ST Kylo Ren/Adam Driver Discussion Thread

Opinion peices and blogs aren't "the media."

And woopdy do. A minority of fan lumped all critism of the film in with the toxic haters (who did and still do exist and are a problem), so what? That means about as much as the other minority of fans who arbitrarly decided it was objectivly a bad film just becuase they did'nt like it.

It depends on where you look - if one were so inclined it would be fairly easy to hope on the wayback machine and find plenty of articles and blogs that treat the PT films as if their a holy cow. It's all a matter of what bais the site posting the article holds and whose blog your on.

I certianly remember a great many peaple online ripping TLJ (and all the other Disney era Star Wars works) to shreads in opinion peices and blog posts, so it definantly was'nt all sunshine and roses as your suggesting. In fact that's still a fairly common thing today, as is seeing opinions online that both lionize and hate on the PT.

You missed the point of what I was saying - when I said "that's like saying Luke replaced Vader" I was saying "Rey spent the movies as one of the heroes, and Kylo spent them as the villian and happened to find redemption at the end."

Rey did'nt "replace" Kylo becuase their was never anything to replace - if she had replaced him then she would have fallen to the Dark Side, taken over the First Order and become the new villian, not remained a Light Side hero and reformed the Jedi.

Boo hoo. Ben Solo was born into a comfortable life with a family who loved him and got to go to what was essentially a private school, then chose to spend years willingly chit-chating with Snoke rather then tell anyone and then chose of his own accord to join him and the Knights of Ren rather then go to his mother or father for help.

If Kylo was miserable, his misery was self-inflicted.

He did atone - he helped defeat Palpatine, the First/Final Order and the Sith and revived Rey, ensuring the Jedi survived.

He lives and the best-case senario is he surrenders himself for judgement and they decide to let him spend the rest of his life in prison rather then execute him. He died and - like Vader before him - he gets too ascend to immortality, gains immense power, gets to be with his mother and uncle (and actually get to know his grandfather, rather then the fake version Palpatine pretended to be) and can still talk to Rey any time he wants.

I'm not really seeing how this is the downside for him. Honestly it seems like he got far, far more then he realisticly deserved.

Funny, becuase that's not what it is from how I look at it

Oh, so Rey's not allowed to be happy? She has to be sad and mourning Ben Solo 24/7?

And Kylo got a big, wet kiss. Seems like he got more then Vader did at the end, to be honest.

God forbid the entire francise revolve around one family forever, right?

I'll be blunt, I'd rather have Rey not take any name at all then take the name Skywalker, so then we could move on into something entirely fresh going forward.

Once Upon A Time is'nt Star Wars, so really there's no point in comparing them - just because one had villians get a happy ending does'nt mean the other has to.

Nothing changed, Disney does'nt just make family films where all the characters get a happy ending.

Villians can have sympathic qualities, you know that right?

 

It's funny but I I can't watch TROS in it's entirety again, I keep thinking to myself that I should have realised that the version we got of Rey in it..... would never have a relationship with Ben Solo. Whereas Belle loved the Beast when he was a monster, Rey would only have accepted the Prince.

"She would have liked to know Ben Solo, but could never love Kylo Ren."

Yet.....he still accepted the judgemental little oink even after knowing her grandfather was 100 times worse than his ever was.

 

I dearly hope that's suppose to be a joke.

 

I can`t stand Rey and as a character type in fiction I find her worse than Kylo Ren. However, he is much, much worse as a person than she was, how evil their respective grandfathers were has nothing to do with that. Or else all the people who suddenly shunned Leia over who her father was - as if she could help that - would be in the right. Nor was either Kylo nor Ben Solo entitled to her love.

 

I don't see in black and white.
This, to me, comes back to Beauty and the Beast.

I'm referring to Disney's animated version by the way, not the live action remake.
At the beginning, it's said that the Prince was spoiled, selfish and unkind. This is how Rey, who was forced to bring herself up, saw Kylo. She would have happily exchanged her life for his....but she had no idea that his life hadn't been as wonderful as she believed. His parents were afraid of him. Every normal childish tantrum would seem to them like the Dark manifesting in him. His mother was devoted to her career. His father was devoted to the Millennium Falcon! Neither of them knew how to handle him, so they sent him away. And a Jedi academy is not a school. It's a place for novice nuns/monks. You don't have holidays, you are encouraged to forget your family. It's a lifetime commitment which Ben Solo's family made for him. Add to Snoke's presence permanently in his head, and you have one ****** up kid.

