Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker has been Star Wars’ ultimate backup plan for at least half a decade. The original trilogy has faded into the distance, and the movies set in that galaxy far, far away have become so poor in recent years that we’d all rather watch Andor. But there was always the option of plugging in Hamill – a sort of human Star Wars USB stick, primed to conjure up 1970s vibes as required. Not quite getting your fill of Force nostalgia? Here’s Luke tutoring Baby Yoda in The Book of Boba Fett. And here he is again, whinging about past mistakes in The Last Jedi. It may not quite have been Binary Sunset, or Yoda lifting the X-wing on Dagobah. But for a few shimmering, quite-possibly-digitally-retouched moments, it felt like we were back in the real Star Wars again.
Back in 2023, I wrote about the weird emotional whiplash of falling for digi-Luke: the plasticky but strangely compelling CGI version of the Jedi master who turned up in those Disney+ TV shows like a hologram from a smoother-skinned age. At the time, Hamill had sounded lukewarm on returning to Star Wars, but left just enough ambiguity to keep the dream alive.
