The Sequel Trilogy has an Identity Crisis

I have a lot of thoughts on how to handle this discussion prompt, but I guess it boils down to: for this to have worked, we would have had to watch Kylo's descent into darkness, not him as a dark character, and lot more would have changed as well.
From the descent, we'd have to mash up his pre-TFA story along with his TLJ story, and throw in some other things. Rey could be seen as a teetering point, a glimpse into Ben's future. Whatever she is, he would oppose...until they find out about her past, and then it switches to them being Kindred Spirits. And finally, Ben would have to learn to accept his own fate, outside of Rey's. Would this mean she dies and he lives? Would this mean that they both live, and Reylos rejoice? Does that mean something else entirely? I'm not sure.

 

That's fair! I guess for me, for this to have worked, we'd need to see Ben have a sort of Dark-side Hero's Journey. An inverse of Luke and Anakin's journeys, with the "obligatory plot twist" being that Anakin died as Anakin, not as Darth Vader; this would send Ben into a spiral, and to me, THAT'S where Rey would come in. But I guess I just can't see it with the story is the way it is now. There are too many moving parts, too many characters I'm afraid would be left out. At the very least, this would have to be a parallel story being told, and film isn't always the best structure for that.
I agree that this latest trilogy should have focused on a Skywalker, but I guess I disagree on who the Skywalker should have been and how they should have been focused on.
I'm not sure if this is making sense, or if I'm going of on a different tangent lol!

 

It wasn't, but I like this a LOT better than the previous ideas! The idea of Luke, having failed, coming back and asking for his students' help to atone for his failures...there's something utterly human in that. It's brave yet vulnerable (all forgiveness is vulnerable, and it's always harder than people think it is); there's a sense of proactiveness on Luke's side that separates him from his thematic predecessors of Obi-Wan and Yoda. OT fans get their last hurrah, and the theme of handing the baton off can be done with the original gang meeting...yeah, I'm liking this.

(My original idea was for Finn to be the Skywalker - which I still 100% believe he is/should have been - and Rey to either be the nobody or the Palpatine (I've come around on Rey Palpatine for thematic reasons, even if the narrative bungled the execution). From there it could be about Finn - the man with no past - learning that he does come from somewhere and he does have family out there, but he doesn't need to follow in their footsteps. In the end, it could end in a different conclusion than the OT did. Where Luke tried to save his father, Finn would ultimately decide to kill his cousin. Where Leia discovers that Luke is her brother, she would also discover that Rey and/or Poe is another child to her as well (via adoption/mentoring rather than actual birth). In the end, Kylo dies a villain, Finn forges his own path, and Rey has a family.)

 

A real brave move would have been the following:
Kylo Ren as the protagonist. We follow a young Skywalker villain and his journey on the dark side of the force.

Instead of a light side trio we then have a dark side trio. Maybe Kylo, Hux and Phasma.

Or we have Kylo as the protagonist on the dark side and Finn as the portagonist on the light side.
Why not Rey, you may ask? Because she's pretty much a female Luke. We don't need this. Finn would be a better choice, especially because he hast something to do with Kylo's First Order.

But I'm getting off-topic here- so I agree with you, @DarthSnow, Kylo/Ben should have been the main character of the ST.

 

The ST should have embraced Rey Nobody and stayed on the path of moving beyond special magical bloodlines.
Making it about "A Skywalker" in the end is a symptom of lack of creativity on the part of Lucasfilm.

 

Rey and Ben souls and their stories are bonded by the force. He’s the other half of her, therefore she just had to take his name. He gave her his life. But making her a Palpatine wasn't needed.

 

Agree.

The story were doing great until the release of TROS. I just think they complicated too much revealing that Rey was a Palpatine and daughter of a clone of Palpatine !!!

 

I disagree. I do agree that Ben should have gotten a bit more screen time at least in TROS. But what you stated above sounds like a generic cliched story about an angry young man coming back to find himself. Yes that happened in this film. But Ben came around on his own and yes on his own.

I only think that Rey helped him,in so much that he was smitten with her and she served as an example that you can go through lousy circumstances and yet still comport yourself with dignity and fight to be your better self. But she didn't persuade Ben to do anything Ben was not already prepared to do.

Even your point about Rey being some disgruntled former student/ex-employee has been done adnauseum. The track done in TLJ and TROS was a bit more fresh and more original and made use good storytelling. Since apparently they took Lucas idea about Anakin's grandchildren and even what they had originally had planned out and twisted that on it's head. I find it far more interesting-- and more original story than a re-tread of Luke's origins.

