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I think most of us agree that Kyle Ren works. He’s good. He’s what we wanted in Anakin, and there really is the “can he be saved” question. I think seeing him as the main character offers a chance to save the new trilogy. Only because he’s the most interesting. Every scene where he was in with Luke or Rey was great. The problem was the other scenes. Poe is fun. Is he a deep character? Nope. But he’s fun. Rose is annoying, and hopefully her character is killed off between movies. The casino world could have been done way better (I like the ideas a few pages back about it). It’s just for every good or great scene, you get three bad ones. New trilogy makes pre-trilogy good by comparison. Which is disturbing.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I don't remember much past what you've said, either. And to me, anyway, Corran Horn was cooler than either Rey OR this version of Ben Skywalker.

The Corran Horn book I, Jedi is what made me love star wars again after I got older and hit the "that's for kids" phase.

I Jedi is pretty amazing and probably my favourite EU novel but his whole arc is pretty good.

I don't know the order of publishing between this and the X-wing novels, but I remember a short story in one of the old WEG Adventure Journals featuring Corran Horn, he was on the run from CorSec as the ISB liaison there suspected his loyalties and he was posing a junior Imperial officer on some backwater, he ended up helping the local cell free some Rebel captives and they all escaped together, which I think is where he originally hooked up with the Alliance.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
He’s what we wanted in Anakin

There is a LOT of truth to this.

 Manchu wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
He’s what we wanted in Anakin

There is a LOT of truth to this.

I don’t see it personally he just comes off as Kevin the Jedi mk2, I mean overall Anakin had a lot more baggage to influence him negatively than Kylo plus years of being manipulated by a real sith lord. Kylo had a strange fetish with his grandfather, anger issues and a pretty fethed up moral compass which still don’t really stack up with what Anakin went through.

He’s the literal anti Vader everything Vader went through Kylo inflicts on himself Vader lost his parents-Kylo killed his own, Vader is born a slave-Kylo enslaves himself to snoop, Vader takes part in a war trying to defend the republic-Kylo takes part in as aggressor in a war against the republic basically Kylo is all self inflicted misery there’s nothing tragic about his fall like with Anakin and is what you get when your writers desperately want Vader to still be around.

 Manchu wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
He’s what we wanted in Anakin

There is a LOT of truth to this.

Also not particularly seeing it... I thought Clone Wars Anakin was generally what we wanted in Anakin.

I think you guys are taking it too literally. Obviously, Ben Solo’s story does not fit the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

The point is, Adam Driver’s compelling portrayal of a person who started out as good violently struggling with fear, anger, and hatred is how we wanted to see Anakin’s struggle. As opposed to Hayden Christensen’s flat performance of Lucas’s half-assed story.


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It’s also wrong to say nothing about Ben’s story is tragic.

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

This is the situation young Ben Solo finds himself in: as the grandson of Anakin and nephew of Luke, he has a huge amount of pressure to be a great and powerful Jedi but his role models are a dad who can’t quit the outlaw life, a mom who puts her work in politics above raising her son, and an uncle who is not equipped with either the skill or knowledge to instruct him. Ben doesn’t have the support structure to become a well-adjusted person much less a galactic hero and scion of destiny. But that is what everyone assumes he will be.

In this way, Ben is an interesting foil to Rey. Whereas Rey is suffering from a lack of context, Ben is suffocated by context. Rey doesn’t know who she is supposed to be. For Ben, it’s clear who he is supposed to be and just as clear, to his family and himself, that he has entirely failed to become that person.

This is why Ben idolizes Darth Vader. At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan sums up the life of Anakin Skywalker in one bitter, tearful groan of despair: “You were the Chosen One!” Everyone expected Anakin would bring balance to the Force but instead he utterly failed. Ben can relate to failing to live up to such crushing expectations.

But here is the crucial point: by becoming Darth Vader, Anakin forged his own unexpected path and ultimately sacrificed himself to kill the Emperor and finally end this ancient conflict between the Jedi and the Sith. Except now Luke and Snoke are keeping that going.

In TFA, Ben meditates on the ruined mask of Vader. Note, he does NOT reforge the mask. He leaves it ruined. And he asks the spirit of his grandfather to “show me again the power of darkness” and promises “I will finish what you started.” JJ Abrams could not be bothered to give us any exposition here so we don’t know specifically what the hell Ben is talking about. But we can infer that Ben believes he has to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, he must embrace the darkness to realize his destiny, and he believes his destiny (as we find out in TLJ) is to “let the past die, kill it if you have to.”

