Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 9 Moments Everybody Misunderstands

5. Luke Almost Killing Ben

Back to Luke Skywalker once more, who had the most divisive arc across the movie as a whole. The reason Luke has shut himself off from friends, family, and the Force is not just the fall of Ben Solo to the Dark Side, but his own failed efforts to stop it from happening. Told in three Rashomon-style flashbacks, we first see Luke's lie - that Ben turned him on - before getting closer to the truth. Through the eyes of young Ben, his master had come to kill him. Luke's version, though, reveals he had just a flicker of doubt, a moment where he sensed the darkness and considered killing him, before instantly regretting it.

The problem a lot of people have had with this is that Luke would ever even contemplate killing his protegee just because he sensed darkness in him, when he's the one person in the galaxy who believed that Darth Vader could be redeemed - a goal he even accomplished in Return of the Jedi.

Of course, in that film, after going to confront Vader and saying he won't fight him, Luke then ignites his saber in anger and fights with all the rage and fury within him. But crucially, he still pulls back and eventually saves his father. This is the same thing: for just a fleeting instant he sees the Vader-esque darkness again, and the basic instinct is to ignite the saber, something he immediately regrets and takes himself into hiding because of.

Part of this movie is about learning from your mistakes, but also about how we repeat them, it's about failure, and that's as true for a wizened old Jedi like Luke as much as it is a raw Force-user like Rey. It makes his return, via projection, more earned because of how he'd shut himself off from the Force, which wouldn't have happened without this moment, and given the way this was loosely setup by J.J. Abrams, there was no way Johnson could've taken it in a more interesting direction for both Luke and Kylo.