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

I still don’t understand Kylo’s motivation. Why does he hate the resistance so much? For that matter why does he hate his family?

 

And this would have been a good goal for Kylo in the second act, had he grown any as a character. Again...broken record, but bad storytelling. We didn't jump ahead in time at all, and so we got the same, derpy, baby Kylo from TFA -- who in TFA was fine for being a crybaby, because stepping forward from that point in TLJ would have outlined his growth - but the story arc doesn't do tha.

I don't know about anybody else, but I was kind of expecting a bada** Kylo who was a bit more brooding (a hair like his grandfather) and more a villain of action and fewer words. Maybe wordy in talking to Rey in trying to seduce her to the dark, that would have worked fine.

Instead we went from Kylo 1.0 to 1.01. Not the full Kylo 2.0 we should have gotten. Subsequently, a Kylo 2.0 I might have found much more believable as far as toppling Snoke.

 

Her plans weren’t exactly rocket science.

 

So they've demoted him for insubordination but they're then going to include them in plans? Part of his lesson was to respect and trust authority.

 

But you're not taking into account all aspects of the situation....I'm not saying she had to tell her entire plan to the whole station from the get go, and I know he was demoted, she could have pointed to a plan that would SAVE the Resistance and ask him to trust her and obey bc of her rank, but then when he didn't and she saw he was going to be a problem, it'd been better at that point to maybe tell him even if only him since it wasn't a necessary secret instead of letting him cause problems and shooting him (even with a stun)....think through the whole situation not just "I'm ranking officer, obey me or else", good ranking officers should be able to foresee better ways

 

cause he is in charge of the star fighters, he wants to know what he should be doing next, how to distribute who is left, etc, etc. He isnt Rose who is just there waiting for some one to tell her something. He is in charge or a bunch of other people who are the ones that go out to fight.

The movie should've just had Holdo tell him to go on stand by several times to the point where Poe finally flips. That way it would really show that he is impatient. Instead we have no communication at all which actually makes it seem like Poe is the one thats right.

 

At that point he isn't, Leia had just demoted him.

 

I still don’t understand Kylo and Snoke’s motivation.

 

It’s a terrible story and script. He wrote himself into a corner. That’s why I feel so strongly that RJ wrote a story and then plugged in characters rather than writing a story FOR the characters he inherited. Lazy, IMO, and he wound up boxing himself in anyway.

 

My idea of RJ's storyboard...
1) Luke needs to be totally unlike his former self bc that would shock the audience
2) Rey and Kylo need to have some kind of connection hence new Force power
3) Gotta have Poe and Resistance do something so let them slowly be chased by FO, and maybe it can say something about gungho fighting being bad...
4) I want to use Finn so I'm taking him out of that coma fast!!!
5) Leia needs to have Force Powers now so.....we get Mary Poppins?????
6) I don't like Finn/Rey match so let's give him a new girl and send him on another story with "social" statements, need those for modern movies
7) I don't care about Snoke, Rey's lineage, or AS's lightsaber issue so I'll get rid of those
8) Let's grey Luke Skywalker from pure good - how? by making him almost kill his nephew
9) An OT person needs to die in this one too - let's make it....Luke just to stick it worse!!!

then he wrote the full story around that

 

IMHO, and I may be way off here, Kylo is a teenager in a man's body. He's angry at the world and rebelling against his teacher, parents, etc. He has no girlfriend and is surrounded by mostly same sex people (not many chances of meeting girls).
He also likes to dress in black leather and...



ok, that's only half-joking. He's mad because his family sent him to train with Luke which in turn tried to kill him, which makes his parents accomplices to this (in his mind). He's probably resentful that he's not as powerful as he thinks he can be because somehow he things Vader was more powerful (according to Rey in TFA). He was angry at his dad for leaving his mom but also because he believed that by killing his dad he would become more powerful.

The Resistance is the enemy of the First Order. He doesn't hate the resistance, he's just fighting against it because it's where Leia is and because it may lead to Luke and his desire to kill Luke.

At least that's how I interpret it but it's a bit hard as TFA and TLJ seem to go on their own way story-wise.

 

I don't know if it was intentional or not but #3 was one repeat of ESB's storyline that should not have been done. So. cheesy. Ugh.

 

I agree that would make sense under normal circumstances, but when your entire resistance is running out of gas you need all the buy in and ideas you can get. That wasn't the time for a lesson

 

Well why don't you enlighten me on what exactly I misread.

I'm not "fixated" on anything. I made a comment expressing my opinion. Or are you "fixated" on your supposed non-misreading of Kylo?

