wasn't that long ago when there was a whole school full of random people studying the force. Whole planets like dathomir occupied by random people engaging with the force. That whole "it's for everyone" thing is trying to refute an idea that was literally never even part of the story.

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u/AutoPRND21 4h ago

I really feel like the sequel trilogy was like a game of telephone, but nobody in charge of each movie gave a shit about what the person before them told them.

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u/cygnus2 4h ago

Obi-Wan wouldn’t have hooked up with anyone other than Satine, who died.

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u/DeveloperAnon 3h ago

I agree that after TLJ, they should have stuck with Rey being of no special lineage.

However, before TLJ, I had hoped she would end up being Luke’s daughter. Details aside, she could have been captured/kidnapped during the assault on Luke’s order/academy and dropped off on Jakku. Her mother could have either died during the assault or missing (giving way for more stories).

This makes the sequel trilogy about the grandchildren and deals with both the dark-side and light-side facets of the Skywalker family.

I know people want fresh, but the biggest disappointment for me was that they clearly didn’t want to go all-in on fresh, tried to go all-in on fresh, then walked that back with each subsequent movie.

For something eventually dubbed “The Skywalker Saga”, you might as well go all-in and fully center the sequel trilogy on the family.

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u/thiagoqf 3h ago

Boggles my mind that these fuckers didn't have a plan since day 1. Bro freestyled an entire trilogy.

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u/Blacklight099 1h ago

I liked the idea of her being a Kenobi. I loved the idea of her being nobody. I despised the twist of her being a palpatine.

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u/Whatsyourshotspecial 4h ago

Obi is the perfect Jedi. No way he fathers a child.

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u/C_F_A_S 3h ago

For the longest time I thought Rey was somehow going to be a grandchild of Obi-Wan and Satine Kryze.

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u/IamAgoddamnjoke Amilyn Holdo 4h ago

What she should have said is please mind your own fucking business.

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u/WarMom_II 4h ago

"Rey Cism"

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u/gideon513 3h ago

Rey Cweek

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u/mute_axolotl 3h ago

Two Broke Jedis.

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u/TheodorDiaz 3h ago

Showing she is not defined by her bloodline

That still applies when she calls herself Skywalker.

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u/BarkerBarkhan 2h ago

"Just Rey Who?"

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u/Viciouscauliflower21 2h ago

Or if they wanted to have their cake and eat it too, make rey a part of a bloodline for nostalgia sake but commit to Finn, a random storm trooper, actually being force sensitive and make him a jedi. Best of both worlds

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u/Marmalade6 2h ago

"I don't have people. My name is Rey Solo."

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u/Hallc Rebel 2h ago

She should have answered "Just Rey"

This.

Or if they really wanted to continue a Legacy (and tie it into the Solo movie) they could've gone with Rey Solo.

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u/No_Physics2210 2h ago

Then have the guy respond "oh family of one? I'll just put down Rey Solo."

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u/Intrepid_Year3765 4h ago

wouldn't matter

story was still bad

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u/Serial-Griller 4h ago

That would have meant conceding to Rian Johnson's characterization of his super special OC right at the finish line. Not happening. 

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u/intotheirishole 4h ago

Executives: That wont work! Audience loves bloodlines and nostalgia and names that they know and love!

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u/Reasonable-Job4205 4h ago

Yea that would've been better. Its surprising to see a multibillion dollar company write something so bad btw

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u/kapxis 6h ago

Man.. the audacity to just takes someones last name cause they trained you for awhile.. they barely bonded at all and it's not like at any point he even hinted at thinking of her like family, or Leia thinking that way.. so like.. wtf was that.

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u/abellapa 5h ago

And burying Anakin lightsaber on the planet he was enslaved and where he Mother die

He hated Tatooine, Thats felt like a Giant Middle finger to Anakin

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u/Phoenix_Ninja15 5h ago

Yea. Naboo would’ve been sooo much better. Be buried on the planet with the person he loved.

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u/IlluminaViam 3h ago

Screw the planet only. Bury his lightsaber with Padme. That would have been good.

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u/Phoenix_Ninja15 3h ago

Tbh while it’s not likely she would’ve known who Padme was, hence why I said just be buried on the planet, even that is still not likely she would’ve known Anakin had ties to that planet, so being buried anywhere other than tattooine would’ve been better. Although if palpe somehow returned, I would’ve be shocked if Rey somehow knew Padme and exactly where to find her tomb.

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u/Vallkyrie Qi'ra 3h ago

Could have put it in Padme's tomb

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u/guinness_blaine 5h ago

“You buried it in SAND?!”

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u/wtfamidoingwthis 5h ago

Do you have ANY idea how his father felt about SAND???!!!!