So why can’t Ben do this without becoming an evil weirdo?

In ESB, Luke asks Yoda whether the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light. Yoda answers, no but it is quicker and easier. This is the key to why Anakin became Darth Vader. Anakin was afraid that he would not have the power to save Padme from her impending death. He needed more power and he needed it quickly. So he gave in to the Dark Side.

Now, this is Ben’s predicament: he knows how much is expected of him and he isn’t getting to that level. Like his grandfather, he needs more power and he needs it faster than Luke’s training can provide.

By the way, this is also obviously why Luke is so afraid of his nephew; he sees Ben going down the same path as Anakin and he has no idea how to prevent it. Luke is terrified that all he has accomplished is to make the exact same mistake as Yoda and Obi-Wan in creating the next Darth Vader.

Ben believes he must embrace the darkness to be powerful enough to realize his destiny, which is ultimately to fulfill what Vader started: the end of the galactic conflict between Light and Darkness, to bring order to the galaxy. This is the story of a person painfully forcing himself to be evil (Rey: “You’re a monster.” Kylo Ren: “Yes I am.”) because he believes it is necessary to achieve a greater destiny. And the further he goes, the more he is willing to destroy, the further away he gets from his goal, the more his destiny becomes a prison, the more his sense of clarity crumbles into doubt and despair.

To me, this is pretty fething tragic. Ben is not a person we can admire because he just arrogantly assumes he is the new Chosen One and he’s at least hypothetically willing to sacrifice anything and anyone (not least of all himself) to achieve his presumptive destiny. But the reason he believes that is because of an accident of birth. His family are important people who failed him miserably. In that sense, we may not admire him but we can sympathize with the crushing sense of responsibility that made him what he is.

Yeah but if your infering that much we could just start from scratch and pretend the new trilogy never happened.
Ultimately what you see in the 2 new movies is a character who is flatter than Anakin even taking acting ability into account and cannot even be called a caricature because he lacks even that depth. He's a Vader wannabe who has anger issues,daddy issues and a texts books worth of other psychological problems.

Hard to criticize Christensen too much from his performance, nearly everyone was similarly flat in PT.

Talking about EU characters,do you think Mara Jade will appear again? Zahn has a veto on her use but was otherwise open for the idea. After all, Thrawn has come back too.
She probably doesn't fit to current storylines however since her character is so tied to Luke.

I posted at length above as to why that is incorrect. So I suppose we will have to “agree to disagree.”

I collected a lot of SW trading cards back in the day. I guess this would make me sort of a fan. What do I like about SW? Episodes four to six. What do I despise? Awful characters like Jar-Jar Bings or however his vile name is spelled. In addition, all the new chars from the latest movies do I thing very well:

They suck. A lot. I didn't watch Solo and won't watch any further movie atrocities committed to the franchise.

 Manchu wrote:

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

Explaining all that without an exposition dump is one of the real strengths of these movies, IMO.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

Explaining all that without an exposition dump is one of the real strengths of these movies, IMO.

It's a shame that so many people aren't seeing it though.

balmong7 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

Explaining all that without an exposition dump is one of the real strengths of these movies, IMO.

It's a shame that so many people aren't seeing it though.

It's almost as if it's explained really really badly and barely at all...

I think that’s my problem with the new films, it’s not that I find them bad per se, but really frustrating; there are a lot of good ideas (and I think a good cast) buried in there, but rather poorly executed.

I actually think Ben Solo's character arc and background is being handled pretty decently. They are trying to show and not tell with him, which is better than the Prequels could muster.

I actually have few complaints about the Force characters side of the story so far as it stands. A few niggles here and there. It is everything else in the universe that has been weak.

 Yodhrin wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

Explaining all that without an exposition dump is one of the real strengths of these movies, IMO.

It's a shame that so many people aren't seeing it though.

It's almost as if it's explained really really badly and barely at all...

It isn’t even barely explained IMO. It’s there to be discovered by those who pick the new films apart under the generous assumption that there must be some kind of character arc implicit in all this jumble. For everyone else, Ben Solo is just a whiny emo loser, as has been argued a million times here on Dakka. If TFA and/or TLJ had been bothered to actually convey Ben’s story, I wouldn’t have to explain it here.


