Star Wars fans will be debating The Last Jedi until the heat death of the universe. Hell, even if there’s two surviving humans eking out a lonely existence on some isolated frozen moon, one of them will probably pipe up with “yeah, but the Holdo maneuver breaks Star Wars space battles, Rian Johnson is such a hack.”
Though the film has seen something of a critical reevaluation by fans in the wake of the dreadful The Rise of Skywalker, the conversation is still ongoing. Now, a post on Reddit is generating discussion about whether Johnson got Luke Skywalker right and, as usual, it’s splitting opinion:
Posting this on r/StarWars in 2019 would have seen you burnt at the stake, but now at least there’s a lot of agreement:
We also firmly agree that J.J. Abrams didn’t leave Johnson with a lot of options after what he established in The Force Awakens:
Another poster smartly identifies that in real life, people don’t just have a linear progression through their existence; they fail, succeed, fail again and develop from there. Luke experiencing a moment of genuine triumph and enlightenment in Return of the Jedi doesn’t mean he won’t ever succumb to his emotions:
We have to admit that after a half-decade of reading various incarnations of this argument, we’re also ready to move on to something else:
Johnson’s long-in-development Star Wars trilogy is still theoretically in the works at Lucasfilm, with the director confirming that he’s still in conversation with Kathleen Kennedy about it. Once he’s wrapped up Knives Out 3, maybe he’ll finally get around to making them… at which point we fully expect a fresh tidal wave of debate that’ll see us through to the mid-2030s.
