Yeah, and ideally we’d also remove his line about balance from earlier in the movie, too.
I have two problems with the original dialogue in the flashback scene that I replaced:
- “Snoke had already turned his heart.” This places too much emphasis on Snoke, who we now know isn’t the real man behind the voices in his head. But more importantly, this ignores the fact that Vader’s heart had already been claimed by the Emperor and that didn’t stop Luke from reaching out in ROTJ. It isn’t justifiable for a character like Luke to put any stock in this.
- “For the briefest moment, of pure instinct” sounds like Luke creating desperate excuses for himself. The script is trying to minimize this moment of failure, but it doesn’t match what we see on screen - Luke slowly reaching for his lightsaber, contemplating, and then amping himself up to ignite it.
I genuinely feel that the only way to explain Luke’s actions in this moment while preserving what we know about his character is to place him in an unwinnable moral quandary such as what I described. I.e. it’s either Han and Leia, or their son. The classic trolly problem. Only it’s his own arrogance that leads him to believe the trolly is inevitably coming.
EDIT: I think evoking Abraham and Isaac would be the best way for the audience to understand this concept intuitively
I’d seen every path before him. Each one led to the same pain and destruction. Han and Leia would die because of what he would become. I saw no future in which I could save him. But for a moment, I thought his sacrifice would stop it all from happening.
Rey’s response to him also makes more sense in this context, with her saying that “You failed him by thinking his choice was made. It wasn’t!”