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 Easy E wrote:
which is better than the Prequels could muster

There’s no reason to pick a standard that low.

 Yodhrin wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

The problem is, we have to infer Ben’s story because both of these lazy ass Disney films don’t bother to explain it.

Explaining all that without an exposition dump is one of the real strengths of these movies, IMO.

It's a shame that so many people aren't seeing it though.

It's almost as if it's explained really really badly and barely at all...

Yeah, if only they had put as much effort into explaining Ben's backstory as they did with Vader's or the Emperor's in the original trilogy...

 Manchu wrote:
It isn’t even barely explained IMO. It’s there to be discovered by those who pick the new films apart under the generous assumption that there must be some kind of character arc implicit in all this jumble. For everyone else, Ben Solo is just a whiny emo loser, as has been argued a million times here on Dakka. If TFA and/or TLJ had been bothered to actually convey Ben’s story, I wouldn’t have to explain it here..

Honestly, it sometimes feels like I watched completely different movies to you.

Between TFA and TLJ, they quite clearly cover the fact that Ben was immensely strong in the force, was led astray by prolonged interference by Snoke and the feeling of betrayal due to a very poor, reconsidered decision by his master, and is now incredibly conflicted and trying to bull his way through it.

I really don't know what more you needed. Again, it's more than we were told about Vader in the original trilogy.

I don't think that's really fair. In the original trilogy, Obi Wan and Luke had a pretty decent conversation about Anakin in Episode 4.

Then Episode 5 and 6 had more in depth conversations between him and Yoda. Then him, Ghost Ben and Yoda.

The new trilogy equivalents would be like understanding Vader's relationships from.

"There's too much of his father in him."
"I've felt something I've not felt since..."
And
"The force is strong in this one."

If the new films really gave us, for example, some decent amount of time with Han and Leia in TFA. Then Luke and Leia in TLJ then things could have been more explicit.

Show not telling is all well and good, but people do have conversations sometimes.

Voss wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
It may just be me being bitter, but we'll probably just end up with Rey and Kylo being siblings, as that would just be another way to ape the original trilogy.

Given she's interacted with both parents, that seems... unlikely.

But if the Time Travel hypothesis hold's true, they could end up as Anakin's parents, and he'll die, she'll adopt the name 'Shmi' and hide on Tatooine, in order to start the Skywalker's Rise.
For a 'slave' household, they had far too much expensive kit and freedom anyway...


"It's like poetry, it rhymes"

1:20 Kylo Ren after a midichlorian-addled time travel plot where Rey is Anakin's mother (technically Great Grandpa):

 insaniak wrote:

Between TFA and TLJ, they quite clearly cover the fact that Ben was immensely strong in the force, was led astray by prolonged interference by Snoke and the feeling of betrayal due to a very poor, reconsidered decision by his master, and is now incredibly conflicted and trying to bull his way through it.

I really don't know what more you needed. Again, it's more than we were told about Vader in the original trilogy.

We do, but the characters have been set up differently: Vader is introduced to us as a master henchman, a former good guy turned bad who has a grudge against Obi-Wan and who apparently killed Luke's dad. The revelation that he 'killed' Anakin only in metaphorical sense, that he actually WAS Anakin, is just a bonus, an extra twist on character who was working very well already.
By contrast, Kylo Ren is build around his betrayal of his family and teacher. These are told to us relatively early - in fact very first scene we see him more or less tells this. He is not as effective as a menacing henchman as Vader was - this is not a dig towards character, he is not even meant to be. But since his betrayal is so defining character trait in his story arcs, we should know more about it. How did Snoke corrupt him so throughly that person like Luke Skywalker considered killing him - however briefly? Did he do some kind of mind trick or did he promise something really big? It sounds like Luke did know Snoke at that point already but there is no hint what kind of interaction they might have had. Did Snoke set up a rival Force school? Did he pretend to be Luke's friend and used his trust to turn his students against him? Or did Luke set up the school precisely to fight Snoke? We get that Ben admires Darth Vader and basically cosplays him. That is not a bad trait on a character but more is needed. Nobody kills his dad and participates in genocide just for cosplay.

