I'm not quite as excited as I suspect most are for this (been tickled lately by RedLetterMedia's Nerd Crew pisstake podcasts... veeery cool), but I am genuinely intrigued to see how much gravitas Hamill, who has grown exponentially as a veteran (voice, at least) actor, very much under the radar in the intervening years, can bring to a grizzled elder Luke.
I really hope it's a profound, deep performance, full of regret and humanity; a quiet, subtle meditation on loss and aging, behind all the light-sabring and that. Done right, it could be really quite moving for those of a certain generation, seeing as Luke is the one character across the saga we've witnessed grow by far the most. As lovely as it was to see Han and them back, Solo especially doesn't change too much over his character arc; maybe became slightly less of a cynical hardass, but he was still essentially the same man from the first Star Wars. Luke, though, evolved and matured to a significant degree over the original trilogy, even if something about his goody-goody character still irritated many of us and so he couldn't penetrate that Solo-Vader-Fett lock on our boyhood faves.
A powerhouse portrayal of a gnarled, damaged, heavy-hearted-but-still-heroically-spirited Luke Skywalker could make all the difference for me. From a callow peppy youth to a wizened burdened master, a fantasy mirror image of the inner journey many audience members have traversed over the past 30-odd+ years. Could be fascinating, and the dynamic between him and the surly inwardly-conflicted angst-ridden teen Kylo Ren (not so much the honest-to-goodness Rey) could lend the film a surprising degree of human depth and even insight.