Why didn’t Luke Skywalker wield his famous green lightsaber in The Last Jedi?
A good question, and one IGN posed to writer-director Rian Johnson in a recent interview. As any Star Wars fan will tell you, Mark Hamill’s Jedi Master fought off Kylo Ren using Anakin’s blue lightsaber – a weapon that was actually destroyed by an enraged Kylo just a few scenes earlier.
Couple this with the fact that Luke’s Force projection did not leave any footprints on Crait, the mineral planet on which The Last Jedi‘s finale takes place, and it should’ve been pretty clear to Ben Solo (and the audience!) that Mr. Skywalker was still housed up on Ahch-To. But as Rian Johnson told IGN, Luke chose blue over green in order to blindside Kylo and allow the Resistance to escape.
Luke is basically tailoring this projection to have maximum effect on Kylo. He knows that Kylo’s Achilles heel is his rage, and so that’s why he kind of makes himself look younger, the way Kylo would’ve last seen him in their confrontation at the temple, and that’s why he decided to bring Kylo’s grandfather’s lightsaber down there — the lightsaber that Kylo screamed at Rey, ‘that’s mine, that belongs to me.’
To his credit, Adam Driver’s mercurial baddie was knocked unconscious soon after the incredible Throne Room fight, so there’s a good chance he didn’t see what happened to Anakin’s (and subsequently Rey’s) blue ‘saber:
We as an audience saw that… The truth is, we see the lightsaber split in half — Kylo sees a blinding flash of light and is knocked unconscious, and then Rey takes the lightsaber away before he wakes up. So if you really want to dig into it and get an explanation, you can say that he doesn’t 100 percent know what happened to the lightsaber.
In other news, and now that Star Wars: The Last Jedi is dominating theaters near and far, Lucasfilm recently detailed every single Easter egg buried within Rian Johnson’s spectacular sequel. Fair warning: it’s riddled with potential spoilers.
