Well, it’s one of those things you don’t want the audience to know for sure before it happens; otherwise, all the tension has just been removed. If Luke had said beforehand, “I’m just a vision,” or he walked through a wall or something, then, blammo, the whole sequence is ruined! You need to be on the edge of your seat, wondering how Luke survived the barrage of AT-AT fire, or if Kylo really did just strike him down. As I said in my previous post, I wonder if it already WAS too obvious since I guessed it immediately. But while I had correctly guessed, I wasn’t committed to it. I wasn’t sure if I was right. Therefore, I was totally in the moment when all of those things happened, and I was genuinely scared when both of those attacks happened. And then when I realized I had been right, which is exactly when the movie wanted me to know I was right, it was very satisfying.
Let it play out as a conversation between Chewie and 3PO, that let’s us use our imagination a bit more and a few suggestive growls could mean “hunky cabana boy.”
“I hear he’s fluent in over six million forms of gratification!”