And it even adds a layer of spice to it, to have Rey be a Palpatine, the granddaughter of the villains' long time nemesis and decide to side with the opposing side.

I can see why given the SW fandom (bizarre in my opinion) view. That SW can /only be about the main trio or the Skywalkers. But I take no issue with it.

Because to go back to the theme of the TLJ anyone can be a Skywalker (ie. a hero). It doesn't need to be by inherantance. It can and should be by character. I am a massive Rey fan girl, and this is not by accident. She is naturally the kind of heroine/hero I gravitate to. Rey was orphaned as a child. She spent 14 years going through a hellish existance . Yet she fought and she persevered and she made most of her time. She never gave into anger and despair. Contrast that with Ben. What happened to him? His Mommy and Daddy didn't spend enough time with him, his grumpy Uncle dismissed him and as a result Snoke/Palpy filled his head with poison. But so what? No one gave Rey pep talks. All she had in her head was the memory of her father telling her he would be back for her one day. Something she must have understood after the passage of time would not happen. Yet she still pressed on and did what she had to. I honestly think that part of the reason that Rey never joined Ren in TLJ was that she wanted no part of TFO, she understood quite well what it was like to suffer under the hands of bullies and she wasn't about to join them.

I still continue to shake my head at the angry fans who are resentful that Disney allowed Ben to die (I am sure he will be back). There was no way that LF could allow Ben to walk off into the sunset with his girlfriend considering all the things he did. Along with the fact that there are characters who experienced much worse than him, yet did not prey on others.

--- Double Post Merged, Aug 21, 2020, Original Post Date: Aug 21, 2020 ---

The use of the ST deserters was absolutely brilliant because it was a more effective use than what was apparently in the Trevorrow's script. It made much better use of Finn's leadership and showed that he could strategize (ie. think with his head). Than have him standing before a legion of ST blaster in hand screaming 'Down with the man!' like Che Guevara. .

 

In one - bitter - way the Episodes as a whole were quite consistent. All of the Skywalkers put their love interest and/or their family on the first place on the very end, even with dying as last consequence. They all died for loving someone more than themselves.
A bitter sweet family drama.
In my personal opinion, I would have hoped for a better ending of Ben Solo.
His whole life was nearly as horrible as Anakins.
Another theme they played with. How one ancestor going full into the darkness overshadows the life of the generations that follow.
SW 1 - 9 tell us, that the Skywalkers had to die one after another to save the light.
Let's hope that not everyone has to pay this price to do the right thing.

 

While I have certain gripes with the ST, I’m glad that the Trilogy was essentially about Rey instead of Ben/Kylo. Call me old fashioned, but I still enjoy to watch a story about the good guy (Luke OT) over a conflicted/eventual bad guy (Anakin PT). I like the PT for its macro story and world building but I just never gravitated to Anakin. While I feel the lack of world building hurt the ST, the character of Rey resonated with me so I cared about her for 3 movies.

 

Having rewatched the ST recently (and then TROS again the other night), I really think the biggest problems are that they tried to focus on way too many characters.

In this trilogy, we had Maz, Rose, DJ, Holdo, Zorii, Jannah, Allegiant General Pryde, and Captain Phasma as important secondary characters. It really felt like JJ and Rian would constantly just cast out the side characters from the previous film and introduce a bunch of new ones in the next one. I’d argue that most of these characters didn’t need to exist: in fact, I would’ve kept Rose and Phasma and just given Connix and Snap Wexley bigger roles.

And while I understand why Rian Johnson split Finn and Poe up for TLJ, I feel like splitting all three of the main characters apart in the middle chapter of the trilogy was a big misstep. I really liked both of their characters, especially Poe, but I feel like they both could’ve been utilized in the story a lot better.

Lastly, Rey and Kylo. Their relationship was the most interesting part of this trilogy for me and I wish we could’ve seen more of it. (I believe Kylo Ren only has like twenty minutes of screen time in each movie, which I think is a MAJOR mistake.) I would’ve also introduced the concept of their dyad in the Force an entire movie earlier and made it a bigger deal than it ended up being.

Outside of character related issues, I wish that this trilogy kept the usual three years between each film OR had an Episode 10 planned for 2021. That way you get three films for the Sequel Trilogy and then you can have an Episode 10 conclude the Skywalker Saga as a whole.

