Spoiler: Actor things So I keept seeing John Boyega hugs adam driver on set but like I distinctly remember driver saying he doesn't like hugs and even in those current articles they say it too It's played as cute or funny but like I'm thinking, if a person don't like hugs, don't hug them?
...I just had a thought. Spoiler: TLJ spoilers Kylo Ren's Vader fixation is suddenly so much sadder with the new backstory information. Like, not just in the sense that we see Snoke using it as an emotional lever to abuse, degrade, and manipulate him, but like. He probably looked up every bit of available information on Anakin Skywalker, and came to the exact same conclusion that a lot of the prequel fandom has: that the Jedi were unbelievable dickheads who completely failed him, treating him as a tool and not a person, and the Order's power absolutely deserved to be broken. No wonder he latched onto the idea of Vader, and of trying to be the next Vader. ...Dammit, I'm starting to get really attached to this dumpster fire of a person.
And now I desperately want to see the scene where Ben and co. kill the rest of Luke's trainees and it's like Spoiler: TLJ spoilers Ben runs in in the middle of the night shouting about how Master Skywalker tried to kill him and they need to get out of here, away from him. And some of the others are like, "He did what? WTF, yeah, let's run." And some of them are like, "Why would he do something like that? You're lying." And some of them have picked up on how closely Luke watches Ben's every move and say, "If he did something like that, I'm sure he had his reasons." And some of them still aren't entirely awake and are just really confused and the emotions are already running high in a room full of empaths and that makes it even harder to tell what's going on, and one person is like, "Let's calm down and let Ben explain exactly what happened," and Ben is like, "There's no time, I brought the roof down on him but I didn't feel him die, so he'll be getting out any minute now to come back and finish the job." And another one who's never liked Ben because he's awkward and creepy and has anger issues says it sure is awfully convenient that Ben wants them to trust nothing but his word with no evidence that anything even happened and run off, cutting their training short. And another one says shut up, Kev, we all know you're jealous that Ben's the most powerful of us by a mile, and someone else, who's noticed how Luke pays far more attention to Ben than to any of the rest of them, and especially how Master Skywalker acts when Ben loses his temper, says, in a very heavy voice, "Yes. He is." And someone else, desperately trying to defuse the tension in the room, says that there's 12 of them and one of the Master, so why don't they all go out together and ask him to explain his side of the story, and someone says, "Are you crazy? He" -they gesture to the person who said Luke must have had a reason- "was about ready to stab Ben himself! I'm not going to make my odds worse if that lot decide we need to die!" And the guy who just got singled out says, "So what if I trust Master Skywalker more than I trust him? Did you see what he did to that practice droid last week? He scares the shit out of me!" and after that it's just complete pandemonium and the whole time Snoke's voice is whispering in Ben's mind, See? He's gotten to them too. Already, they think you're a monster, when you have done nothing to them, and Ben is thinking that Master Skywalker could come back at any minute to finish him off, and afterward none of the survivors can entirely remember who threw the first punch, and Ben might have been the first one to pull a lightsaber but they're not sure if that's just a trick of memory, and- The survivors are standing there, realizing what they've done, and they follow Ben as he tells them what to do because whatever their opinions were five minutes ago, they all know they don't have a place here now and he seems to know what he's doing and the rest of them sure don't, and the whole time Snoke is saying in his mind, Come to me, I will take you in, I will protect you and teach you and give you the power he promised, and I will not betray you as he did because I accept what you are. And maybe there's still one who says no, I'm not going along with this, I'm going back to find Master Skywalker, and the others panic and someone stabs them in the back as they start to leave, and Snoke tells Ben, Destroy this place of his power, destroy this place of your pain, destroy your past, and Ben quietly lights the fire and leads the others to the shuttle as the temple burns, and the corpses with it.
Spoiler I love pretty much everything about the Luke/Kylo confrontation on Crait, but my absolute favorite is the whole "I'm sorry for fucking you right over, Ben", "oh are you gonna ~save me~", "nope" exchange, cause it was very. Like, Luke owed Ben that apology, he super fucked up, and Kylo's weird sarcastic "you trying to turn me" thing made me think Kylo didn't buy that Luke meant it. Like Luke was just saying pretty words to make Ben stop. Switching tactics after the whole murder thing didn't work out. I like that they divorced Luke's apology from Kylo's actions like that. How Ben reacted to the murder thing doesn't make Luke retroactively justified in thinking about putting him down like a dog, and neither does anything Kylo plans on doing moving forward. Treating the dude fairly wasn't contingent on him changing his behavior. That's nice, is all.
Yesss. Spoiler I thought they did a good job of hitting the tragic-backstory sweet spot where other people definitely have a lot of fault in where he ended up, but he's still absolutely responsible for his choices now.
