User:TAnthony/Star Wars research

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Kylo Ren, the Darth Vader-obsessed antagonist whose rage leads to a crushing moment of grief in the film.^[1]

At a post-screening Q&A for Episode VII at the Writers Guild of America this weekend, director J.J. Abrams discussed the creation of the monster — and, for the first time, he and co-writers Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt talked publicly about the decision to have him murder a hero we’ve loved for decades.

To create someone new that Star Wars fans would hate and fear, Abrams says they made the hard choice to kill off someone who definitely made that type of mark, someone we love: a particular scoundrel who also proved he was more heroic than anyone might have guessed back when we first met him.

“Star Wars had the greatest villain in cinema history. So, how you bring a new villain into that world is a very tricky thing,” Abrams told the crowd. “We knew we needed to do something f—king bold. The only reason why Kylo Ren has any hope of being a worthy successor is because we lose one of the most beloved characters.”

If you’ve seen the film, you already know: Kylo Ren, who was born Ben Solo, runs his ragged, crossguard lightsaber straight through the heart of his father — Harrison Ford’s Han Solo.

It’s a crushing moment that comes as Solo, at the behest of the boy’s mother, Leia, reaches out in the hope of finding something good inside the son who has already hurt so many others. The boy had already chosen a new name and a new fate after joining the monstrous Knights of Ren — but the slaying of his father is the final step in his transformation.

“Long before we had this title, the idea of The Force Awakens was that this would become the evolution of not just a hero, but a villain,” Abrams said. “And not a villain who was the finished, ready-made villain, but someone who was in process.”^[1]

He said he took inspiration from real world fears. Anyone raising a child knows the parental anxiety that they might grow up wrong, make poor choices, and then keep spiraling into self-destruction.

“All of us bring our own experiences to it,” Abrams said. “As a father, as a friend to people who have children, I know what it’s like to see struggle, to be part of struggle. I know how painful it can be. I know how real it is. And this is, of course, an insane extrapolated version,” he added with a laugh. “Patricide is not ideal.”

Michael Arndt, who helped craft the story before Abrams and Kasdan penned the script, said Kylo Ren began merely as a way to separate the heroes we remember from the original trilogy.^[1]

“In my early drafts, my thinking was we had to bridge the end of Return of the Jedi to what happens in this movie, and we didn’t want everybody to start off all together. We wanted them to be spread all throughout the galaxy,” Arndt said.

The problem was, Return of the Jedi concluded with such a robust happily-ever-after that the writers of The Force Awakens had to find a way to undo that.

“We came up with a backstory that Luke had a pupil who turned against him and fought him, and killed all the other pupils, and that was a thing that exploded the family and destroyed Han and Leia’s relationship,” Arndt said.^[1]

Even then, however, they didn’t know Han had to die.

“I had thought Han’s story and Leia’s story was just about them coming back together. At the end of the movie they would have reconciled and gotten over their differences. And you would have said, ‘Okay, bad stuff happened, but at least they’re back together again,” Arndt said. “J.J. rightly asked, ‘What is Han doing in this movie?’ If we’re not going to have something important and irreversible happen to him, then he kind of feels like luggage. He feels like this great, sexy piece of luggage you have in your movie. But he’s not really evolving. He’s not really pushing the story forward.”

Audiences have been grieving the character all weekend. So did Harrison Ford, you know… take it hard? “Nah, he was fine,” Abrams said, waving his hand curtly as the audience laughed.

As we all know, Ford was way ahead of them. He’d been advocating decades ago for Solo’s death as an emotional sacrifice. “He was all for it back when we were doing Empire and Jedi,” Kasdan said. “He may have rethought it a little bit in the interim.”

Abrams said his fears about taking such an extreme measure were assuaged by Kasdan’s enthusiasm for the idea. “You wrote some of the greatest lines that Han ever spoke, so there was a level of comfort in the danger,” Abrams told him. “You were willing to go there, which made me feel like it wasn’t necessarily the worst idea.”

There are reports of adults breaking into tears during that scene, but it’s probably not the shock of that lightsaber stabbing through their favorite character that triggers the waterworks: It’s more likely what Han does with his final moments of life, reaching out to touch the face of his lost son. It’s not Han Solo’s fate that is sealed in that moment, it’s Kylo Ren’s. And the cruelest act in Star Wars was followed by one of its most tender.

So what was it like on set for that scene?

“It was really chilling,” Abrams said “Seeing these two actors, they weren’t chewing up the scenery. They were just doing this thing in a way that, frankly, was disturbing. To see Harrison reach out and touch Adam. I know this sounds stupid, but literally watching it, I forgot — I forgot that he wasn’t his son. He did it so beautifully.”

There’s no denying — it was one hell of a goodbye.

• "Kylo Ren vs. Rey: Can the fallen son be redeemed—or only destroyed?". Entertainment Weekly.

He hates her. This girl. This garbage picker. This amateur who somehow drew his family lightsaber to her hand, overpowering his own bond with the Force.

