The Problem Of Disney Star Wars

[Istbor]

One more thing. Disney Star Wars has crappy villains. I love Adam Driver in Indie films (e.g. Paterson, What if? etc) and he made Girls watchable, but he is terribly miscast and I can't shake the Darth Emo nickname. In fact, his best moment as Kylo Ren was in that SNL skit. Snoke was just a pale mockery of Palpatine. Compare them to Darth Vader, arguably the greatest film villain of all time (do you remember his sheer presence when you were a kid?!), and the truly malevolent Emperor - not to mention secondary villains like Jabba, Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters, etc.

Nah, I think Driver is perfect. Kylo Ren is also so. I don't want an endless parade of Darth Vaders and Emperor Palpatines. They are gone. And maybe that is very realistic. Vader was a great villian and he had great presence, but should every Sith? Should every villian be the same cookie cutter uber strong and domineering? I think not. We won't see Vader's like again, or at least not for a long time, and that to me is real. It's reflected in History even. Great and terrible people arise, and fall. Time goes on, and eventually they are over-shadowed by the next, or not.

And is Ren a Sith? Maybe at the conclusion of The Last Jedi, but before that? I think he is portrayed as a reluctant Sith well. We can see the division in him as he toils over what he thinks he must do with his father. We see him again, pause and then even refrain from killing his mother, and then that look of astonishment and maybe even a little of sadness as his wingmen follow through.

I watch the movies and see him as this reluctant Sith. In over his head, and like many who first start down that path, and maybe some of the most tragic, one who thinks they have now gone too far to ever go back. That to me is what makes a good villain. That thinking that you have gone too far, and there is only one way forward, that path of destruction. That path to the dark side.

Snoke? I loved it. He was some great schemer, or at least we were shown to think so, and then Ren, in his ascent to truly becoming a Sith, maybe even Darth Ren? He kills him. Gone, all that silly speculation about who Snoke was turned on its ear. I thought that was a great move.

It is my hope, that we see Ren start to settle into this role as the Dark Lord of the Sith and level out. Or not. I kind of also like the fly off the handle Ren. It makes him unpredictable and a different kind of frightening. He's not Vader and maybe now he can get from out behind that shadow to be a different kind of Dark-side user.

 

[Shasarak]

Everytime I see Kylo Ren I think, would Darth Vader have put up with that?

But then again he is probably a perfect villain for the Millennial audience.

 

[dragoner]

Kylo and Rey as lovers would add more verve to the storyline than killing a roomful people, yet one is family friendly (killing) and romance is not? Meh

 

[Kaodi]

I do not think Kylo Ren counts as Sith. The Sith were an organization of dark force users, not a collection of dark force users. Maybe he will take up the mantle in IX, but unless it is explicit they I would go with, "not a Sith".

In any case I think I have a relatively rare criticism of TLJ: it is a whiter movie that TFA. Finn was brutally demoted in TLJ, and Poe just somewhat less so. Their actions literally almost lead to the extermination of the Resistance. That is a big difference from what happened in TFA. Sure Poe was captured and interrogated in TFA but he did not do anything wrong per se. And Finn - he is the first character you meet in this trilogy. He defects, saves Poe, and he faces Kylo Ren with the lightsaber despite not having Force powers. That was epic and meaningful, and his losing did not diminish that in any way.

TLJ let them down. Poe had a flyboy moment but that was the same time he let the whole bomber fleet die. And the actually fighting between Finn and Phasma was mercilessly short. That could have and should have been one of the great duels in Star Wars film history, a melee battle between two non-force users. But they did not take advantage of that.

The only possibly meaningful thing that came out of their whole arc was the thing with the kids at the stables. And of a black boy, a white girl, and a white boy, who turned out to be the most important one? The white boy. That is what the movie ended on. All the other important stuff was done by Rey, Leia, Luke, Holdo, and Kylo Ren. For all people complain about TLJ being some kind of SJW movie the racial politics of it are actually bantha poodoo.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It's hard to say what my biggest problems with the series are, how much it is just nostalgia for all the good parts of the old movies or the old EU, how much of it is resistance to change, and how much it is just genuine more or less objective flaws.

Some people describe Rey as Mary Sue because she's too competent, but I believe that is not really that important.

