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Star Wars VII-These Aren't the Spoilers You Are Looking For


Manhole Eunuchsbane

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(Howdyphillip) I am absolutely positive that he wasn't killed. He returns with cybernetics in The Clone Wars which is Star Wars can

 As I recall it never gives any explanation for how he ended up as a feral cyborg monster on a different planet, though. For him to survive, realistically there must have been someone waiting at the bottom of the shaft with a net to catch him and a fully equipped medical suite to keep him alive. Obi-wan was most definitely trying to kill him.

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Kylo Ren, in addition to actually looking at, and using, themes of the Force and its relation to emotions that were stated but slightly underused in the OT and ignored in the PT, was and is basically a better written version of Anakin.  I buy this guy turning into a Sith Lord.  I buy him betraying Luke and Han and Leia and deciding he is going to emulate the "strongest" person he knows, possibly even for what seemed like good initial reasons.  I buy his fall to the Dark Side in a way that I didn't buy Anakin's, and I saw three movies ostensibly about that.  

Here's what we know about Ben Solo:  

  • His parents are galactic war heroes who deal with adversity and interpersonal conflict by throwing themselves into their work
  • His grandfather's name is synonymous with "menancing, imposing terror and power"
  • His uncle and Jedi teacher is basically Space Jesus reborn, what with superpowers, defeating the Emperor, and re-founding an order of mystical guardian knights who are famous throughout the galaxy.

I don't know whether the following happened, but I could draw up a proposed backstory for Kylo Ren based on that alone:  Ben Solo was utterly terrified of falling to the Dark Side.  Utterly.  Every moment in training he had to be perfect.  Any discussion about his fears with his family was avoided or fled as Leia dove into trying to found the New Republic and then fight the nascent First Order.  You've got a kid growing up with no parental support, a ton of pressure, and a massive amount of fear (and Yoda is pretty damn clear what fear leads to).  He makes a small mistake or there is an accident and he blames himself and thinks he's too weak.  (This is pure conjecture, but the rest has textual support.) He thinks about Vader and the power of the dark side.  And he goes over because he needs to feel powerful, to live up to this perfection.  And then when he's there, he finds he can't live up to that ideal either.  It explains his fear of being seduced by the Light Side.  It explains him begging Vader for strength.  It explains his tantrums and his insecurity and how his entire demeanor changes when he's wearing the mask.  And if he started on his path of "I need to be stronger so I can save everyone" just like Vader he ties in with the First Order and their apparent need to have, well, order. The connections to the appeal of fascist ideologies should be clear.  Kylo Ren might be a bad Vader, but he's a fantastic Anakin.  

In the meantime, Luke has been trying to restart the Jedi Order, and his first apprentice goes and turns Vader on him again.  Of course he cancels the whole deal and goes to hide as a hermit, because he's just restarted a cycle of violence he'd thought he'd avoided.  Did all of this happen?  I don't know, but it was something I could read into, because there are hooks there.  Vader has nothing, until ESB.  And even then...not much, but there's something to wonder about.  We just got that earlier.  How did this scion of heroes turn bad?  Lets explore!  (and I suspect we will!)  Kylo Ren is an excellently written and acted  character.  He isn't supposed to be Vader, and so the complaints that he isn't as intimidating as Vader miss the mark, I think.  We saw his development.  We saw Vader-as-Anakin in this movie.  Wait until the next, perhaps.

One thing this movie did very well, in my opinion, was use elements and callbacks to the OT very, very well.  The one glaring exception is Starkiller Base (which is why Finn lying about it being a superweapon about to fire off would have been pretty fucking great for me).  Kylo Ren is a different image of Vader, and making him as effective a villain as Vader would have been a boring retread.  Vader2.0 is boring.  But an insecure Vader cosplayer trying to live up to Vader's reputation?  That's fascinating.  Notice the FO officers:  They're all young.  Very young.  Babyfaced, even.  Too young to have fought in the Galactic Civil War.  In contrast, all of the Resistance leaders are veterans of the First War.  That's good visual storytelling, and tells us something about the FO.  They're immature.  They're figuring it out.  They're dressing up in the trappings of their parents and to overcompensate for their feelings of insecurity, they're doing what their role models did but more so.  Kylo Ren and the First Order tell us more about Anger and Fear and the Dark Side (which, to a huge extent, is what Star Wars is about) than anything in the PT.