And yet, Adam Driver says Kylo Ren can’t help but harbor an admiration for Daisy Ridley’s Rey in The Last Jedi.

“He has been aware of this ability in himself from such a young age, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people around him who are on the same level,” the actor says. “I think that there is something familiar there, as well as something to be feared, or something … that he can’t quite place.”

This burns at him, too. He craves respect, so he has none to spare. It just wells up in him as more corrosive envy.

Rey is unburdened by these distractions. She doesn’t think anything about him at all.

The dynamic between them, the dark and the light, pushing and pulling at each other, is the heart of the Dec. 15 film, and although they are on opposite sides, their fates are still interlocked. That’s why writer-director Rian Johnson paired them on the first of EW’s four covers devoted to the movie.

Rey doesn’t have his will to power over others. All she wants is to understand this ability that appeared within her – and to use it to help others. “She doesn’t really know what she wants,” Ridley tells EW. “She really is trying to do the right thing and morally, her compass is really pointing north.”

But that she could still be led astray.

“The Resistance is really not that much to her,” the actress says. “I mean, she’s been left her whole life, and very quickly is eager to sort of help other people, which is wonderful. She wants to be part of something. I mean, everyone wants to be part of something.”

But when Luke Skywalker displays fear toward her, and rejects her rather than embracing her as a student, Rey feels cast out. After all, Luke banished himself rather than help the Resistance, and has now decided that the order he devoted his life to must end. The Last Jedi will find her adrift.

That’s where Kylo Ren once found himself, too.

Both of these main characters know what it’s like to feel abandoned.

Driver says Kylo began turning against his mother and father, Leia Organa and Han Solo, because he felt they cared more about the Rebellion and rebuilding after the fall of the Empire than they cared about him. That created a bitterness that ultimately consumed him.

“I think the idea of someone whose parents are very much devoted to the cause, that’s something a lot of people could relate to, whether it be religion or politics or a business,” Driver says. “Not identifying with [that cause] yourself, I think can give someone a complex.”

Selfish? Sure, a little. Maybe more than a little. But it’s also understandable, even in our world. Ironically, Kylo Ren just rebelled against an actual Rebellion.

“Looking around and not seeing yourself and not identifying with what’s around you, I think, affects how we behave,” Driver says.

After the events of The Force Awakens, and his choice to end one of the most beloved figures in George Lucas’ universe, Kylo is still trying to figure out if he did was the right thing – if only for himself.

“From his perspective, what he’s done is hopeful,” Driver says. “If anything he has justice. I think he’s surprised by how he would feel after Han Solo. He’s hoping for hope. He’s hoping for clarity.”

“There’s a big part of the story yet to be written and not by me,” says Johnson, who will hand the trilogy back to The Force Awakens filmmaker J.J. Abrams for 2019’s Episode IX. “But I don’t think it’s very interesting if the whole story is just ‘Will Kylo get his comeuppance?’ He’s a more complicated character than that and I think he deserves a more complicated story than that. I don’t see the point of trying to get behind his mask and learn more about him if all we’re going to learn is ‘Yeah, he’s just an evil bad guy that needs to be killed.’”

When Rey feels rejected by Luke Skywalker, who also sees parallels between the power in her and the abilities of his estranged nephew, the old Jedi master inadvertently pushes the two toward each other.

“This is very much about Rey trying to figure out how she fits into all this, much like any of us as we’re growing up, as we’re transitioning from childhood into adulthood,” Johnson says. “You’re going meet people who you think are going help who don’t. And help is also going come from unexpected places.”

That unexpected place is Kylo Ren, and the situation she finds herself in – alone, unappreciated, is similar to where Ben Solo found himself when broke from his Uncle Luke and followed the Knights of Ren down a darker path.

Supreme Leader Snoke, the enigmatic ruler of the First Order, detected the power in him and saw someone who could be swayed. But the young man’s shaky resolve means he could also be swayed back.

“Anybody that’s committed to anything, at a certain point in their life … you kind of constantly question why you got into it in the first place,” Driver says.

Rey and Kylo Ren are reaching toward each other in combat, but each one could also end up pulling the other to his or her side.

• Tom Long of The Detroit News: It also offers up a great new villain, Kylo Ren, played deliciously by Adam Driver. Kylo Ren literally worships at the altar of Darth Vader and wears a similar black mask, although thankfully he takes it off once in a while to let Driver’s heat out.^[2]

• Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Post: Adam Driver is similarly right-on as a shadowy, somewhat simian figure named Kylo Ren.^[3]

• The astonishing newcomer here is Adam Driver’s Ren. A helmeted, caricatured villain to begin with, the moment of his unmasking is revelatory and inventive. Driver brings a palpably sinister edge to the role, vulnerable and humanised in ways Darth Vader (more machine than man, remember) ever could be.^[4]

• Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, an impertinent, Oedipally-motivated Vader Lite in an inky cloak and a metallic duck-billed muzzle that renders his voice a digitized growl ^[5]