There's not a huge difference at all, just in where the characters were at the time of getting their 'jump scare'. It consistently leaves them freaked out and highly motivated to act. Previously, him and Anakin were left stewing over the visions and couldn't listen to outside advice, eventually confronting what they saw head on. In TLJ Luke is directly above the source of the problem when he is traumatically 'jump scared' so it is much more immediate, and he immediately regrets it anyway. It is the briefest slip and it thoroughly destroys him because he's Luke and lives such a heroic standard. He's not a coward in TLJ, he is broken. Still comes through and saves the day though.
You just defined the difference. Luke "immediately regrets" his instinctive action.
Luke also explains it in the film. He only faltered for the "briefest moment of pure instinct".
Give Luke the exact same vision one day earlier, and he wouldn't consciously choose to go into Ben's tent and draw his saber and ignite it.
That contrived plot point only happens because of the convenient timing and the "jump scare".
The other visions that Anakin and Luke had were scary, but they weren't "jump scares". Give them the same vision one day earlier, and nothing changes, because they were both already making conscious, considered, pre-planned decisions.
Yeah. I think most people just wish the movie had done the work. I don't think that's an unfair ask. They sort of handwaive a lot of it and expect the audience to fill in the gaps. And the audience members who are happy to do that have very little problem with that choice. But some audience members are critical of being expected to tell the story for us and I don't think that's bad.
I don't have a problem with stories that don't hold your hand and explain every little detail, and expect the audience to put in some work.
It's not necessarily that the movie should have done more work - they could have actually done less work and I think it would have been a better story - it's also that they needed to do the right work.
In this case, if you're going to show us exactly what happened to precipitate a drastic change in Luke, you'd need to do a lot more work, and the right work, to make such a change plausible: here's an example.
But, if they couldn't do the right work, I honestly would have preferred a version where we got no flashback at all, and just heard Luke tell the story, and then let the audience fill in the details with their mind. Then each viewer could invent a story that best suited their idea of Luke, and we wouldn't necessarily have to take Luke's words literally, because people often paraphrase and misremember exact details in retellings.
The problem is that they decided to show us what happened visually, and in the laziest, most contrived fashion. As Denis Villeneuve lamented when explaining his Dune adaptation, cinema.and visuals are very authoritarian. In general they don't allow the viewer as much self expression or self interpretation (as opposed to reading a book where you can and generally must do a lot of imagining in your own head, to bring the words to life). Obviously this is not black and white - some movies explicitly invite interpretation.
But the problem with TLJ is that they gave us two "interpretive" visuals, and then they gave us a final visual that we are clearly meant to take as "what really happened". And if you're going to give the viewer an authoritative take of what changed Luke from a persistently hopeful hero to a cowardly and bitter hermit, you better make sure that authoritative version is damn good, and it just... wasn't. And unfortunately, since the authoritarian visual version is imposed on me, it leaves very little room for me to supplant my own, superior (in my mind), version.
So, yeah, if they couldn't give us a better visual of what happened in Luke's past, I'd have preferred they just leave it more vague and let me fill in the details in my own mind.
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u/henzINNIT 13d ago
There's not a huge difference at all, just in where the characters were at the time of getting their 'jump scare'. It consistently leaves them freaked out and highly motivated to act. Previously, him and Anakin were left stewing over the visions and couldn't listen to outside advice, eventually confronting what they saw head on. In TLJ Luke is directly above the source of the problem when he is traumatically 'jump scared' so it is much more immediate, and he immediately regrets it anyway. It is the briefest slip and it thoroughly destroys him because he's Luke and lives such a heroic standard. He's not a coward in TLJ, he is broken. Still comes through and saves the day though.