And on that note:  I really, really want to see what happens with Rey.  She's got an interesting relationship with anger, too.  She's got a fantastic angry face.  Look at her righteous anger when she hunts down Finn because BB8 says he stole Poe's jacket.  Hell, look at her anger when someone is trying to steal BB8.  Notice that she says something to the effect of "he doesn't think you're a person."  She's one of the few people who treat droids like people.  Her face when she's going to shoot the stormtrooper on Maz's planet.  She's got righteous anger all over, but she beats Kylo Ren (injured and unable to access the Dark Side) because she listens to Yoda: "You will know... when you are calm, at peace, passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, NEVER for attack."  She's losing to Kylo when she keeps throwing stabs at him.  When she stops, the battle ends.  She's won.    So where does she go from here?  I want to find out what the new trilogy says about anger and fear. Does anger always leads to darkness (ie, righteous anger on behalf of others is still wrong, as shown by Luke's pacifism in the face of the Emperor's Evil  But what does that say about Vader killing the Emperor in defense of helpless others)?  Or, like the PT seems to argue (by showing that the utter failing of the Jedi stems from their rejection of all emotion) is it not the emotion that matters, but what we do with it?

 

e:  Well, that was all over the place.  Sorry for the rambling there.  

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Thirded. I left the cinema convinced that Kylo Ren's portrayal would not be a contentious issue whatsoever. How anyone can think that Vader (iconic, but lacking in depth which should have been dealt with in the prequels and spectacularly wasn't) or The Emperor (look up pantomime over acted evil in a dictionary) are more interesting villains is beyond me.

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Thirded. I left the cinema convinced that Kylo Ren's portrayal would not be a contentious issue whatsoever. How anyone can think that Vader (iconic, but lacking in depth which should have been dealt with in the prequels and spectacularly wasn't) or The Emperor (look up pantomime over acted evil in a dictionary) are more interesting villains is beyond me.

Are you serious with this? Are you actually saying that Kylo Ren is a better villain than Darth Vader? The irrational praising of this movie have gone absolutely insane now. 

 

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Are you serious with this? Are you actually saying that Kylo Ren is a better villain than Darth Vader? The irrational praising of this movie have gone absolutely insane now. 

 

I'll grant you that Vader's iconic status is very difficult to remove from the equation, but yes. By any objective standard, he has far more interesting character traits. Vader was intended as a walking embodiment of evil in ANH, then they changed him slightly when they retconned his identity as Anakin Skywalker, then he basically turns back to the light with no real insight as to how he felt about any of it. Sebastian Shaw certainly did a great job of making me sympathise with him when the helmet came off, but that was one short scene in three movies. The character's been played by David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Sebastian Shaw, Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christenson so he's more of a cobbled together ideal than a human character.

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I'll grant you that Vader's iconic status is very difficult to remove from the equation, but yes. By any objective standard, he has far more interesting character traits. Vader was intended as a walking embodiment of evil in ANH, then they changed him slightly when they retconned his identity as Anakin Skywalker, then he basically turns back to the light with no real insight as to how he felt about any of it. Sebastian Shaw certainly did a great job of making me sympathise with him when the helmet came off, but that was one short scene in three movies. The character's been played by David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Sebastian Shaw, Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christenson so he's more of a cobbled together ideal than a human character.

In A New Hope you get the sense that there's more to Darth Vader than is showing on the screen, but I never once felt that way with Kylo Ren. I get what they were trying to do with Kylo Ren. They want to show an emotionally unstable villain, but the way they do it is just lacklustre and I don't feel any depth, because he's written to just serve a story. In one scene he says that he feels the calling of the light, and some scenes later when probably the person who has the biggest influence on him tries to speak to that side he doesn't even hesitate about killing his father. 

The way that whole scene is built up kind of throws the other scene in the water, and for me it doesn't make him more interesting and shows his flaws. It shows that he's egotistical and whiny and that he never really felt the calling of the light, it was only put in the movie because the writers wanted it there, not because it made sense with the character. Vader might have been evil but at least he didn't kill Luke just to prove a point to himself. Even in the first one you get to see the respect Vader shows for Force users, and mentions it when he's chasing Luke. Some of the things Kylo Ren does doesn't mesh well together in my view, and how he's managed to beat a Jedi Academy with Luke Skywalker at the top and still get beaten by someone who's 10 years younger and not a Jedi is still just a big plothole in the movie. 

 

 

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 As I recall it never gives any explanation for how he ended up as a feral cyborg monster on a different planet, though. For him to survive, realistically there must have been someone waiting at the bottom of the shaft with a net to catch him and a fully equipped medical suite to keep him alive. Obi-wan was most definitely trying to kill him.

So Han may not be dead!!!!!! The lightsaber through the chest, fall through a massive shaft and destruction of the Starkiller were all just sleight of hand. "There has been and awakening." Thanks, Felice.  

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So Han may not be dead!!!!!! The lightsaber through the chest, fall through a massive shaft and destruction of the Starkiller were all just sleight of hand. "There has been and awakening." Thanks, Felice.  

"We can rebuild him...we have the technology," The Six Million Dollar Han. Coming May 2017.