I think one of the bigger aspects about it is that it doesn't feel like she is sufficiently challenged by anything and this denies her real growth. Luke's first light saber training isn't so easy, and him deciding to really trust the force and succeeding feels like great growth. ESB adds to it - we don't really know the time frame of his training with Yoda, but we see Luke's transition and how he gains better mastery of the force. We also see him rush out and end up being overwhelmed when facing Vader, both due to the lack of experience and training, but also due to the emotional challenge of learning that the most terrifying and hated villain in the galaxy (and his personal enemy) is his father, and he loses a hand over it.
Rey's challenges just always fall flat compared to the journey Luke takes. She learns from a questionable third party that her parents might not be important and fights her way through a group of supposed elite guards, and her final challenge of using the force in the movie is lifting some rocks, which just feels a bit lame compared to what she has already accomplished so far.
There are certainly some interesting aspects to her - unlike Luke, she is an unwilling hero in the beginning, and her own encounter with the Dark Side is visually quite interesting (but it also feels a bit too open to interpretation).

Overall I think it would have helped if they had really thought up an arc for the trilogy beforehand, or at least after the first. I mean, that is kinda the point of making it a trilogy.

 

[Imaculata]

I didn't really mind the character of Rey in TFA, but I feel TLJ really needed to push her further as a character. I mean, what does she really do in TLJ? She spends a lot of time on an island, which ultimately doesn't lead anywhere, and then fights Snoke's guards a bit. This movie would have been the perfect opportunity to have her suffer defeat, or to be challenged in her convictions. To have shocking dark revelations about her and the origin of her powers. This movie NEEDED to do that. Instead it shrugged, admitted it had no answers, and made jazz hands at the audience.

In TFA Rey is wide-eyed, and dreaming about the grand adventures of great heroes. The name Luke Skywalker gets her excited, because he is a legend. TLJ does some dispelling in that regards, but I feel they didn't go far enough. I wanted to see a complete Luke heel turn, or a complete Rey heel turn. There is some great potential to have Rey and Kylo Ren doubt the side they are fighting on and turn more towards the gray. Maybe Kylo Ren can redeem himself, and turn away from the dark side? Maybe Rey can lose her faith in the light side of the force? Perhaps they can meet somewhere in the middle and reject both ideologies? Instead the movie has both characters flirt with this possibility, and immediately abandon it.

Also, am I the only one who noticed that Daisy Ridley's acting at the start of TLJ is really bad? She gets better later on, but it is a rough opening.

 

[Zardnaar]

I didn't really mind the character of Rey in TFA, but I feel TLJ really needed to push her further as a character. I mean, what does she really do in TLJ? She spends a lot of time on an island, which ultimately doesn't lead anywhere, and then fights Snoke's guards a bit. This movie would have been the perfect opportunity to have her suffer defeat, or to be challenged in her convictions. To have shocking dark revelations about her and the origin of her powers. This movie NEEDED to do that. Instead it shrugged, admitted it had no answers, and made jazz hands at the audience.

In TFA Rey is wide-eyed, and dreaming about the grand adventures of great heroes. The name Luke Skywalker gets her excited, because he is a legend. TLJ does some dispelling in that regards, but I feel they didn't go far enough. I wanted to see a complete Luke heel turn, or a complete Rey heel turn. There is some great potential to have Rey and Kylo Ren doubt the side they are fighting on and turn more towards the gray. Maybe Kylo Ren can redeem himself, and turn away from the dark side? Maybe Rey can lose her faith in the light side of the force? Perhaps they can meet somewhere in the middle and reject both ideologies? Instead the movie has both characters flirt with this possibility, and immediately abandon it.

Also, am I the only one who noticed that Daisy Ridley's acting at the start of TLJ is really bad? She gets better later on, but it is a rough opening.

She isn't a great actor but Mark Hamill wasn't that good in SE:IV and then we had kid Anakin and Hayden so I gave her a free pass- she looks good by comparison. Any problems with her character are not the actors fault.

 

[trappedslider]

 

[Imaculata]

She isn't a great actor but Mark Hamill wasn't that good in SE:IV and then we had kid Anakin and Hayden so I gave her a free pass- she looks good by comparison. Any problems with her character are not the actors fault.

In TFA she was great, so it was kind of weird to see her deliver such a bad performance. But like I said, this is only during the opening of the movie, so I think the director is really to blame here.

 

[Umbran]

And is Ren a Sith?

Not as such. While they haven't really defined it in the new movies, going on the old canon, the Sith were a specific tradition of users of the Dark Side of the Force. Snoke never uses the term "Sith". Andy Serkis (the actor for Snoke) went so far as to say explicitly that Snoke was not a Sith Lord.

Snoke was some other user of the Dark Side. So, Kylo Ren is not Sith either.