All in all though, I did like the Sequel Trilogy and all three films that comprised it. I just wish they were more interconnected and less sloppy. Fortunately, I’ve got a feeling that Lucasfilm’s learned their lesson here and will use it to make the next series of films even better!

 

After TLJ and playing up the angle of balance, I was hoping for more of that plot point in TROS. I think it would have been an interesting theme of the ST about balance/dyad.

The PT was about the darkside

The OT was about the lightside

The ST was about Balance.

 

I agree with you here. There is another alternative, however. They could have taken the entire Dyad thing out of the movie. In TLJ, Snoke gloats about how he bridged the minds of Kylo and Rey. There was nothing inherently mystical (outside of the Force and all) about it. It was one man/monster's doing, and everyone fell for his trick. At the end of the movie Rey closes the door to the Falcon and on her and Ben's relationship. To me, that was the end. She had bested him twice now (once in combat, and again by letting him live), and all he did was respond with threats, demands, and lies.
Bringing in the Dyad thing negated everything TLJ set up and used IMO. But yeah, had they used it/brought it up earlier by having Snoke gloat about how he now has a Dyad at his will instead of how he himself made the connection, then it'd be fine. Or maybe they could have pulled a Plagueis, where Snoke THINKS that he created the Dyad, but in reality he was just unveiling what was already there. But the amount of work to do that within a movie would be enormous.

Agreed, but I also don't think there was a giant way around it either. Someone needed to go on that adventure. To me the biggest misstep was on who they chose for what storyline. I always said Finn should have stayed with the fleet and Poe should have gone on the mission. That way we don't have a Finn vs Phasma 2: Electric (Staff) Boogaloo. Instead we see a new character face-off (and Poe completes his trifecta of trolling each major villain). Meanwhile Holdo now has a "reason" to not tell anyone her plans - she doesn't trust Finn, since he's a defector from the F.O. and not really in league with the Resistance. They could have had him explore the differences between the F.O. and the Resistance, and eventually come to terms that fighting for Rey isn't a bad thing, because it's not always about fighting for some nebulous goal, but about fighting for a loved one, be it your brother-in-blood or your brother-in-arms. It would also allow Finn to still be slightly injured from his battle with Kylo.

Honestly, with the stories they were telling, there was very little room for all of our heroes to be in the room at the same time. I don't think that's a bad thing - the time all of our heroes spend together in the OT is about one act per movie, with a little more in ROTJ.* But since the timeframe of the ST is so short, our characters didn't really feel like they bonded as a trio that much off screen, and there were so few meaningful interactions between all three, it hits a lot harder. Maybe it's also that when the Jedi went off to do Jedi things, the other two at least had an arc together. In the PT, Anakin and Padme had a romance, while Obi-Wan & Anakin had their master-apprentice relationship. In the OT, Luke & Han and a bromance while Han & Leia had a romance. In the ST Finn and Rey have...something? But then Rey's off on her stuff, and Poe's either thought dead or on a mission.

I'm not trying to justify it, I'm just trying to break it down and figure out how it could have been reconstructed better.

Act II for ANH as they escape the Death Star and head to Yavin IV. After that, Han leaves, Leia's on base, and Luke's doing the trench run.
Act I in ESB and very briefly in Act III. After Hoth, Luke is on Dagoba while Han and Leia are trying to escape. They all meet briefly on Bespin, but then Han is taken, leaving Luke & Leia.
Acts I & II in ROTJ, and then everyone comes back for the denouement. Luke saves everyone on Tatooine, they meet again to plan out their mission to Endor. The first day of the mission happens, and then Luke heads to confront the emperor.

 

The problem is this. Having Ben don some robes like some disgraced Samurai who dons Budhist robes and roam the galaxy paying penitence doesn't bring a satisfying end and it just seems out of character for Ben. And having him be put on trial and in jail...well still doesn't bring a satisfying end to it either. I honestly think they went with the best option in the film.

I've been recently educated that on how the WBW works so that 's a no. But I guess they can find some way to bring him back. Sort of like a Christ figure, who died and paid for his 'sins' and is brought back.

I agree with you that Disney should have split it into 2 films. But I just got the impression that they just wanted to put this to bed and move on. I guess they had no idea how beloved Rey and Ben would be and how much story there really should be to tell--not to mention the damper that COVID put on the whole future film thing. So who knows? I am just keeping my fingers crossed.