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In A New Hope you get the sense that there's more to Darth Vader than is showing on the screen, but I never once felt that way with Kylo Ren. I get what they were trying to do with Kylo Ren. They want to show an emotionally unstable villain, but the way they do it is just lacklustre and I don't feel any depth, because he's written to just serve a story. In one scene he says that he feels the calling of the light, and some scenes later when probably the person who has the biggest influence on him tries to speak to that side he doesn't even hesitate about killing his father. 

The way that whole scene is built up kind of throws the other scene in the water, and for me it doesn't make him more interesting and shows his flaws. It shows that he's egotistical and whiny and that he never really felt the calling of the light, it was only put in the movie because the writers wanted it there, not because it made sense with the character. Vader might have been evil but at least he didn't kill Luke just to prove a point to himself. Even in the first one you get to see the respect Vader shows for Force users, and mentions it when he's chasing Luke. Some of the things Kylo Ren does doesn't mesh well together in my view, and how he's managed to beat a Jedi Academy with Luke Skywalker at the top and still get beaten by someone who's 10 years younger and not a Jedi is still just a big plothole in the movie. 

 

 

Certainly he hesitates before killing his father. There was an immense struggle there with the character, and Adam Driver did a fantastic job through facial expressions and dialog portraying it. I have seen the movie four times now, and every single time that I have seen the movie, Han and the light side of the force is winning that emotional encounter until the point that the sun disappears leaving them covered in darkness. You can actually see from that small physical cue, a complete change of demeanor in Kylo Ren. 

 As far as him beating Luke as a plot hole, well, that is nothing but rubbish. Not once was it mentioned, hinted, or even implied that he beat Luke in combat. As a matter of fact, I would find it absolutely inconsistent with Luke's character that he would engage with his nephew in a fight. 

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Certainly he hesitates before killing his father. There was an immense struggle there with the character, and Adam Driver did a fantastic job through facial expressions and dialog portraying it.

I feel like we watched a different scene. Looked to me like he just wanted to lure Han in close for the personal kill. Meh each to their own. It was probably meant to be your interpretation I just didn't see that.

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Certainly he hesitates before killing his father. There was an immense struggle there with the character, and Adam Driver did a fantastic job through facial expressions and dialog portraying it. I have seen the movie four times now, and every single time that I have seen the movie, Han and the light side of the force is winning that emotional encounter until the point that the sun disappears leaving them covered in darkness. You can actually see from that small physical cue, a complete change of demeanor in Kylo Ren. 

 As far as him beating Luke as a plot hole, well, that is nothing but rubbish. Not once was it mentioned, hinted, or even implied that he beat Luke in combat. As a matter of fact, I would find it absolutely inconsistent with Luke's character that he would engage with his nephew in a fight. 

Who said anything about combat? I certainly didn't. But if Kylo Ren manages to wipe out all Jedis (hmmm.. where do I recognise that from) but Luke (and maybe an 8 year old Rey, who has been master trained by Luke so she will beat a Jedi who has been trained for 10 more years...) and basically turn Luke into an exile, then I'd say Luke is beaten, even if they didn't cross lightsabres once, which I don't think they did. Luke, one of the most powerful Force users ever, was played by a 18-19 year old kid who's shown 10 years later to not even being able to hold his own against a non Force user and a 19 year old girl, which may or may not have had Jedi training, and even if she did get Jedi training, it would only be from say the age of 5 to 9, or something like that. That was what I was getting at, never once did I say anything about him facing Luke, because if he did face Luke and survive but then didn't beat Rey, the fight takes another step down in my view. 

At least with Palpatine we saw the progression of him getting to Anakin. How the hell Snoke got to Kylo Ren and turned him here will be an interesting way to see how they will explain that shit. 

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I feel like we watched a different scene. Looked to me like he just wanted to lure Han in close for the personal kill. Meh each to their own. It was probably meant to be your interpretation I just didn't see that.

Why would he need to? There's no need for him to lure him in. There's no need for any of that.

It was kylo ren's test. To himself more than anything. Which is exactly what snoke says to him. He needs to not just kill han, but kill him as a very conscious choice. It is the step that makes his journey to the dark side complete.

And I'm starting to agree with Vader as being a less realized villain. He was certainly more of a bad ass, but his face turn was idiotic and came out of no where. While I don't know why ren went dark, I fully believe that this isn't something to be glossed over. That isn't a plot hole. It's just backstory that hasn't been covered yet.

Really good analysis merentha.

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Why would he need to? There's no need for him to lure him in. There's no need for any of that.

 

It was kylo ren's test. To himself more than anything. Which is exactly what snoke says to him. He needs to not just kill han, but kill him as a very conscious choice. It is the step that makes his journey to the dark side complete.

 

And I'm starting to agree with Vader as being a less realized villain. He was certainly more of a bad ass, but his face turn was idiotic and came out of no where. While I don't know why ren went dark, I fully believe that this isn't something to be glossed over. That isn't a plot hole. It's just backstory that hasn't been covered yet.