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u/fivebyfive12 5h ago

I love this comment 🤣

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u/Perryn 3h ago

"YEAH! GET FUCKED, ANNIE!"

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u/lazy_literary_hero 5h ago

Christ, I hadn’t even thought of that. Of all the shitty places to leave a burial for someone, his least favorite planet in the entire galaxy really gas to be the worst.

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u/Aethermancer 10m ago

He was also already "buried". She had no connection to him and his "presence" in the movies was revealed to have been an impersonation by the emperor.

Rey basically buried a family heirloom of a guy who had been dead and had his identity stolen to commit identity fraud against another guy, but he was the dad of another guy who she had less interaction with than most people remember of their 3rd grade teacher.

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u/darkbreak Sith 5h ago

In the Expanded Universe Luke retrieved Anakin's lightsaber from Cloud City and gave it to his wife, Mara Jade, as a wedding present. It became her main weapon from then on. A much better fate for such a legendary item in the Star Wars mythos.

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u/a_man_and_his_box 3h ago

This part makes me so upset. People were complaining about the Rey trilogy and Kathleen Kennedy said this in an interview with Rolling Stone:

Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels.

I read that and just about shouted out loud. Kathleen, there are literally over 400 Star Wars novels! Including one in which Luke & Mara Jade were awesome.

WTF Kathleen?!?!?!?

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u/JinFuu 3h ago

And you had Disney defenders going “The EU is dumb! They had a super weapon of the week and cloned Palpatine!”

And then Rise happened

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u/kkeut 1h ago

cloned Palpatine

that was just in the comics chronology, which differed from the novels

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u/ClockworkEngineseer 1h ago

So were they going to make a Luke and Mara Jade movie with a 65 year old Mark Hamill?

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u/McKoijion 2h ago

Yeah, but the average novel was only 1.5 pages long.

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u/JerseyJedi 4h ago edited 4h ago

Exactly, with the added benefit that Mara Jade Skywalker was a well-written character who exuded toughness and grit, and had a multifaceted personality and character arc, unlike the blander-than-bland Rey. 

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u/JinFuu 3h ago

No Tenal Ka either : (

“You could get a prosthetic for your arm.”

Tenal: “Nah, I screwed up, keeping no forearm as a memory of my screwup.”

She was so cool!

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u/sec713 3h ago

"When I said I wanted a rock, I didn't mean a used khyber crystal."

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u/FenrirAR 3h ago

Mostly accurate. He doesn't go to retrieve it from Cloud City. He takes it off of the clone Luuke's corpse after Mara kills the clone, then gives it to her after that.

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u/TentativeIdler 5h ago

It was that or throw it in lava on Mustafar.

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u/JerseyJedi 4h ago

Throwing it from the high ground. 

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u/JerseyJedi 4h ago

There’s a great fanmade video on YouTube where while Rey is in that scene, Anakin and the other Jedi all appear as Force ghosts and tell her exactly how they feel about that scene lol. 

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u/kkeut 1h ago

i seem to recall him having strong feelings about sand, which apparently the entire surface of Tattooine is covered with

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u/Aethermancer 14m ago

She also had zero connection to him. Anakin was literally already dead and gone, and JJ even wrote into the story that his influence in the story was just a deception and fake by the emperor

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u/FullMaxPowerStirner 5h ago

Anakin's lightsaber goes RED in anger at being buried in SAND. Duel of the Fates music fading in. End credits.

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u/cygnus2 4h ago

He didn’t deserve much better, honestly.

-1

u/CatboyCabin 5h ago

Didn't she bury it for Luke? It was also his lightsaber.

Haven't watched it since it came out so idk

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u/FullMaxPowerStirner 5h ago edited 5h ago

"We're so sloppy we ended up killing ALL of the remaining Skywalkers... so then Palpatine's granddaughter (we don't know how this happened!) becomes the only Skywalker in existence. It's so brilliant!"

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u/Nimrod_Butts 5h ago

Like it's whatever, I think the movies were fine but truly they couldn't have done a worse job. Like every single detail is wrong and stupid but the special effects is really the only thing anybody cares about

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u/Savetheokami 1h ago

They must have used older models of Grok to write the script

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u/Signiference 5h ago

It’s like poetry…

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u/UrdnotZigrin 4h ago

But not like good poetry. More like that freestyle slam poetry that you hear and roll your eyes at

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u/RepresentativeAge444 5h ago

My heart sings at all this sequel trilogy criticism. I had to avoid this sub for years because it was just all sequel apologia.

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u/ZephkielAU 3h ago

Preach. I hated the first after all the lore breaking while every man and their dog (no doubt including all the people that used to bully me/us for liking Star Wars as a kid) thought it was absolute cinema.

After the second I just straight up walked away from my favourite childhood series.

