Star Wars: Why The Last Jedi Didn’t Explore Snoke’s Backstory
Rian Johnson explains.
Who is Supreme Leader Snoke? Where did he come from, how did he become so powerful, and what's his goal here?
These questions were what Star Wars fans, in the wake of The Force Awakens, spent two years both asking and coming up with their own answers to.
In The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson cut them down with a single stroke of a lightsaber. It was the movie's - heck, the year's, and perhaps even the decade's - biggest twist, one that left fans not only stunned, but a lot of them quite angry and upset.
Neither before nor after he died did we get any clue to Snoke's history. No sudden reveal that this X was correct, or that he was Darth Plagueis all along, he was just gone. It's a huge decision, and in my interview with Rian Johnson (which will be published in full at a later date) he explained the logic behind it:
"You have to remember I wrote the movie before The Force Awakens came out, so I didn't write in the context of 'oh all these people on Reddit are writing their theories on how he's Darth Plagueis' or whatever. It's not like I read all those theories and decided to defy them.
"To me, first of all, it just wasn't a question that I felt very interested in, mostly because I didn't feel like the character of Rey would be interested in it. It's not Snoke's story, I guess, so in that way he's very similar to the Emperor in the first trilogy, where we know exactly what we need to know about him. He's the powerful, shadowy emperor behind Vader in the first one, and now Kylo in this one.
"So frankly it never occurred to me to suddenly stop the whole movie to explain his origins, because it wasn't really germane to the story."
It's a fair argument, although equally easy to understand why fans might be annoyed. But the twist is superb and leads into the strongest section of the movie. Meanwhile, part of Snoke's backstory has been revealed in the novelisation of The Last Jedi, which explains that he was an unlikely leader of the First Order, but used his knowledge of the Force and the Unknown Regions to rise.
Do you wish Snoke's backstory had been in the movie? Let us know down in the comments.