JJ Abrams even wanted the movie to end with Luke surrounded by floating rocks, to wow the audience by showing off how powerful Luke was.
I’m sure this would have been a cool shot. But now I’m really doubting JJ Abrams. This sounds like Luke would still have been connected to the Force when Rey finds him (which, to be fair, is maybe why they scrapped it). So Luke would have been on that island, ready and waiting to join the fight for… what? We know from TESB he can sense when Han and Leia are in pain or danger, so I hate the idea of him being able to sense that but not doing anything about it. He needed to have cut himself off from the Force, so the Force couldn’t influence his resolve as much.
People talk about Luke wanting to remain on the island as a ‘subversion of expectations’. But I always wonder why that wasn’t the expectation. In TFA, Han said that when one Jedi student destroyed Luke’s new Jedi order, “Luke felt responsible”… he just walked away from everything." Luke is on the island for a reason and Rian Johnson just had the task of explaining that as best he could. It’s beginning to sound like JJ and maybe Lawrence Kasdan were ok with Luke’s exile just being a set up for the sake of an interesting story structure, without any explanation or logic.