Any hope of seeing Supreme Leader Snoke’s origins in Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been officially crushed. With the film arriving this December, many of us were hoping to see a bit more about the mysterious Snoke.
Director Rian Johnson made his feelings known in the latest issue of Empire:
We got the whole story of Palpatine’s rise to power in the prequels, but in the original films, he’s exactly what he needs to be, which is just. [The Emperor is] a dark force: the scary thing behind the thing. That was entirely how I approached Snoke. I wasn’t interested in explaining where he came from or telling his history, except where it serves this story.
It is the mystery behind some of the leaders on the dark side that really drives home the character for many people. In the prequel films, there was so much known about Palpatine. Of course, it was necessary for many ways to explore Palpatine’s rise to power, but for many of us what made the Emperor, such an imposing figure was what you didn’t know about him. He was out of reach in the original movies, and that helped to cement the character as an evil villain in the film.
Now that we know that Snoke’s motives and background won’t be explored, it’s more than likely the focus will be on Kylo Ren. Johnson explained what he hopes to explore with Ren’s character:
Star Wars boils down to the transition from adolescence into adulthood. That’s the heart of these films and Rey is most obviously the one that hangs on. But it’s also Kylo. In the originals you project entirely onto Luke, while Vader is the scary other — he’s the minotaur. The fascinating thing about Kylo and Rey is that they’re two sides of something. We can all relate to Kylo: to that anger of being in the turmoil of adolescence and figuring out who he’s going to be as a man; dealing with anger and wanting to separate from his family. He’s not Vader — at least, he’s not Vader yet — and that’s something I really wanted to get into.
The Heroes Journey is a trope which has existed since the birth of Hellenistic culture, maybe even before it. Seeing the focus brought to Kylo Ren can be seen as the Villains Journey. It is a great way of creating two different journeys inside of one movie. The Heroes is being taken by Rey while Kylo Ren takes the villain’s.
How do you feel about this? Are you excited to see that Snoke will be left as a mysterious figure? Let us know in the comments below!