Rian Johnson’s main goal in The Last Jedi was to move Star Wars beyond the past and into the future by tearing down some of its strongest foundations such as pretending that the Jedi are the galaxy’s almighty saints when really their foolish confidence allowed Emperor Palpatine to create an army right beneath their noses that ended up destroying them. Or taking away the kind perception of Luke Skywalker and turning him into a flawed man who had lost all hope in what he claimed he believed in the most the last time we saw him; the Jedi. Or simply erasing the idea of the Jedi altogether by having Yoda strike lightning on Ach-To’s Jedi library tree. Now we know Rey had already taken the ancient Jedi relics from within the trees confines but the idea of the Jedi is what Yoda caused to go up in a spout of flames.
And there were many more ideas Rian destroyed from its predecessor, The Force Awakens, such as Snoke. He completely busted all of our theoretical bubbles by killing him out of the movie in an even less ceremonious fashion than Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. He obliterated the idea that Rey was the daughter of someone special. And he nearly wiped out the entire Resistance to make the First Order the new rulers of the galaxy.
But while all of these larger ideas and characters were being torn asunder I completely didn’t realize that one of the most iconic pieces of Star Wars history had also been destroyed right under our noses and that is the annihilation of Luke’s lightsaber. Yes, the lightsaber.
The lightsaber that graced this epic Star Wars poster in 1977. The first lightsaber that was ever seen in Star Wars. The lightsaber that had survived four movies, five wielders, and had even been reclaimed by Luke from the lost depths of the gaseous planet, Bespin, has finally found its end in, unsurprisingly, The Last Jedi.