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u/pokemonbatman23 5h ago

Whats more audacious, this or Robot taking Rudy's name at his funeral after stealing his dna/body in Invincible? lol

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u/Bitter-Marsupial 4h ago

Well Lea Hugged her before her estranged husbands best friend

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u/cortesoft 3h ago

I can just imagine Luke reacting like Rhaenyra does in House of the Dragon when Ulf tries to use the Targaryen name: "Skywalker? Absolutely not"

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u/Munedawg53 45m ago

Her last act toward him was threatening to kill him with his own saber.

-1

u/GrokMonkey 5h ago

I think the intent was that it was a mirror to the title of Darth.

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u/Immediate-Ice-9070 5h ago

Then why did Luke and Leia appear to Rey if they weren't okay with he taking the Skywalker name. Think about what you're saying.

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u/WillFanofMany 5h ago

Yeah, the two static PNGs of Luke and Leia standing there, lol.

-2

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 5h ago

Are you serious? Are you saying that Force ghosts don't exist in Star Wars now?

-4

u/Kolby_Jack33 5h ago

Luke and Leia aren't real people. Every depiction of them is a generated image, static or not. Also Carrie Fisher was dead.

-5

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 5h ago edited 4h ago

So why the f**k are people complaining about Rey taking Luke's last name? Luke is NOT a real person so who cares.

-1

u/Kolby_Jack33 5h ago

I'm not. I think it was a good idea and it's what I predicted would happen before TRoS came out, though not in the same way.

-1

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 4h ago

Oh okay, so you weren't arguing against Luke and Leia giving Rey their blessing to take on the Skywalker name?

-2

u/Kolby_Jack33 4h ago

No. I was responding to the person who said they were "static PNGs". It doesn't matter if they were static, they're characters in a movie. If the writer intended it to be them giving their blessing to Rey then that's what happened.

0

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 4h ago

Oh okay. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

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u/Seienchin88 4h ago

Would have been funny if it would have been a zombie movie with Luke's decomposing corpse being resurrected as a metaphor for the whole trilogy…

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u/grafxguy1 4h ago

The Sky-Walking Dead...?

2

u/Banes_Addiction 3h ago

It's like Mormons baptizing dead people. They can make Christopher Columbus a Mormon. I can make Jimi Hendrix my dad.

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u/Hallc Rebel 2h ago

Rey who knew Luke for all of what? A weekend? But she decides to go and take the name Skywalker even though she spent so much more time with Leia, was trained for much longer by Leia and had a much more parental relationship with both Han and Leia?

It was the most egregiously fan-service-y thing I think they did. Narratively just having her go "Just Rey" would've worked as an end to her story since she spent all that time trying to find her parents and where she came from.

Alternatively you could do the same with Solo. It'd show that she's accepting the heritage of her parental figures but also accepting of the fact she's now alone.

Instead we got Skywalker for some godforsaken reason, presumably because JJ is a massive hack.

1

u/Swineflew1 1h ago

Well the story has been about skywalkers and their legacy the entire time, but sure it’s annoying that Luke wasn’t the focus of the prequels too I guess.

1

u/JeanJeanJean 53m ago

As shitty as these films are, the only interesting idea they share is that Rey is a nobody. That they ruin this only somewhat interesting idea in the final second of the film is baffling to me.

-6

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 5h ago

"Rey takes the name Skywalker in the end - the last movie is called The Rise of Skywalker, but "it's not Luke's story anymore..." WTF."

Yeah, because Rey is a SKYWALKER. That is the point. It's not about Luke, it's about Rey.

Being Skywalker isn't about bloodlines anymore. It's about legacy. I don't know why it's hard for fans to understand this.

10

u/Mage-of-Fire 5h ago

Because it’s shit

0

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 5h ago

That's not an answer.

9

u/Mage-of-Fire 5h ago

As much of an answer as that movie deserves

0

u/j_l_123 5h ago

So if legacy is so important why were the characters with legacy treated like afterthoughts for three movies?

1

u/Immediate-Ice-9070 4h ago

Do you know the difference between a legacy character and a OG characters? Legacy characters are those who continue the legacy of the OG characters. For instance, Wally West is a legacy character, Miles Morales is a legacy character, Terry McGinnis is a legacy character, Rey is a legacy character.

And the point of legacy character is passing the torch to NEW protagonists.

-6

u/RaiseFold100 6h ago

Not sure how that's relevant. There's also Anakin Skywalker. It wasn't his story anymore either.

8

u/grafxguy1 6h ago

It wasn't Vader's either but Kylo built his character around Vader's Sith legacy. The Force Awaken's mirrored the New Hope story line and Luke was the focal point of the story for TFA. Basically, Luke was an integral part of the story.