That about covers it for me as well Backfire (and thanks for the new sig material), which leaves me wondering how they are going to introduce the Knights of Ren into the new film. Are they going to be something that just appears or some over elaborated back story? We were shown already that they helped burn down Luke's Temple but have very little info otherwise.

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, if only they had put as much effort into explaining Ben's backstory as they did with Vader's or the Emperor's in the original trilogy...

All you’re doing is pointing out how the OT was not convoluted and the DT is. The OT clearly and concisely explained everything we needed to know, which wasn’t much. Vader being Luke’s father was a surprise, not a mystery teased in ANH. Luke’s father being a Jedi was a matter of his up front characterization, not a mystery box. We could go on like this ...

Between TFA and TLJ, they quite clearly cover the fact that Ben was immensely strong in the force, was led astray by prolonged interference by Snoke and the feeling of betrayal due to a very poor, reconsidered decision by his master, and is now incredibly conflicted and trying to bull his way through it.

I really don't know what more you needed. Again, it's more than we were told about Vader in the original trilogy.

What I wanted, and what the general audience clearly needed, was clear and concise exposition. What we got was a tangle of implications and missing information to be filled in by officially licensed products. Kylo Ren is probably the character we can talk most about, not because we have been informed about him but because we know the characters who are is family, thanks to the OT, and so we can make some pretty sound inferences about him.


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Oh I see Compel and Backfire nicely explained this already.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ingtaer wrote:
which leaves me wondering how they are going to introduce the Knights of Ren into the new film. Are they going to be something that just appears or some over elaborated back story?

Almost certainly they will just appear. That’s JJ’s style. And there will be a Knights of Ren comic book series at some point.

We know they are going to appear Manchu as they are on the poster along with the new Sith troopers and TIE variant (in both Imperial and Sith colours, its called the Dagger). I am more curious as to the manner of their appearance, are they going to just sidle in or are they going to be made a big deal of (at least until Ben kills them all...).

As the prequels get so much hate (fully justified in my opinion) I wonder if many people have watched the fan edits of them? The Fall of the Jedi edit is actually pretty decent as it removes pretty much all the things that people complain about the most, like Annie the even younger, JarJar, emotion droids, flying Yoda etc.

But Flubber Yoda is one of the highlights. I'd always wondered how he did combat, seeing as he's somewhat on the smol side.

That, and his 'benefits cheat' walking stick immediately before anyone else shows up.

Yea Yoda's fight with Dooku is really cool, you could tell Christopher Lee's acting pedigree in those scenes. Just the way he stands and holds himself sells the idea of Dooku as a master swordsman.

The fight between Yoda and Palpatine was pretty rubbish, in fact Palpatine had no good fights. I don't know whether that was a limitation of the actor or a deliberate choice by Georgy Porgy.

Possibly a deliberate thing.

Palpatine is a planner, first and foremost. And I'd say that's largely reflected in his fighting style.

Within second he cuts down what, three Jedi Masters. Not Jedi. Jedi Masters. And that's mostly down to hurling himself into combat, quite literally. He knew their knowledge on him was limited. Who'd expect a fairly doddery old coot to come at them like that?

Indeed, it's not until Mace gets a handle on it that we see, actually, Palpatine perhaps isn't the greatest swordsman you'll ever face. Competent? Sure. But far from a champion.

Against Yoda? It's predominantly Force powers. Which strike me as far more Palpatine's thing, if not quite as cinematic.

So I can buy it was a deliberate delineation. Palpatine isn't a Warrior - hence he needs the likes of Maul, Tyrannus and Vader.

Yea those two got Warfed, which would be fine if it looked good but they literally just stood there like lemons.

Personally I would have cut 33% from Anikan's and Ob Wan's fight, which was too long, to make the scene where the Jedi try to arrest the Chancellor of the Republic more dramatic.

I fact why have Palpatine fight at all? It would have cooler imo to have Mace try to arrest him publicly, and provide the justification for the destruction of the entire Jedi order through his actions.

"The Jedi act against the Republic, they cling to the power we entrusted them with during the war... etc"

 ingtaer wrote:
I am more curious as to the manner of their appearance, are they going to just sidle in

Right—as I posted above, they will just appear as per JJ’s style, with no explanation. Any explanation will be via comic or novel, off screen.