Spoiler the resistance storyline gets a lot of flack, and especially Holdo not explaining her intentions to Poe, but like. She didn't owe him an explanation. He's her subordinate, and one recently demoted due to insubordination, anyways. And also, I've seen people jawing about how the destruction of the Resistance could have been entirely avoided had Holdo just told Poe about her plans, but Poe did launch a fucking coup when he learned about her intentions in the goddamned movie, so. Maybe not. Maybe Poe super believed that sacrificing the big old gunship was an unacceptable loss (because he did) and would be willing to round up a bunch of his pals and launch a fucking coup (because he did). Maybe Poe was the one at fault, for assuming that he knew best,,,, and not compromising at all, ever. Also, if Poe hadn't loudly given away Holdo's plan to Finn, DJ never would have known about it, and it would have super worked.
Spoiler also, I'm super chuffed about people calling TLJ's Poe OOC when he had about 5 minutes of screen time in TFA, and also he does have a spin off comic wherein he behaves exactly like how he does in TLJ.
Spoiler The hole of Dark Side didn't strike me as very dark during the movie itself. However, today I learned a fact that perhaps explains why Luke considers it such: Luke Skywalker canonically cannot swim (source: The Weapon of a Jedi). So if going through the hole dumps you directly into the water, that may influence how he views it. Rey is somewhat less melodramatic.
I have a great many questions about that whole thing, and am really hoping they follow up on at least a few relevant subjects next movie. 'cause like Spoiler They have now established that the Force is the connection between living beings, and the Light is described not just as growth and life but also as death and decay and regrowth out of that death. They have now established that "balance" in terms of the Force means that a rise in Light brings about a rise in Dark and vice versa. There is, however, no information given about what the Dark Side is or how it relates to the Light. ...And apparently this random hole in the rock/cave is the representation of the Dark Side for vague and unspecified reasons. "What is the Dark Side" has always been, like, the #1 thing that bothers me about Star Wars, and here all of the vagueness is basically distilled down to produce the platonic ideal of that pet peeve. It's just weird when they just gave the most detailed, clear, and coherent definition of the Force in the entire franchise that they then give no information whatsoever about exactly what it is we're supposed to be afraid of or what it has to do with anything. And, okay, I'm pretty sure the real main reason the cave sequence was there was that ESB had the similar bizarre and random cave sequence, and the reason that was there was that George Lucas wants to marry Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey has "journey to the underworld" as a step to tick off, but given how tightly-written the new trilogy has mostly been, I'd like to hope they put some thought into what they were doing beyond "let's put in a surreal mystical vision in a location vaguely described as ~Dark~ because the OT did that." I'd really, really be happier if this turns out to be setting up for them to actually talk about what the Dark is next movie, but my hopes aren't that high.
Spoiler: Continuing on this thought Luke Skywalker being unable to swim makes sense as he's a desert boy, though I'm a little surprised he never got around to learning. On that tangent though- when the hell did Rey learn to swim??
Spoiler I thought the light side was growth and life, and the dark side was death and decay in that metaphor. Maybe it wasn't, tho. I guess Luke did tell her after she had that whole "light and dark, life and death, warmth and cold" vision quest thing that the Light is everywhere and doesn't belong to the Jedi, and also scolded her for going straight for the Darkside hole thing without hesitation or fear.
Spoiler Yeah, overall I found the dark hole really disappointing. I mean, the funhouse-mirror-with-lag thing was pretty cool, but definitely not dark. I mean, maybe there is something there about it giving her specifically-tailored information to try to steer her toward dark actions, but it's not like the Jedi were particularly any better about giving people agency via information transfer. I don't know. I think the whole Light/Dark/Balance, Jedi/Sith/Other thing in the movie was super muddled, and then tossed aside at the end to make Rey yet another Jedi.
Spoiler I didn't really see it as "tossed aside" so much as "not followed through on enough to feel done." Plus doing the same stuff Star Wars has always done where they don't actually want to tell you what makes something Dark, just that Dark Is Bad and this thing over here is Dark, even if it's not actually doing anything that seems to have anything to do with Bad. That cave in ESB is also apparently a nexus of ~the Dark Side~ and all it does is summon up a vision of Vader that has Luke's face, which... I guess scares him, but doesn't cause any lasting damage or seem to have any impact at all on his behavior going forward, and is vaguely symbolic in a way that doesn't actually represent much of anything. And most characters identified as Dark are huge jerks, but plenty of characters identified as Light are also huge jerks, and basically this is why I ended up making up an elaborate headcanon about the mechanics of Dark Side vs. Light Side Force use.