 

Really good analysis merentha.

So his journey to the dark side isn't complete when he kills an innocent old man on Jakku? I would say you are very much turned the moment you start cutting down innocents.

The reason the Han death scene is there isn't for Kylo Ren's character. It's because JJ wanted a Han death scene and they probably couldn't come up with a better scene than that, so that's why it doesn't mesh. Having a shadow coming in just before is also just so heavy handed and unsubtle. And why Han is trying to find his son the first time 10 years after he's turned is also a bit weird.

It just feels like they could have given Han Solo a more worthy ending. And that Luke didn't have a single line in the movie is also a weird decision. That last scene was not as big a deal as they tried to make it. It just felt misplaced and I would have been fine with Luke having like 5 minutes of screen time or something. They should have focused a bit more on story and characters, and less on shine and effects. It's kind of the same way Lucas gets so much hate for the prequels, but now people are loving it because it's not Lucas anymore. It seems to me that he at least had some visions, and now we're getting remakes instead. 

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So his journey to the dark side isn't complete when he kills an innocent old man on Jakku? I would say you are very much turned when you start cutting down innocents, you're definitely no Jedi, I can tell you that much.

The reason the Han death scene is there isn't for Kylo Ren's character. It's because JJ wanted a Han death scene and they probably couldn't come up with a better scene than that, so that's why it doesn't mesh. Having a shadow coming in just before is also just such bad writing. So a shadow is what made this guy kill his father, damn man, ok..... 

It's about the point of no return. Just like Anakin didn't turn to the Dark Side when he slaughtered the Tusken Raiders, or when he killed Count Dooku in cold blood. It was after he killed Mace Windu and crossed that point of no return, when he saw himself as irredeemable. He committed an act he didn't believe he would ever be forgiven for, in betraying and murdering a member of the Jedi Council. Similarly, Ren has to kill Han because it's what he perceives as making him irredeemable for his mother and Luke. The point at which he has truly shunned the Light and embraced the dark.

I wouldn't say that the shadow is bad writing at all, it's pretty effective symbolism. As the light drains away outside, so it also drains away from Ren's heart. It's not going to win any literary prizes, but for a film series about good vs evil, light vs darkness, it's perfect. In a novel it might be weaker symbolism, but on the screen, this is often how light and darkness has been used, to great effect, for decades.

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Yes, his journey to the dark side isn't complete when he kills lor. The movie literally says as much.

I get that you didn't like the movie and that's a shame, and I'm sorry that it didn't work for you, but really you're glossing over pretty much the entire movie to make your points.

You didn't like rey beating ren - even though the movie is all about the force awakening and we see rey embrace the force while saying the words "the force".

You didn't buy that kylo ren was conflicted - despite the movie literally having you tell us that ren is conflicted and is feeling the allure of the light side, that snoke says facing han will be his greatest test, and then the actual scene.

Killing innocents ain't a problem for jedi. The problem is whether you give in to your hate. If you kill a bunch of people dispassionately you're fine jedi wise. And you aren't irredeemable almost ever - see Vader for an example. For kylo, this was his final step.

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It's about the point of no return. Just like Anakin didn't turn to the Dark Side when he slaughtered the Tusken Raiders, or when he killed Count Dooku in cold blood. It was after he killed Mace Windu and crossed that point of no return, when he saw himself as irredeemable. He committed an act he didn't believe he would ever be forgiven for, in betraying and murdering a member of the Jedi Council. Similarly, Ren has to kill Han because it's what he perceives as making him irredeemable for his mother and Luke. The point at which he was truly shunned the Light and embraced the dark.

I wouldn't say that the shadow is bad writing at all, it's pretty effective symbolism. As the light drains away outside, so it also drains away from Ren's heart. It's not going to win any literary prizes, but for a film series about good vs evil, light vs darkness, it's perfect. In a novel it might be weaker symbolism, but on the screen, this is often how light and darkness has been used, to great effect, for decades.

Well, Anakin's killing of the Tuskan Raiders is there to kind of show us that he will turn eventually, and if he ever said it to the Jedi Council I'm pretty sure he'd be kicked out or at least  persecuted. That scene is there to show us that the darkness kind of always was there with Anakin, even before we get the whole turn in Episode 3. 

What we get with Kylo Ren is a villain that is pretending to be evil, because he wants to be evil but already is evil and that's just not interesting to me. If you kill an innocent old man you don't know or a family member, that's the same evil, but you have more emotional bonds to one of them. From a Jedi perspective I don't think they would put one in front of the other. That whole dilemma doesn't mesh with me and it's all just poorly explained in my opinion. His flaws doesn't make him a better character, it just makes the writing worse, especially in a universe, where as you say, there is big contrast between the dark side and the light side.  

 

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