10 Movie "Plot Holes" You're Getting Completely Wrong

6. Star Wars: The Last Jedi - How Did Rose Catch Up With Finn?

Star Wars The Last Jedi Crait
Disney

The final battle sequence in Star Wars: The Last Jedi takes place on the salty plains of Crait, with a small band of Resistance fighters squaring off against the mighty First Order and their battering ram cannon.

Near the end of the fight, Finn drives his worn-down ski speeder directly towards said cannon - while it's in the middle of firing - hoping to destroy it. But just before impact, Rose appears out of nowhere and knocks him out of the way using her own speeder.

At face value, it seems like it should be impossible for Rose to reach Finn in time (she was already in mid-retreat), but there are a couple of small details in this scene that are important to remember before branding it a "plot hole".

Firstly, Finn's speeder takes a lot of damage from the cannon's blast, causing parts of it to fall away. While the movie doesn't explicitly state that this makes the speeder go slower, when you consider the sheer force of the laser beam, any weight loss on the speeder's part would make it easier to push backwards.

The second and more crucial detail is that, in certain shots - specifically, the first-person POV shots from the cockpit of the speeder (like the one below) - you can clearly see that Finn's speeder is moving slower due to the force of the beam.

Star Wars The Last Jedi Finn speeder Death Star cannon
Disney

The movie does a poor job at effectively conveying these details so it's no surprise that people miss them, but they're definitely there, making Rose's last-minute rescue a much more plausible feat.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!