Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson solves film's plot hole ending

For those who saw a pretty glaring plot hole at the end of the new Star Wars movie, Rian Johnson has performed a bit of a Jedi mind trick.

It’s not the plot hole you’re looking for, basically.

There are, as you might expect, one or two spoilers ahead for those who have yet to see the film.

Fans noted that in his final face-off with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, Luke Skywalker drew his blue lightsaber, following the barrage from the new AT-M6 walkers on the salt planet of Crait that left him unscathed and Kylo rather vexed.

However, this is the same blue lightsaber than Kylo and Rey were fighting over on Snoke’s ship, the one that ended up being split in twain.

Surely Kylo would have spotted that Luke was using the blue lightsaber, the iconic weapon inherited from his dad, Anakin Skywalker, particularly considering Kylo is a bit of a Darth Vader fanboy?

And in turn, if he’d spotted that, he’d have then quickly worked out that something was amiss, like, for example, Luke not being there in person at all, but being a jedi mind projection.

Well, it seems that Luke was just trolling Kylo the whole time.

(Credit: Disney)
(Credit: Disney)

“[Luke] is basically tailoring this projection to have maximum effect on Kylo,” Johnson told IGN.

“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.’”

So it’s all a bit of a mind game, on Luke’s part then. But how come Kylo didn’t spot it? Johnson has an answer for that too.

“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.”

Maybe he thought Rey had grabbed it and legged it – how she actually managed to leg it and find Chewie and the Falcon is quite another matter – and then it got back, somehow, into the hands of Luke.

Or perhaps he wasn’t, in his rage, paying attention to what colours things were.

But, according to Johnson, it was all done on purpose, and totally not a mistake or a plot hole or anything like that.

So there.

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