 

Given that this is a life or death situation for everyone involved, and they're operating on limited time, Holdo takes the worst possible action: she splits the difference between the two options. She should have either included Poe, or put him in the brig. This is a classic trope of storytelling when it comes to leaders with potentially dangerous subordinates, or with external rivals. If your choice is either magnanimity or ruthlessness, the average of the two is disaster.

Take, for example, the story of the Samnites and Romans. A Samnite general had captured a Roman army, and asked his father for advice on what to do. The father first said to let all the Romans go freely, unconditionally. The general was confused, and asked for clarification, and then his father said to kill all the Romans. Now, the general was even more confused, and went to his father in person to ask him what the hell he was thinking. His father said that the choice was either to make the Romans eternal friends or kill them all. The general didn't take his father's advice, and disarmed the Romans, humiliated them, and sent them back to Rome. Suffice to say, there's a reason most people don't know who the Samnites were.

Holdo is the Samnite general, and Poe is the Roman army. Her waffling on how to handle him put everyone in danger.

 

Maybe there are no more Samnites because the general did not take his father's advice to make friends with the Romans if he was going to release them. Instead he came up with his own 3rd option and "disarmed and humiliated them". And as you say, the rest is history.

 

did you miss the point of the story???? yes he chose a 3rd option and that option didn't work out very well....the reason you don't hear about the Samnites is bc the Romans came back and obliterated them from history bc of the general's bad decision....the connection is Holdo's 3rd choice in the middle didn't help her situation at all either

 

Exactly. Splitting the difference in a difficult decision does not result in a mediocre result that balances out the flaws of two options, it magnifies the flaws of both. In the analogy I gave, the Samnites enraged off the Romans (as they would have, if they destroyed their army), but left their army intact, to threaten them in the future (as they could have, if they released the army amicably). In TLJ, Holdo alienated Poe (as she would have, if she had put him in the brig), but left him free to interfere with her plan (as he could have, if he had been included in the plan).

 

Random thought. I enjoyed watching Michael Burnham's 15 second unsuited space jump in Star Trek Discovery more than Leia Poppins. And that's saying a lot because I tend to favor Star Wars a bit more than Trek.

Questions indeed to be answered. Although I don't like the film... I would like to point out that as a kid, we all just accepted Vader's evil persona and motivations as bad without knowing much beyond BASIC backstory until the third film (former Jedi who hunted down and destroyed the Jedi Knights). Vader was just scary and convincing because he was well written. Palpatine doubly so...I'll go so far as to say Palpatine's draw was because he was mysterious and scary.

 

Vaders backstory is given in ANH? Pupil of Kenobi, turned to evil, killed Luke's father.

 

The problem, though, is that we know enough about Kylo's backstory that it just interferes with his characterization. Imagine if, in ESB, Vader revealed he was Luke's father, and then ran his son through with a lightsaber. I'm not saying it absolutely couldn't be made to work, but we'd sure as hell be confused afterward.

 

It think as far as Luke goes, RJ ignored the setup from TFA about Luke being on Ahch-tu. Luke could have secured himself anywhere if he was just waiting to die. Why go to a Force-sensitive place and cut yourself off from the Force? That wasn’t originally part of the plan as JJ saw it.

RJ decided to abandon the idea that Luke was doing something - waiting, like Yoda and Obi-Wan - but decided rather he had given up all hope. So what could he have done that would be so awful?

That’s how we got the mess of th flashback, which as I said elsewhere, doesn’t fit JJ’s TFA flashback at all.

 

Misread, but I can see how I typed that and it being read wrong. Starting over: I remember as a kid in the 70s and 80s, we all accepted Vader's basic backstory from ANH as "enough" until ESB and ROTJ revealed more.

I think Kylo's character development stinks, and by stating the comparison above, I just don't know if it's backstory Kylo needed or just to be shown as convincing in TLJ. Still pondering it. Force-Skyping with Rey certainly didn't add to the picture. Neither did acting like a child and smashing his helmet for being called a child. Neither did acting like a child when Hux challenged his authority after killing Snoke. Nor when Hux got Force-slammed against the wall (again, acting like a child) aboard his shuttle when the Gorilla Walkers were shooting Luke.

In Kylo's case, adding backstory would be fine, but as I said in another thread, so would just pushing the character forward. It's hard to do when you start the next chapter right after the last. These films have followed a formula of having stories a few years apart within each trilogy, and I'm starting to understand why.... it gives time for believable progression.

 

Oh I see. I suppose at the time the backstory in ANH seemed complete until we learn more. The issue with Ren is from the start we knew we didn't have the whole picture.

 

Serious question here:
Is it typical for the director to be the writer? To me these are very different skill sets and I think it shows In the story we were shown.

To me the plot is the fundamental issue. Failure as a theme is fine. There are some issues with vision on film but relatively minor. The story and fleshing out of characters is the sin I can’t get past in TLJ


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