ST The Sanctuary - (Dissenters Unite! - Warning on page 232)

I just don't see the transition and maybe that's my preconceived notion that most things in the ST don't make sense if given too much thought. But Kylo Ren convincing students to kill the others seems like it would be something more than just a one time conversation the night of. As I understand it went Snoke Corrupts Kylo which turns in to Kylo corrupting the students.
IF kylo was in fact turning his fellow students against luke and towards the dark side wouldn't that then in turn mean he was on a collision course with the dark side regardless of Luke igniting the light saber or not.

We can sit here and speculate what might have been and what could have been had luke not stood over him with the light saber but what we DO know is that at some point in time Kylo turned some of his fellow students. In my mind that takes more than a quick conversation the night of to convince someone to kill their fellow students.

 

With the guards it makes sense for them the not be KOR as ones assumes they would hold allegiance to Kylo and not care to fight over Snoke's dead body.

But to introduce them not once but twice in TFA (Snoke's dialog and Flashback) and not use them them in some way of continuity is insane.

 

If the KoR were dark siders, I could see them quibbling with Kylo. I think it would have made the scene so much better. My big complaint about the PG fight scene is that it’s so stale with no stakes. The audience doesn’t know who these red guys are or care about them. They have no impact on the greater plot. No one will care that they’re dead. Kylo didn’t care about killing them. It was just a choreographed fight scene with no tension or emotion. If they were Luke’s former students, Rey could have tried to appeal to them. Maybe she’d even be hesitant to take them on. It also would have been a fight between force users, and Rey would have struggled more so the audience could actually worry about her surviving the fight. Maybe some would join Rey and some would stick with Kylo. Damn there are just so many ways RJ could have gone. Thinking about it makes my disappointment with tLJ new again lol.

 

If Ben/Kylo turning half the students under his uncle`s nose is supposed to show how he is beyond hope anyway, then that might migitate Luke`s failure in that night but it makes him an unobservant idiot in his own Jedi school. Of merely 13 students.

He doens`t come out looking good either way.

My hope with the KOR is that JJ - who I think actually did have a backstory in mind for them, just had no time to put them in TFA for real - just says "whatever", ignores TLJ and goes right back to what he wanted to do with them. Why shouldn`t he, what`s good for the goose and all.

 

Quick semi-tangent: How does everyone feel about the on-screen chemistry of Luke and Rey? I never get a master/student vibe from them at all. They're on-screen together, they interact, and he does teach her... two lessons (I won't rant about being told we'll get three again). But thats it.

And what really bugs me about this is that, in the prequels, Lucas specifically looked at the footage of Obi Wan and Anakin and realized that they were way too antagonistic to each other, and reshot scenes and added new scenes in to mitigate that. He wanted us to get a feel that the master and student actually had a bond and, while it wasn't perfect, he put that effort in.

I'm seeing no bond between Rey and Luke. Of course, their entire period of knowing each other is a weekend, so thats not surprising. RJ should really have taken that objection up with the script writer- oh, right. Do we get any sense that Luke has 'passed on what he has learned?' to Rey?

Oh, and totally unrelated, but all the concerns regarding how Finn was portrayed, I have to agree, and I liked him in TFA. Now, not so much.

 

Re: The praetorian guards. According to the trusted VD their origins go back to some 14th Emperor of "Kitel Phard" or some such.

 

I hated Rey and Luke. No emotion or empathy what so ever. Hence Rey getting frustrated and leaving him there to die.

 

Rather non-existant IMO. Which is to be expected because they really had nothing to work with. They started as strangers, had maybe three scenes really together and ended as antagonistic strangers.

IMO RJ comes across more as a Reylo shipper. And, admittedly, the actors do have chemistry. I just don`t think JJ is a shipper and I imagine he will nix that.

 

Another example of loose ends in TLJ. It might be the nitpicking (or not), but they made an emphasis in very beginning on the drednaught captain who angrily talked about how Hux's incompetence put them in an inferior position.
In that moment i naively thought "Woah, they gonna give Hux some development and struggle to overcome to get his subordinates' respect!".
Boy, i was completely wrong.
Why to make an emphasis on FO lower rank leadership conflict with Hux if you never gonna use it in the movie??? You could have build some kind of split between the ranks of FO. You could have show us the scene where FO officers mutiny after Snoke's death and kills Hux or betray him or something. Now thats would be bold in in interesting and reasonable way.