 

It's only out of character because we've only seen one side of his character.
I think it could have worked. It's worked in other shows and series before, particularly with Iroh's past - he went from being the Fire Nation's most prestigious general to an advisory role to a banished prince.* His sphere of influence was smaller, but through that sphere he impacted people in better ways than before.

Heck, the manga/anime/live action trilogy Rurouni Kenshin is all about this. Himura Kenshin was an assassin, and then became the most famed killer in-world during a bloodbath of a war; but after the war he put down his blood-soaked sword and picked up a sword that couldn't kill, and vowed to protect those within his sight. His sins are hardly forgotten or washed over in the series - in fact, his greatest challenges are the direct fallout of his choices in the past. Had they done something like this with Ben, I think it could have worked.

They could have had Ben wander around, trying to help out in little ways while pieces of his past haunt him at every turn. He meets a nice family who simply need an extra farmhand for the season? First Order remnants come and nearly massacre them and burn their land. He meets a Force Sensitive youth he may want to train? Former Jedi apprentices who survived pop out of the woodwork and convince the youth not to train under him.** Have survivors of the Sith Eternal try and raise him up as their new Emperor. Have Poe hunt him down. Have the new Jedi Rey are training refuse to accept and integrate him, despite Rey's forgiveness. Show how hard it is to atone and how hard it is to forgive. Show how much harder it is to work to make a difference than dying in a grand gesture.*** And in the end, they could have let Ben settle down with a small Jedi order (and potentially a family!) somewhere else, showing that he's protected those around him, redeemed those who have fallen because of him, and accepted what can and cannot be. Doing this would also erase on of the faults of the Jedi before him - the Jedi of his grandfather and of his namesake's era were too tied to the government; they were too centralized as an organization. Allowing for small pockets of Jedi schools to come up would ultimately negate that. It also could have allowed for different schools of thoughts about the Jedi to arise, based on their teaching.****

But instead Star Wars went back to what was familiar (a particular trend with JJ honestly), and Ben died after doing one redeeming act, leaving behind a mess of a world he doesn't have to worry about fixing.

No thank you. Ben isn't really a messianic figure - Luke, Rey, Obi-Wan, and Anakin fall into that trope far more. Honestly, that feels like more of a Karma Houdini thing than him surviving and trying to help out in small ways.
What would Ben do, after being brought back? Would he try to atone? If so, then why kill him off in the first place? Would he become a villain again? Great, we have another villain that won't stay dead; and considering Lucasfilm's 50/50 track record so far, I'm not sure which way it would tip. Would he be praised as a hero?

Besides, IIRC, the WBW only works for characters whose dead wouldn't really mess up anything at the time of their death. There was no time, place, or way to bring him back while keeping Rey alive. Please fact check me if I'm wrong though!

Honestly, Ben is a bit of a tainted product going forward. Because of how he was used/mishandled, you can't use the character in live action, since Adam Driver doesn't really want to play him anymore; you can't use him in animation going forward outside of being a Force Ghost, because he's dead; and you can't bring him back, because the WBW doesn't work like that; and you can't use the Knights of Ren anymore, because they're no longer threatening or cool. (I mean, rebuilding the KoR could still be a cool storyline, but it'd have to be VERY well done.)


*Of course there's more to Iroh, but this is the part I'm focusing on right now.
**If one wanted to go really dark, have the youth slip to the Dark Side, and Ben has to kill the youth in order to save someone else - In my head, the people Ben would have to save would have been the Youth's bullies. Ben was going to train the kid on more...proactive yet peaceful ways to avoid bullying, but in the end, the Jedi coming out would have ruined it. No one wins, all because of Ben's actions previously (although from there we could explore the theme of how much of our action can be blamed on the pain we have suffered, and how much can be blamed on our own free will. If Ben, in a moment of clarity, recognizes this, he could have a moment of empathy for the Lost Jedi, and in turn, that could work into a redemption arc for all of them...hmm...))
***In the words of Hamilton's George Washington, "dying is easy, young man. Living is harder." Or in the words of one Lan Mandragoran from the Wheel of Time series, "death is as light as a feather, but duty is heavier than a mountain."
****While I stand by this idea, I do understand it's a potential minefield. Jedi are more of a school of philosophy or religious sect in a way. They have rules, laws, practices, and doctrines they hold to that separate them from other Force Sensitive groups. To allow for those doctrines and philosophies to differ may mean the end of the unified view of Jedi. Treating them like a particular art school philosophy, where there can be different ideas with the same outcome would be seen as untrue to who and what they are by some. Then again, that may not be a bad thing...