Wait, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Director Rian Johnson Said Whatnow About Rey’s Parents?
**WARNING: This post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.**
Star Wars: The Last Jedi may finally be out in theaters to answer all of our burning questions about the storylines set up in The Force Awakens, but for those who have seen it, it’s already time to look ahead to that wide open future set up by Director Rian Johnson’s installment—and that means the potential for even more things to get upended in the process.
The two-year gap in between the existing parts of the current trilogy led to a lot of theories that fans got personally attached to, which naturally led to some disappointment when, say, Snoke was killed off without much fanfare, or when Rey’s parents were revealed to have been no one important to the Star Wars canon other than the impact of their actions on our new protagonist. But if there was one ray of hope for these fans (sorry), it was exactly in how Last Jedi deviated from what people might have expected to follow J.J. Abrams’ cliffhanger at the end of TFA.
Some fans are already theorizing that Abrams could turn things around again in Episode IX and make a liar out of Kylo Ren, and it’s easy to see how he could have been lying and simply feeding into Rey’s fears when he made the reveal that her parents were no one important and had turned their backs on her. Those fans will be happy to hear, then, that Rian Johnson himself wouldn’t rule out that possibility in an interview with Bustle, saying,
“I don’t think he’s lying in that moment—I think he is like telling what he saw and I think that Rey seems like she believes it in that moment. So for me, I wrote it as an honest revelation and as an honest kind of reaction to it, as opposed to a move in a game of chess.
“Now as we know in these movies, you know the whole idea of a certain point of view comes into play and as you know I’m not involved in writing the next movie. JJ [Abrams] and Chris [Terrio] are writing it so, I want to make it clear I’m not sure how it’s going to get resolved. For me, the important part was saying it was an emotionally honest revelation, I feel like it, I don’t know, I believed it.”
So in Johnson’s mind, Kylo Ren wasn’t purposefully lying about Rey’s parents, but it’s still possible that even he didn’t realize that he hadn’t seen the real truth in reading Rey’s thoughts. If there’s anything The Last Jedi was quite clear about, it’s that using the Force to read minds and/or the future isn’t nearly an exact science, so there’s plenty of room for Kylo to have seen what he wanted to see from Rey.
Personally, I liked that Rey’s family didn’t have any existing importance to the Star Wars fandom, and that she’s just as much a “chosen one” in her own right, by the Force, as Anakin was, rather than by familial inheritance like Luke. But for anyone who was looking for something else, even Johnson didn’t say that the presentation of Rey’s parentage in his own movie was 100% solid fact—just that Kylo believed it to be so. Whether J.J. Abrams takes that opportunity and runs with it remains to be seen, but fans are sure to do just that in the meantime.
(via Bustle, image: Disney/Lucasfilm)
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