A/V Episode VIII - THE LAST JEDI - Official Movie Discussion Thread

Yes, but when you're insinuating that he's being dishonest, this is an important distinction.

It was your point insofar as you saying he was trying to be charming, though.

I'm curious why you think Kylo Ren cares about being liked. Over the course of two films, he's always alone, and hates everyone. And as mentioned before, nothing in his behavior towards Rey suggests that he's going out of his way to make her like him, although in the aftermath of the throne room fight he certainly wants her to join him.

I'm similarly confused by the idea that he's denying responsibility for himself. When and how?

I'm not saying Ben is making good decisions, I'm saying if he were doing the right thing all the time he wouldn't be a villain.

I'm not trying to convince you to like him, necessarily, I just don't think your specific complaints about the character bear themselves out in the movies.

 

I think Ben's conflict is that he knows he's wrong, but he wants so very badly to be right that he thinks if he can convince someone else he's right, then it'll vindicate him. It's why he wants Rey to join him so badly. He doesn't have anyone who sees things his way. No one around him, whether First Order, Jedi, or Resistance, wants what he wants: to burn old things to the ground. That's not his initial goal, I don't think–I'm honestly not sure what his goals are pre-TLJ. I think he's just in that selfish I-don't-know-what-I-want, I-just-want-it-my-way phase.

He's a classic character study of an under-developed adult, that guy who peaked in high school and never moved past those days. I've got friends like that, and they never seem to have any idea what they actually want out of life; they just chase the next thing that seems right for them at the time, no matter what is right for everyone else. Is this supposed to make Ben likeable? I don't think so, because these people in my life are people who I have a hard time getting along with. Ben's personality is supposed to be grating, I think.

Note his attitude toward Rey in the aftermath of the throne room battle (after she escapes). There's never a moment where he even seems to consider trying to bring her back to him. He orders the Falcon destroyed, probably knowing full well that she's on it. He even tells Luke "I'll kill her." He straight up says that. He doesn't care about Rey anymore because she's no longer showing him sympathy. The second she stops acting like he's important to her, he ditches her. The only human relations he can stomach are those that are 100% focused on him.

That's how he's constructed in TLJ, and I don't think that there's supposed to be any kind of sympathy in it. He's manipulative, he's conflicted, and I think a lot of fans have misconstrued that as being sympathetic, but we're seeing Kylo as Rey sees him. She sees something worth saving, and at first that's what we see, too, but we're also privy to seeing his side of things, and it quickly becomes very apparent to anyone who looks beyond surface level that Kylo is acting like an emotionally abusive boyfriend. He seems sympathetic for the same reason that so many in abusive relationships in real life think their abusive partner is sympathetic: they're trying to see the best in him. But Kylo's a sociopath; he plays on his sympathetic traits while trying to hide his true nature. And honestly, I think it's a credit to Rian Johnson that he wrote him so successfully that most fans don't even see it. The point of Ben's character in TLJ is to make him seem like he could be redeemed, and then yank that rug out from under us. At least that's the way I saw it when I watched it again last night.

 

You said he was "making puppy dog eyes and trying to charm Rey" so.

They're different scenes.

Well, no, "owning" one's behavior isn't the same as repenting or accepting guilt. Kylo Ren owns everything he's done, he's just also trying to convince himself it was the right thing to do.

This is an odd point. He wants her to see things his way because he thinks he's right. He's not "pretending." And again, he owns it all, hence the "Yes I am" bit when she says he's a monster. Telling his own side is not, fundamentally, different from Vader telling Luke that Obi-Wan lied.

I think he has sad teary eyes in a lot of his scenes because he's sad and angry, not because he wants to be liked. (Who, in the elevator, is he trying to impress as he smashes his helmet? Who, in his starfighter, is he trying to convince to like him as he tearfully considers whether or not to kill his mother?) He wants to show Rey his side of the story because he hates Luke and thinks Luke is a liar, and he wants Rey to join him, not because he wants her to "like" him. He tells Han he's being torn apart because he feels he's being torn apart, and then he kills him.

EDIT: Rewatching the Force bond scenes, I was actually struck by how much Kylo reveals about himself in them:

I really like this article, too. The idea that Ben is doing all of this for a sense of control and agency is intriguing.

 

I think there's some miscommunication here. I don't think it's Kylo that wants to be liked with scene after scene of sad face. I think its the directors that want us to pity him. The directors have Adam begging for pity in front of the camera for us. Not anyone in IU.

 

We know that's just the way Adam Driver looks, right? He's not purposefully making his lips do that thing they always do.

 

No, that's complete bs. He doesn't get all teary eyed in his fighter when his mom is in his crosshairs because that's just the way he looks. What they're doing with Adam/Kylo and him pity mugging for the camera is entirely intentional. And he was cast with that intention in mind.

I've seen plenty of Adam where he doesn't look like that at all. Ever seen This Is Where I Leave You? It's a comedy about his father's funeral and he's not some joyless, sad sack of **** in it. His face doesn't look like Kylo at all in it; ie his lips don't do that thing. He's actually the young, reckless, fun one.

Has Kylo smiled even once so far?

 

Pity-mugging. Or, as we otherwise know it, acting.

 

lol, what a brainless, insecure, needlessly defensive response. It's also a complete flip flop of what you just said. You just said that he just looks that way, that he wasn't making his lips look that way purposefully.

I was the one that said it was intentional.

Of course it's acting. He's doing what the directors obviously want him to do, look sad in close up shots. Quite a few shots have been set up just for that purpose.

The reason its mentioned is because, for me and others, it's actually tiresome and repulsive. They want us to pity him, but for myself and others its having the opposite effect intended.