Spoiler It's really the "moving beyond the Jedi/Sith dichotomy that was I was complaining got tossed aside. Luke and Yoda were both saying that the ways of the Jedi were flawed, and that Light and Jedi were not synonymous. There's that whole spiel by Kylo Ren (of all people) about needing to leave the past behind. And then at the end apparently Rey is a Jedi anyway. None of the traditions, at most a day of training, no teaching, nothing but the title,, but apparently a Jedi nonetheless. I don't know. It didn't feel unresolved, as if they went somewhere and then stopped. Rather, it felt like they went somewhere, and then deliberately backtracked to the beginning as if the journey never happened. Maybe it will be addressed in Episode IX. Maybe she's just reclaiming the word, with no connection to the previous meaning besides being a Light-Side user with a lightsaber. Maybe it was just Luke trolling Kylo Ren. But it definitely felt resolved in the wrong direction. And at least with Darth Hole v1 in ESB you could claim that it was bringing out Luke's fears and stuff. Maybe not trying to make him turn per se, but reacting to his negative emotions. Rey just got disappointment.
Spoiler: tlj I just saw it. I LOVED IT. I adored the fuck out of Kylo and Rey’s interactions. I think someone upthread said they didn’t expect the movie to actually have the guts to go there. Neither did I, and I was so delighted. (When they were asking out loud why they were connected, I wanted to say, because thematically this is a modern Disney movie and the struggle is more about self actualization than defeating the bad guy. (I have watched several Lindsay Ellis videos, can you tell?) Kylo Ren is a terrible fit for the Darth Vader villain trope, but that’s not a mistake. I think I have a lot more context now with this movie to appreciate what they were actually going for with him, instead of just noticing that he isn’t much like Darth Vader. And I mean I liked him a lot anyway, but now he makes so much sense. A terrifying death cyborg is a pretty good representation of an evil empire, but maybe not the most useful antagonist to prod a hero along a highly personal journey of identity. Darth Vader can reveal he’s your father and then he’s pretty much shot his entire load. Fathers mean the world to Rey, but I think a lot of the urgency there is related to not knowing who she is, coupled with the pain of a lack of deep interpersonal connections. I Am Your Father Dramatic Pause doesn’t really have much of consequence to offer on either of those fronts. And I’m not sure how much more you could reasonably do with Darth Vader onscreen without completely muddling his character and entire function in the story. Kylo Ren, and his internally conflicted, isolated self (with the bonus visible eyes to help the audience connect emotionally more easily- gosh, you can see his entire face!) has so much more to offer Rey and her character arc, with his parallel issues and related, very obvious vulnerabilities. They are both so, so lonely. And so lost. I ship them as adopted siblings who prefer to describe their relationship using inarticulate noises of frustration, and who push back against their codependent tendencies by being kinda horrible to each other, but are making a sincere and gradually successful effort to do better.) I loved how well Luke’s fancy projection trick was set up. There was very deliberate attention drawn to a soldier guy leaving red footprints in the not-snow, by having another soldier guy taste the white powder (ew dude) and say it was salt. Which just seemed like an explanation for the cool blood-looking tracks effect that the vehicles left in their wake. Until during Luke’s combat scene, it was just noticeable enough without being too obvious that Luke had no footprints. So that was neat. I think I had more to say, about how Luke continues his thing of backing off from killing blows. And how Kylo Ren, much like his father, continues to not back off from preemptive lethal strikes. And I’m really interested in the direction they’re going with force-related mythology. Maybe this has been explored in other Star Wars media, but I’m strictly a movie person so I wouldn’t know. I guess the idea of balance was always there, but it always struck me before as a way to say that good will rise again even if things look very bleak. I didn’t think much of what it might imply if the imbalance was in favor of light. On one hand it seems like it could be kinda hopeless if good will always be balanced with bad. But I’m hoping maybe the real answer is something related to why Rey freaked Luke out so much. Maybe it’s a balance you can navigate within yourself, and making peace with the dark doesn’t have to mean giving up all the light and being evil. Maybe the Jedi had some notions that weren’t exactly correct. I would like to think.
Not to mention- Spoiler they bombed the EVERLOVING BEJEEZUS out of his position, and he didn't even raise his lightsaber to block the blaster bolts. And you don't really register that as anything but "he's an unfathomable badass" any more than any of the characters watching do, until it clicks.
Spoiler: more of above If the Jedi did have some wrong notions re: light and dark, that would actually fit really well into the type of self discovery and self actualization plot I’m referencing. Think of a post-renaissance Disney princess of your choice. Did this character rebel against some dearly held belief about how things are and/or should be, despite all efforts of others to instill this idea or value? Was an extraordinary act of compassion and/or interpersonal insight key to finding her true path? It’s not every single character that hits both of those beats but they’re pretty common. If that’s the direction they’re going with Rey, it’s just as well Yoda burned down the library because she’s going to have to forge her own path through this anyway. Like, Kylo Ren is probably the only person who reasonably could help, since he is just as lost as Rey, and the old ideas haven’t done him many favors. I just want to be clear that I’m not trying to imply anything negative by bringing up Disney princesses. I love me an iconoclast princess who sees people for who they really are.
