A Little Something About The Villians In TFA

I loved the The Force Awakens and find myself loving it more as I think about it. However, I've been thinking about something in particular all morning, and will hopefully get a little more insight into it when I watch The Force Awakens again tonight.

I felt both Hux and Kylo were desperately trying to live up to their predecessors. To make parallel's to the villains of A New Hope, you have Tarkin, an older and experienced military officer who had so much faith in his super weapon that he died with it. Then you have Darth Vader, a loyal and ruthless dark lord, whose loyalty to the dark side is absolute.

Make that comparison with Hux and Kylo, and you have a young, clearly unconfident military officer (just look how defensive he got at that 'clone army' line) who has built the Starkiller Base, a larger version of the Death Star for better and for worse. Then we have Kylo, who, while he may be strong in the force, is untrained and so unsure of his allegiance to the dark side that he asks for advice from Darth Vader himself (so he thinks).

I mean the whole Idea of the First Order is an attempt to replicant the Empire, yet it's clear that by being so obsessed with the past, they are somewhat weaker. The First Order could start to show cracks in it's organisation and effectiveness in later films because of this.

The legacy of the past and it's effect on the most of film's characters seemed to me like the biggest theme within the film.

 

I thought of that as his public persona, rather than what we actually saw behind the scenes. Which was him feeling the pressure to live up the legacy of the Empire.