Warning: Spoilers Ahead
One of the most common complaints about “The Last Jedi” is the movie doesn’t give any history of Supreme Leader Snoke, voiced by Andy Serkis. Fans had explored theories that he’s everyone from Darth Plagueis to Mace Windu. But in the movie we learned nothing about him before being cut in half by Kylo Ren.
At a Q&A for the BAFTA awards, writer/director Rian Johnson explained why he didn’t explore the character’s backstory.
“In this particular story, it’s much more like the original trilogy, where with Snoke if you think about the actual scenes, if suddenly I had paused one of the scenes to give a 30-second monologue about who he was, it would have kind of stopped the scene in its tracks, I realized,” Johnson told the crowd. “Even though it could have been interesting, something that fans were interested in, as storytellers, we have to kind of serve what the scenes need to be. It was a tough thing, even though I knew some fans were interested in it I also knew it wasn’t something that dramatically had a place in this movie. Hopefully, it can be addressed elsewhere or even J.J. may address it in the next movie. But it’s not something that’s particularly interesting to Rey, so we kind of had to follow through.”
He has a point. In the original movies, the Emporer was a complete mystery. We didn’t even know his name until the prequels.
Hopefully, they’ll explore his backstory in future movies.
What do you think? Are you sorry the movie didn’t explain Snoke’s history?
