There has been a lot to be said about Luke Skywalker in ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ and now director Rian Johnson is opening up a bit as to the importance of his final significant act in the movie. If you haven’t seen the film yet or don’t know what happens, I congratulate you for living under a rock or avoiding the Internet, but there are a few spoilers ahead so you may want to turn back.
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Now, the importance of what Luke does stems back into a comment he made earlier in the film which has him get over his fear of failure and embody the answer to his own question.
When talking about why Luke had to end up fading away and likely becoming a Force Ghost Johnson says that:
“I don’t want to get too explicit, because I like people being able to have their own interpretations but I think definitely the act of what he does at the end literally just takes everything out of him. That’s a huge thing. Also … he’s having his final act be something of myth-making in a way.”
Honestly, it is this “myth-making” that is key to the entire point of what happened here. We’ve seen what happens to the little boy at the end of the movie and even before that we saw the hope that myths create:
“The galaxy needs legends. I think about the look in Rey’s eyes in ‘The Force Awakens,’ when she says, ‘Luke Skywalker, I thought he was a myth,’ and that gleam in her eyes. And I think about how I felt when I showed up to work the first day to meet with Mark Hamill, and I sat down and started talking to him, and I could only see Luke Skywalker. He made it very hard to talk, and [it’s] the idea that there’s value in that, in terms of inspiring us to fight the good fight and to be our best.”
This idea of legends is core to what we see in the younger generations in both of the Disney films. For Luke Skywalker, though, it is also overcoming his own doubt:
“It does go back a little bit to what he said at the beginning [of “The Last Jedi”]. “What do you think one guy walking out there with a lightsaber [can do]?” … The answer is: Create a legend that will spread hope. And once he’s done that, combined with the physical toll it’s taken on him, you can make the case that then there’s nothing more powerful that he could accomplish.”
The very end sequence of the movie shows that he was able to do just that.
Do you agree with Rian Johnson that Luke Skywalker went out in a way that not only saved his friends but also to become a legend that would inspire hope throughout the galaxy? Did ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ do a good job at closing the current chapter on Luke outside of future Force Ghost appearances or were you hoping for more? Share your thoughts below!
Source: The Huffington Post.
