[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi]
Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s Rian Johnson has heard the commentary surrounding Supreme Leader Snoke’s pivotal moment in the new movie, and he’s ready to explain himself.
In particular, he’s explaining why Snoke (Andy Serkis) became destined to be the fall guy for Kylo Ren’s (Adam Driver) rise to prominence.
“Snoke’s place in this movie came about largely from me figuring out Kylo’s arc, what Kylo’s arc was going to be in this movie,” the writer/director told IGN. “In my mind what I wanted to do with Kylo was to take him and basically knock out the kind of shaky foundation from under his feet, and build him by he end of the movie into someone who’s standing up as a credible, but complex villain. He’s taken the reins, basically. He’s no longer a Vader pretender.”
(This might also explain why Kylo loses the helmet early on in the movie, as well.)
Unfortunately, if Kylo stands up for himself, Snoke would be surplus to requirements, according to Johnson’s math. “Okay, you have Kylo there at the end, what is Snoke’s place in all this?” he argued. “Do you really want Kylo to be that but with an Emperor figure over him? And if it is that, then suddenly your options are much more familiar going into the next movie.”
And anyway, Johnson suggests, Snoke was never actually a big deal anyway. “He was built up with fan theories since the last movie. The truth is Snoke has a couple of very brief scenes in the last film. And I love fan theories, by the way. I don’t want to just poo-poo them. I think that’s an important part of Star Wars fandom, and I think it’s really fun to think about where these people came from, but the truth is in terms of Snoke’s actual place in this movie, it’s much more similar to the Emperor’s place in the original trilogy.”
If that’s true, it’s only a matter of time before a trilogy of movies comes along to demonstrate how Snoke went from a middle manager to a deformed monster who fights Samuel L. Jackson. Snoke Trilogy by 2027, anyone … ?
Read his full comments at IGN.