 

I interpret it like a Minority Report type situation. Luke was going to judge Kylo for something that hadn’t happened yet and might not happen at all. Perhaps Kylo would have still turned, perhaps not. As Rey points out, he had not made that decision yet. Luke failed him by casting judgement prematurely.

But Kylo perceiving his master as betraying him was without a doubt the catalyst that drove him to the turn his back on the Jedi. Luke and Kylo are both in agreement there. What Luke treats as a momentary lapse in judgement, Kylo regarded with great fear as an attempt on his life.

Luke remarks that Snoke already held some influence over Ben by this time. So it seems that after having been sent away by his parents and betrayed by his teacher, he sought to join Snoke, a decision that wasn’t made until Luke’s decision.

As to the other students. We know nothing about them. Maybe Snoke corrupted them too. Maybe Ben had been turning them. Maybe when told that Luke tried to kill his nephew some lost faith while those that didn’t were killed. Maybe it’s as simple as Kylo was the strongest and presented them with a join me or die ultimatum. We have no idea.


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Well, let's see ... I think we can safely infer that Ben Solo was a bad egg, but extremely powerful. That power probably caused him to have influence over some of the students, while others would have shunned him and have been super loyal to Luke. The bad kids v. the teacher's pets. That's not a stretch, nor is is out of character for kids at all. Humans form cliques. When Ben turned on Luke and destroyed the hut in a fit of rage, I am guessing he started tearing the place up, and he told the other students 'I am burning this joint to the ground; you are either with me or against me. Join me, or die.' Some of the students -- probably the ones that already saw how powerful Ben was -- went with him, while those who were loyal to Luke fought him, and lost.

That's head canon, but I think it is reasonable head canon. There was no need for some elaborate plan to have been in place before the action went down. (Though I don't believe JJ's flashback and RJ's flashback fit together. I think JJ had one thing in mind, and RJ went someplace totally different, both with how the destruction went down and were Luke was when it happened).

As to why people are saying it was Luke's fault ... Look no further than ROTS. Anakin is scared to death that he is going to lose Padme to death in childbirth. He turns to the Dark Side to try to stop this from happening, but his actions CAUSE it to happen. Some are seeing what Luke did as the exact same thing; he peered into the future/Kylo's heart and saw darkness.

How do we know he didn't make the same mistake Anakin did?

 

Interesting discussion, the last few pages. Pity I'm busy at work.

But, I wanted to add one thing here regarding Padme and Anakin. We don't know that it would not have turned out exactly the same way even if Anakin had not turned. It may be, then, that it's not that Anakin's actions led to Padme's death. It may well have been inevitable anyway.

As to Luke, he may well have sensed something terrible in Ben's future (but peering into the sleeping mind is not the place to confirm those suspicions - it's like judging thoughts not actions), but Ben's arc appears to be about snuffing out the light inside him. So that, to me, appears to contradict the inevitability of the dark in Ben's future.

It's also quite unlike Luke, but that is another matter entirely.

 

Rey learnt almost nothing from Luke. Her progression in both films has so far been entirely arbitrary. She learns lightsaber combat just when she needs to fight Kylo. She learns to lift tons of boulders when called upon.

Unlike Luke in ESB, she isn't changed by her training. She doesn't learn the deep philosophies of the Jedi, Luke doesn't want to teach her them, insistent as he is on ending the Jedi. Luke doesn't teach her to do anything. She's as proficient in combat as she seemingly was at the start of TFA.

What character transformation has she had since then? Other than going from hating Kylo, to wanting to redeem him and back again?

 

It may not show that he is beyond hope of pulling back to light side but it definitely demonstrates that he was heading that way either way. Luke may have pushed him closer but he was definitely taking conscious and necessary steps towards the dark side. And I would definitely say that turning his fellow students and convincing them to kill the others a clear sign that he was turning to the dark side regardless of Luke igniting the saber of him or not.

Story wise its very weak and flimsy to say Luke is to blame and then narratively hint/show that Kylo was corrupting others to the dark side with the intent to kill the others before luke ignited the saber.

 

No no, it's clear enough where the Praetorian guards come from:


They're obviously Sheev's ex-guards, finally getting a new job after 30 years of un-employment.

 

I know right. The whole movie seems to avoid characters who know each other meeting each other and dealing with those conflicts. The only time 2 people with a history who duke it out, is when Phantom Luke shows up to belittle Kylo. Even friends are kept a part for the most part.

