So when Hamill told Vanity Fair back in May how disappointed he was, initially, with Rian Johnson’s take on Luke, he gave his fans permission to be disappointed too. Hamill told David Kamp: “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’”

The actor has since walked back those remarks, telling Variety in June that he “got in trouble” for how “inartfully phrased” that statement was. “What I was, was surprised at how he saw Luke. And it took me a while to get around to his way of thinking. But once I was there, it was a thrilling experience. I hope it will be for the audience, too.” But even the week before The Last Jedi’s premiere, Hamill was still throwing doubt on Johnson’s characterization of Luke. “‘It’s time for the Jedi to end?‘ Are you kidding me?” Hamill said, rehashing one of his lines with Mashable. “I’m just saying, what could have happened between the last time we saw him and now for him to be that way? Even if it was the worst thing in the world, I said to [Johnson], ‘Jedis don’t give up.‘”

Hamill primed the pump for fans to dislike Johnson’s Luke—and, taken a certain way, The Last Jedi could certainly be viewed as a condemnation of the Skywalker legacy. In what many critics consider Johnson’s boldest and most compelling move, The Last Jedi calls into question the binary morality of George Lucas’s dark side/light side saga. Going beyond the muddied waters of The Empire Strikes Back (which demands audiences consider what would happen if the most evil villain in the world were actually your father and potentially salvageable), The Last Jedi rips up the overworked Chosen One narrative and the notion that the Force should belong to only a certain elite sect. I see this as Rian Johnson building on and advancing the notions originally laid out by Lucas, while others see him as a Kylo Ren hell-bent on obliterating the building blocks of the franchise. “Let the past die,” Ren says in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to.” But is that really what Johnson is doing?

There certainly are some extreme franchise rebooting elements to The Last Jedi. For one thing, thanks to the on-screen death of Luke Skywalker and the real-world death of Carrie Fisher, Episode IX will be the first Star Wars film without a single character named “Skywalker” in it. (We can count Ben Solo, if you want, but you catch my drift.) It’s a bold new direction for the so-called Skywalker saga, and one that Lucasfilm, at least, seems pleased with. Before The Last Jedi even premiered, the studio gave Johnson the reins to an entirely separate, Skywalker-free future trilogy to explore just how far this galaxy can go.

But the notion that The Last Jedi did Luke Skywalker dirty in order to advance Rey’s plot ignores the fact that Hamill gets the biggest heroic moments in the film. In a nuanced and often brilliant analysis of the highs and lows of The Last Jedi, freelance writer Jay Allen tweeted: “Luke - the hero, the POV character - is a bitter old man consumed by self-hatred, and he is never redeemed. Victory is accepting his failure.” Acceptance of failure—something Lucasfilm is quite familiar with—is an overtly stated theme of The Last Jedi, but is Luke never redeemed? In Hamill’s best live-action performance yet, Luke rallies when he needs to and pulls off the most powerful Force-using move we’ve ever seen in this franchise—a galaxy-spanning feat of astral projection. Luke had to hit rock bottom, green milk and all, in order to soar to new heights. This story was always going to end with Luke reduced, Yoda-like, to a pile of clothes. But far from advocating the end of the Jedi, Johnson’s film firmly underlines how they will carry on—even without Luke.

A lack of nostalgia might be another reason some Star Wars fans didn’t latch onto The Last Jedi the way they did with The Force Awakens (which has since been dinged for too much nostalgia) and Rogue One. Gareth Edwards’s film—which was originally conceived to be completely stand-alone—added more allusions to the Force, beefed up Darth Vader’s role, and, unadvisedly, used C.G.I. to resurrect a youthful Leia, all in an attempt to dial into the nostalgia addiction that drives pop-culture phenomena like Stranger Things. (Vader also reportedly features in Solo: A Star Wars Story.) But The Last Jedi is almost entirely Vader-free—and, in fact, Johnson had particular fun with Rogue One–esque over-reliance on nostalgia in a scene in which Luke chides R2-D2 for pulling the “cheap move” of broadcasting a hologram of A New Hope’s Leia. The Yoda scene, too, nimbly side-steps the nostalgia swamp by having the little green puppet advocate for moving on from the past. “We are,” he says, “what they grow beyond.” He might as well have been an older Star Wars fan talking about the new.