The Beast in BATB was physically hideous. Belle had to learn to see the unhappy boy behind the monster. And the Beast had to learn to be kinder, more unselfish. Kylo, even with his scar, was handsome. His ugliness lay in his deeds, the murder of his father, his association with the FO. Kylo Ren was the shield the broken, vulnerable Ben Solo wore around him, just as the Beast's ugliness concealed a loving and caring man. When Belle started to see beyond the face she triggered the transformation back in to the Prince. In TLJ Rey saw Ben Solo behind the ugliness of Kylo Ren's actions. Unfortunately it went pear shaped at the end, because both made mistakes - but their feelings for each other had begun.

Rey wasn't a saint. It's one of the reasons I liked her so much in TFA and TLJ. She tended to see in extremes. And she was too quick to latch on to father figures. She knew Han Solo for give minutes, yet mourned him as if he was her father. Han would not have gone to Starkiller to save Rey. He didn't go to Starkiller to save Rey. He went to destroy the shielding system. It was Finn who went to save Rey, and who refused to leave without her. If not for Finn, she could very well have died on Starkiller.

Rey attacked Finn when she first met him, over a jacket a droid said was stolen. She took a creepy pleasure in not only beating Kylo on Starkiller but tormenting him. Watch how she stalks him like a predator stalking it's prey. It's exactly how Anakin, consumed by the dark, did it to Obi Wan. And, before any body tells me you couldn't blame her.....I didn't. Someone like Yoda however, would have. Jedi do not do that. Darksiders do. She enjoyed blowing up TIE pilots on Crait 'im really getting the hang of this now' - despite them being stolen brainwashed children like Finn.
Rey was HUMAN. Look at her costumes in TFA and TLJ. She wore shades of grey and beige. None of us are totally evil or totally good. In the ROTJ novelisation, Luke realises that at the end - he didn't despise even Palpatine, but the dark in him. And in himself.
The relationship between Rey and Kylo was meant to be based on acceptance. That was why they had a falling out at the end of TLJ, because he wouldn't accept that she had friends she loved amongst people he saw as terrorists. And because she reacted, as she always did, with violence.
Rey was reimagined into an unforgiving creature of perfection in TROS. Hence her pure white costume.
That wasn't the Rey I loved from TFA and TLJ.

 

We discussed Beauty and the Beast before in here. I don't think the two are comparable because the Beast did not kill anyone. And it is still a questionable love story. I did like the redemption story in TROS, but the romance angle always turned me off. But if others like it that's fine with me.

 

Your comparism would be much more apt for the live action version than for the animated one. Because in the animated one the prince is just a spoiled, unpleasant git as a human. No excuses. He absolutely deserves what he gets. His outside got transformed to match his inside. The beast didn`t "conceal a loving and caring man". He first had to grow into one because the prince certainly wasn`t that before he became the beast. The interaction with Belle triggered that transformation (and a couple of long years being off his spoiled high horse). If she had just made him transform back into the prince he was, she would have been left with a pretty jerk once more.

By that comparism, Ben/Kylo didn`t get disfigured but his inside was never all that pretty and certainly nothing for Rey to see and coo over in TLJ.

It is the live action remake that comes in with a more "he was a victimized, abused kid" narrative for the prince pre-Beast which is more in line how you describe Ben Solo.

 

I agree that Rey showed signs of dark throughout, but due to Daisy's likeability and Disney I never thought they would go that route. @sian1965 brought up some interesting points I just did not agree with some.

 

We watched ROTJ last night in a social forum. It is a great movie, but it is bittersweet to watch Luke grow as a Jedi, Leia soften with Han(sorry @anakinfansince1983) ha ha and Han become the man he did and then watch them all backtrack in the ST. Yes characters have setbacks but they really regressed. They found their way again but for all 3 to regress like that was too much. I doubt Lucas would have come at it with such cynicism. The Luke of ROTJ would not have pulled a saber on Ben.