Imagine if that when Kylo killed Snoke, the P-gaurd who were once the KOR (maybe Snoke didn't think he deserved them yet) approach them both, and there's this tense moment where Re thinks she's going to need to fight them with Kylo. And instead they all just stand down, and salute their real leader, Kylo Ren. Or maybe he would have to fight them. Maybe they're more loyal to Snoke. But at the very least, both of those would have held some weight, other than Kylo just attacking random guards.

 

I just have a hard time believing that Ben overpowers 12 other students to such a degree that some join him out of fear and slaughter the rest of them. But that's another thing that makes this movie so frustrating. In the other movies you had a certain sense of who was stronger than who. I am almost certain that NO ONE hear believes that Vader being hit with a bowcaster would make him lose in a fight against an untrained Rey or an untrained luke. But Ben takes one hit and is all of a sudden matched by someone untrained.

 

Well they aren't Master and Apprentice so why would we? He refuses to train her every time she asks him. They are strangers.

Well for me even without that scene the bond between them is excellent so I can't relate but again Luke and Rey are strangers.

I like the personality of Finn but as a character he is so all over the place I don't know what it is that he is supposed to be. His being a Stormtrooper is simply for plot purposes and does not inform his character or personality. He's just another confused and confusing character that was like so much of the ST simply placed as a piece on the board because they need him to do what they needed whenever they needed it. We are used to Star Wars characters actually existing in a larger world that they are a part of. In the ST the larger world is whatever it needs to be for any scene then it can totally change in the very next scene if need be. Certainly the First Order and galactic situation of TFA and the one of TLJ are quite different.

Why does the First Order take over so easily after TFA? Because the TLJ crawl said they can. No other real reason is in the movie to any actual degree. RJ became so keyed in on subversion that he subverted Lucas' movies, TFA and his own movie all at the same time!

 

The difference being, Kylo Ren is still kind of a noob. Chewie hurt him pretty badly. That's pretty far down on my nitpick list, but I hear you.

 

But to an extent RJ kind of explains why in TLJ... whether we buy it is another story, but the explanation is there. Luke has never seen the kind of raw power Kylo exhibited, until he saw the same raw power in Rey. That is why Kylo could take on all the former padawans and why Rey could best him untrained after he was seriously weakened.

I don't know if the right answer is that Kylo had already converted a handful of Luke's students and they were going to slaughter their peers the next day anyway (rendering Luke a moron school principal) or if Luke's conduct instigated Kylo's dark side hand and inadvertently led to a slaughter that may not otherwise have occurred (also rendering Luke a moron school principal). I think it's open to debate, but I actually think that is kind of the point. I believe RJ didn't settle this in the movie, but he leaves it open to either interpretation intentionally.

 

Its funny but there is another thread asking if TLJ Blew the potential open for widening the SW story. I think its the wrong question and should be, Will future writers blow the story wide open? RJ just seems to have so much material and instead of making something great has reverted back to a minimalist approach in just about every story possability.

 

So Kylo Ren is a noob but grossly overpowers the 12 other students??
That's the reason why I think he turned them gradually...essentially feeding them the dark side stuff that Snoke was giving him. And again if that's the case no matter what Luke did...Kylo was paving his own path to the dark side. But the movie is so unclear where it wants to go narratively that the whole story falls apart.

The movie wants us to believe that Luke sensed so much darkness that instinctively he ignites his lightsaber, but at the same time Luke is the reason Kylo fully embraced the dark side???

 

Your comparison doesn't work. It would have implied Luke retreated to Ahch-To so that he could bring "the Jedi" (his army) back to fight another day.

The comparison would be that Luke believes his army and country suck. He wants it to end. So he abandons his army and lets them die a terrible death. Maybe one day a better country will rise up, but Luke won't do anything to make that a possibility.

Then 10 years later, General Luke runs through the battlefield naked and dies a few minutes later. What a spectacle he was. So inspiring.

 

Chuckle:

 

Raw power has literally never = skill level with using said power. Anakin vs Obi-Wan comes to mind. And I have a hard time believing that Kylo's power is greater than Darth Vader's or Emperor Palpatines.

But i'll agree that either way the story gets told Luke ends up looking quite stupid. But seeing as how you and I have two very different opinions on a key aspect of the movie I would say means the movie failed in its story telling. If part of this chapters story was Kylo Ren's fall then it definitely failed to convey how and when very clearly. Which I guess Chapter IX can answer definitively but theres so many other story threads that need explaining and expanding upon that the movie seems like it will be pretty crowded.