Hayden's petulant whining was acting, too. It also made a whole lot of people hate the character.

 

Maybe let's just calm down and move on from this very minor point, eh?

 

Fully agree. Instead we should talk about the most important part of TLJ: Canto Bight

Who do people think was best dressed?
Best hat?
Which one of the new species should be given large roles in the EU and/or E:IX?

 

The weirder non-humans should be given bigger roles, because it's more fun that way.

 

Darth Vader never smiled once so long as he was a bad guy.

 

Not to mention how they try to shift some of the blame to Luke. If only he hadn't had his lightsaber out at that moment- or at least that's what the film implies. In a general sense we know Ben was already sliding towards the darkness, which is why Luke was worried, but we still don't know the details of how Kylo ended up like that. But it definitely broke Luke so badly that he just ran away and moped for most of the rest of his life- or rather he was so terrified of doing anything else for fear of messing things up further.

Especially with how Rey reacts after she finds out Luke's "dark secret" that he "created Kylo Ren". Well, feeling guilty over failing a student isn't new, but at least Obi-wan worked on a way to make up for it, even if his method (train Luke to kill Vader) wasn't exactly great either, but things were much more desperate back then (no Republic at all with Palpatine triumphant).

The more we see of Kylo, the more monstrous he looks. In theory Snoke could have corrupted him, possibly doing a better job than Palpatine did with Anakin since Anakin had a hard life from the beginning, whereas Ben grew up during a time of peace. Anakin kind of fell from a misguided need to protect Padme (well, more like his obsession with her, which was one of his many flaws), but now that Snoke died so easily, hard to see him as an impressive figure again. And Kylo certainly still comes off as an idiot (as we saw at Crait). It doesn't help that plot armor is mainly what's keeping Rey from just killing him already.

 

It was obviously playing too many violent lightsaber games on the HoloNet turned him to the dark side. Obviously Luke needed to invest more in mental health.

Actually, there is something to be said that Jedi Temples are schools where every teacher and student are armed, and yet they seem to keep getting massacred even so. Often by the very students and teachers they arm.

I actually do think that Tim Zahn originally wanted to use Piett in the Thrawn Trilogy and then had to turn him into Pellaeon. In the Heir 20th anniversary edition, Zahn mentioned he wanted to bring a character who died in ROTJ back and Lucasfilm said no, and even before that I've always thought that Piett was the basis for Pellaeon. It makes a certain amount of sense, too - Piett is maybe the only OT Imperial you kind of sympathize with, or at least isn't shown as a monster, and having Vader's former commander now serving Thrawn would get across how Zahn wanted to show that Thrawn was someone completely different in his approach.

I have to say that as with most ST alien designs, not many of the new aliens there really appealed to me, but even so I really loved Canto Bight and wish we had seen more of the deleted scenes in the movie. I'd love to see a story with the actual Master Codebreaker and Lovey, they're pretty much screaming for at least a one-shot comic. And I'd like to see the original Butcher of Brix idea come up at some point.

And while I liked Canto Bight I just wish they had put more COLOR in it. Like Maz's castle or the Hosnian Prime scene, it's just a bunch of black, white, grey, and brown. Jedha and Dryden Vos's ship were at least a bit better at this.

I know everyone says that Canto Bight is the "prequel aesthetic" scene, but it actually reminds me a lot more of what the aristocracy in the next Dune movie might look like.

 

It seems like part of the issue here is that, unlike the OT and the PT, here our villain is a co-equal main character whose story we're meant to track alongside the good guys. We have to be invested, I guess, but we don't have to like him. We spend time with Kylo Ren, and he is a conflicted morass of emotional intensity, usually on the edge of crying or screaming. That's how he's portrayed. Whether you care about him or not is largely up to the viewer.

 

Gutted we never saw these guys in TLJ.

 

Whoa that guy is weird.

 

Some of the blame is on Luke though. Take Draco Malfoy for example. Everyone knows he was on his way to joining the Death Eaters from literally his first Harry Potter appearance. Yet those who got to the end no he ultimately chose the good path and had a fairly decent life, with his son Scorpius ending up friends with Harry Potter's son. And this is due in no small part to Dumbledore playing his cards right by Draco, even though Draco was on the dark path since book 1.

But what if Dumbledore held an ignited wand on Draco in his sleep, and Draco woke up and saw it. Draco would have flipped out, and then run off to become most loyal Death Eater ever that day.

Some of this is on Luke, although in the end Kylo is legally responsible for his actions. If Luke had been more like Dumbledore, Kylo might have ended up an ok guy like Draco.

 

Fully agree, I think the designers did a mistake not to give them colourful jewellery. Against the white, black and cream of their clothes and the background they would have stood out.

I'm, not certain that Canto Bight has "prequel aesthetic" more then both are clean and among movers and shakers (or at least people who want to appear to be among them) which was not an aesthetic that appeared all the time during the PT.

 

If I were given Ron Howard's job and told to re-edit The Last Jedi I would have made the following changes.

* Had DJ provide information secretly to the Resistance while abandoning the others, showing him an even more wonderfully revolving door character.
* Had that information be necessary to doing the ramming element.
* Have Finn ram the First Order cannon and destroy it but eject out first. Rose then rescues him.
* Re-film the Luke scenes so he went to the Jedi Temple to find some secret and has no idea how to beat Snoke.
* Have Luke come with the Rebels and not die.

 

Draco Malfoy got cursed every day, and more so as the war went on, and at least once publicly and by a professor. Draco turned good because when he *did* become a Death Eater he hated it mightily and couldn't bring himself to do what it required of him.