The film critic Pauline Kael, in her brief review of “Star Wars,” in 1977, wrote that George Lucas “has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly, they just seem to be bad actors.” Kael didn’t single out any of the young performers, but it’s safe to assume that her assessment included Mark Hamill, who played the hero Luke Skywalker. All the actors complained to Lucas about the stiff dialogue that he made them speak, but Hamill was especially ill-served in the original movie and its two sequels. “But I was going in to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters,” he brays, when we first meet him. He whines to Obi-Wan Kenobi and whinges at Yoda. Even in his grandest moments, as when, in “The Empire Strikes Back,” he learns that Darth Vader is his father, he sounds like a surly teen who’s been grounded: “That’s not true. That’s impossible.”
By the opening scene of “Return of the Jedi,” in 1983, age and experience had lent Hamill (and Luke Skywalker) some gravitas, but he’s quickly put in his place by the gangster worm Jabba the Hutt, who simply laughs at the character when he claims to be a Jedi warrior. Luke was the dreadfully earnest one, the do-gooder, the orphan who longed for approval and love, the harmless guy whom Leia could kiss to make Han Solo jealous. Han got the best lines, the crackerjack adventures, and the Millennium Falcon; Luke, meanwhile, came across like the first millennial.
The sense that Hamill had been the weak link in the original cast was reinforced by the way that Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher would define themselves beyond blasters and cinnamon buns, while Hamill remained forever stranded in the public imagination as Luke. He enjoyed success as a voice actor but never had the kind of onscreen performance that could displace the one that had made him famous. And so, to fans, he persisted as an occasionally ambivalent human totem of the series—if not a victim then at least something of a casualty—later to be joined by two other young actors who also had the unfortunate good luck of being cast as angsty, peevish heroes in the “Star Wars” franchise: Jake Lloyd, who played the very young Anakin Skywalker, and Hayden Christensen, who played an older Anakin, both in Lucas’s prequels. It seemed that the role of a male Skywalker was where young actors went to die.
In “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Hamill, who is now sixty-six, returns to the screen (following a very brief cameo at the end of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) in the role that, for many, he never left. We find Luke on a remote island in a hidden corner of the galaxy, living a life of self-flagellating monkhood as the guard of the Jedi temple and foundational texts. The intervening years have not been kind: he’s gone from a fresh-faced and hopeful crusader to a heavily bearded, crusty hermit—the before-and-after looking like that meme about what the world was like on Election Day in 2016 versus what it became in 2017. Yet Luke’s diminished circumstances make for a far richer character, one whom Hamill portrays with mournful energy and depth. For the first time, Hamill’s performance is one of the best parts of a “Star Wars” movie.
Not everyone agrees. Some fans have sharply criticized the new movie for, among its other faults, turning Luke into a decrepit pacifist, but to my mind he’s, instead, a kind of badass Buddhist and, at long last, the first character with the good sense to point out that, for all their special powers and good intentions, the Jedi have proved to be a pretty disastrous element in the universe—what with their defections to the Dark Side and all the mayhem that’s followed. One of the themes of the new movie, ironic for a franchise still leaning heavily on fan nostalgia, is the need to finally dispense with the past. It’s refreshing to find that Luke agrees—and fitting to hear it coming from Hamill. Luke’s great act of bravery in the movie is also a product of this earned wisdom, relying on cunning and misdirection rather than gung-ho optimism or blind faith.
Best (and most surprising) of all, time and its bitter disappointments have led Luke to finally develop a sense of humor and a sort of roguish charm—traits that Hamill, back in our galaxy, has always demonstrated offscreen. (This week, he’s been trading barbed insults on Twitter with Ted Cruz and mocking Ajit Pai, the chairman of the F.C.C., over net neutrality.) In the absence of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, Luke takes over as the resident gruff, no-nonsense skeptic—and the screenwriters are wise to give Hamill the scene-stealing lines and chances at relatable human interaction that he’s always deserved. When he reunites with his old friend C-3PO and the always admiring droid says, with grave wonder, “Master Luke!,” Hamill looks at him and simply winks. It is, for all his well-chronicled and widely celebrated feats of daring and courage—his one-in-a-million shot on the Death Star and all that followed—the coolest thing that Luke Skywalker has ever done.