 

Okay, fine.
I actually loved Han and Leia, but they were flawed. Like me.

 

Well, I tried to stay away. I guess I need to put in another Godfather clip here:

Wow. Where is all this in canon again? The idea that Luke's academy was like this? That Han and Leia were bad parents? IN CANON - a novel, comic or film.

Because just because JJ said it, it's NOT CANON.

This right here. For a guy who professes to love Han and says he's his favorite character, he sure hates him. Same with Kasdan. They like one sliver of Han - the guy he was at the start of ANH. That's it. They really should stop with their nonsense.

And I really won't comment about how someone who says he loves the SW OT did what he did to those characters. Because a) I'm not a psychologist and b) I can't express my true feelings due to forum rules.

 

Agreed Han going back to being a smuggler erases all his development in the OT. By the time he was frozen in carbonite he was a different guy.

 

Well, obviously he died, and the frozen person is Haan.

 

I remember a line from a film once - "young people are full of dreams. Older people are full of ****."

We do get more cynical as we age, that's what I saw in Luke. And Han and Leia never stopped loving each other - but sometimes people love each other, but can't live with each other because they're too different.
I liked Leia's last conversation with Han"No matter how often we fought, I hated to see you leave."
They were passionate people, they fought a lot in the OT. Opposites attract.

Regarding Lucas....I think he was a lot more cynical by the time he made the PT. The Jedi he'd created as such noble souls in the OT, came across as very different in the PT.

 

This thing about Han and Leia being bad parents is not in the film.

They -and Luke- were ensnared into behaving towards Ben in a way that could be misinterpreted by Ben, who was manipulated in his turn into misinterpreting it in precisely that way. Too much Vader in him was also true for that moment in the hut, and Luke was caught off guard; and so was Leia.

Then Snoke was caught off guard.

All of them behaved as someone else had foreseen. Ben and his parents had to be separated, and then Ben and Luke. Then Snoke had to go. Kylo would have been next, and then Rey, through possession.

'He was deceived by a lie, we all were'

 

I think Kylo/Ben is a character people either love or despise - rather like TLJ he's split the fandom..

I love the character. I see him as a broken, vulnerable child inside a man, an abuse victim, someone who honestly doesn't really know what he wants, but desperately wants to be understood.
I identify with him because he was coded as a mentally ill abuse victim, and I have mental health problems myself.
I love the OT cast, but I don't see them as being 'disrespected' by being shown as human beings who made mistakes. I know many admirable women who've been great mums but also have great careers.

But I also know people whose lives revolved around their careers, and although they loved their children, they weren't there for them. Quite a few famous people had difficult relationships with their children - the late Henry Fonda was one example.

Other people however, do not and never will see Kylo Ren as anything other than a monster, a patricide, an abuser of women.
We'll never change each others opinions of course - and we shouldn't - but just as many posters here have the right to denounce him, we who love the character have the same need to defend him.
On this, we must agree to disagree.

 

He’s arguably the most interesting character in the whole franchise. Betsy quoting Kris Kristofferson’s “He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction a walking contradiction“ lyric to describe Travis Bickle could, in a somewhat looser fashion, be applied to Kylo Ren/Ben.

He’s certainly in that mold. Travis Bickle, Ethan Edwards, and Kylo are all variations on a theme. The intimacy afforded by the narrative that’s presented in both Taxi Driver and The Searchers helps us to get a fairly cohesive grasp of the intricacies of their respective lead’s character by rarely shifting focus from them. Unfortunately Kylo doesn’t get this luxury. And nor should he. Nobody goes to a see a Star Wars film with the expectations of seeing a 2 hour character study. We want spaceships and Wookies and lots of pew pews.

Nevertheless over the course of 3 films I believe they served up a character that was suitably complex enough to keep my interest. He’s the only principal character across the entire saga where my attitude towards them shifted as the story progressed. Adam did a fine job in his portrayal, and Kylo Ren is a fine addition to not just the Star Wars saga but to cinema in general.

 

I'm in the minority, but I wanted a bit more than pew pews!

 

Booom, kkkblaamo, whooossh, zzzp, zzzzappp.

There you go. Just for you. Take them, cherish them.