LUKE SKYWALKER

Why Luke’s Last Jedi exit was perfect

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Luke Skywalker was cinema’s greatest hero: the farm boy who saved the galaxy, and with it his father’s soul. Last year he returned… As a bitter, isolated failure. It was tough for many to swallow; too tough for the fan-brats calling for Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi to be uncanonised. Tough for Mark Hamill, too, who confessed to being “unsure of the direction Rian wanted me to go”, and felt he had to switch off his own “internal navigation device” — just like Luke at the Battle Of Yavin — and “tune into his navigation device”.

He was right to. The manner of Luke’s return was dramatically bold, thematically potent and utterly appropriate to the character. Just as onetime disbeliever Han grew to embrace the reality of the Force, Luke had decided the galaxy is better off without him — and by extension the Jedi Order. As ghost-yoda reminds him, “The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”

The world, both ours and the universe of Star Wars, belongs to the young. Progress comes with the infusion of new blood: on the dark side Kylo “kill the past” Ren; on the light side Rey, who aptly has no bloodline baggage. The conservative, reactionary old guard should encourage that, not cling greedily onto glory and power.

Luke’s refusal to directly join the fight or seize leadership of the Resistance, and his passing of the Jedi torch to Rey, is his ideal journey’s end. Not making a blazing, lightsaber-duelling ‘heroic return’, it turned

out, was the most heroic thing he could have done.