Raging across the galaxy

star wars, but it’s just the memes

This scene is still not over. 

Finn draws Rey’s attention to the prisoner ship and the fact that Rey’s stint into parkour is going to cost the group dearly if she doesn’t get her ass in gear. (I have utterly given up on trying to grasp the geography of this scene.)

Rey experiences a spike of fear that her messing around is going to get Chewie killed and she reaches out with the Force to pull the ship back.

Rey’s all worried and scared the ship is going to get away, oh no time is of the essence! She’s concentrating really hard, she’s pulling the ship back…!

Then she just happens to look down.

Queue the Villain Music!!

*gasp!* He’s………..alive!!! (I laughed OUT LOUD in the theater.)

Kylo is in literally no hurry here. I cannot emphasize enough how slow he’s walking away from that wreck when we have seen him stomp quickly and loudly through ship halls. He doesn’t start playing tug-of-war for another few feet at least.

#the fact that even op’s soultion look like paltry bandaid says something#honestly there LITERALLY NOTHING one can do to make this scene moetionally compelling#how could you compel people to root for anything here when there is no conflict between Rey not wanting to Kill Ben and then violently#trashes his ship which rolls like a ball on a cliff like that?!#like JJ handwaved it away when Ben saunters away from it like it was a minor inconviniences#and we laugh at it now#but when i actually saw it first time it honest to god look like Rey genuinely wanted Ben dead and doesn’t care#so her little tear and pity party in death star looked like big joke (tags via @ainomica) 

First of all, you’re right and you should say it!

The main purpose for this blog is my efforts to run a post-mortem on this movie. The above tags made me think as I hunt for the root of the problem in this movie.

1. JJ wanted a retcon but didn’t put in the work to reestablish the characters as different from the previous movies. This is fanfiction 101: you have to establish the new assumptions. He was relying on the audience’s lizard brains to make the assumption that Ren is the Bad Guy and Rey is the Good Guy, and further make assumptions about their motivations, based solely on their costumes and voice tenor. Then, without firmly establishing the characters’ new roles in the story, JJ threw them together into situations thinking, “He’s the Bad Guy and she’s the Good Guy so of course there’s inherent conflict!” Newsflash bro: it didn’t work.

((2. If JJ wanted to make a retcon so bad, why did leave in a plot thread that is obviously a reference to TLJ, and even more specifically, Reylo from tlj?! (”I offered you my hand once” is what I’m referring to here). It boggles the frickin’ mind.))

3. The lack of emotion in this movie is death from a million cuts. The lack of believable emotion I point out in the original post is just one microsecond in a movie full of these missed opportunities. Yeah, one shot isn’t going to fix the movie (my suggestion really is a paltry bandaid solution).

4. JJ didn’t want a compelling emotional narrative. He wanted a David-and-Goliath shoot-em-up in which the Bad Guys are mercilessly punished.

5. The internal inconsistencies are what make the movie incomprehensible. Aside from the core theme of the movie being rotten, it’s probably the worst thing about the movie. I’m going to do a post about this as I think about it more, because this is a huge part of why the movie was so bad.

5. Frankly, Rey does want Ren dead in the TIE backflip scene. There’s no other way around it. You don’t cut the wing off a TIE and not expect to kill the pilot inside. As a result of that, her sorrow during the Ocean Battle absolutely feels like crocodile tears. This is a really good example of how the internal inconsistencies of the movie cause it to shoot itself in the foot. And I’ll reiterate: this juxtaposition could have worked, if there had been groundwork done of ‘oh, Rey looks conflicted/sorrowful’ during the TIE backflip scene.

6. …..I literally just had a thought others have definitely said first: Rey Palpatine truly is her grandfather’s heir. She: - infiltrates the resistance and plays to their expectations of what a Jedi Hero should be in order to gain their trust -cons Leia into trusting her -tries to get her ‘friends’ killed and/or captured by the FO (by wandering away and delaying Poe from launching Ochi’s ship) -tries multiple times to kill Ben and when that doesn’t work, cons him into trusting her - by telling him what he wants to hear (“I did want to take your hand - Ben’s hand”) - to the point he gives up his life for her ((not gonna lie, this section is the worst part of the realization for me)) -kills her grandfather so he can’t betray the truth of her machinations to the galaxy (i.e. can’t reveal that his goals are her goals) -gets as much semi-valuable junk from the Resistance as she can (i.e. the Falcon and the ‘sabers: the Resistance was being held together with spit and glue there at the end) -traps Luke and Leia’s spirits on a planet they both hated (?to get revenge for the fact they were hidden from Palpatine when Anakin became Vader?) -then leaves to presumably spread her poisoned doctrine (the veneration of Luke Skywalker Jedi Hero) to the universe and people will listen to her because they assume she’s a Jedi

They’re both angry. They’re both impulsive. They’re both Down To Fight. They both feel the dark side strongly. (I could go on but I haven’t seen TROS in two months, the details are fuzzy.)

And, like, they’re a Dyad In The Force or whatever - so it makes sense to me that they’re very similar in all these important ways. But then I realized the implications of this idea: I asked myself, “With Rey’s behavior in TROS, why do the protagonists welcome Rey when they rejected Ben?” In a more meta view: why did the writers of TROS punish Ben and ‘reward’ Rey when a lot of their behaviors are very similar?

Think about it: Rey in TROS does a lot of the things Kylo does in TFA or TLJ (see above) but Rey wholeheartedly embraces the Skywalker/Organa/Solo legacy - admiring Luke and Leia, wanting to be them, striving to ‘earn’ their legacy. Ben distanced himself from his family, killed the emissary Leia sends to bring him back. He opposed Luke. “Let the past die,” he insisted to Rey. He is punished by being killed off unceremoniously and being completely forgotten by every character in the movie. Rey’s narrative ‘reward’ is that she gets to take on a name that holds prestige and power in the minds of the writers and receives the metaphorical blessing of her guardians (Leia and Luke as benevolent Force ghosts).

And what did Ben do wrong? “He killed a lot of people!” Well, Poe kills a lot of people and he’s shown to be a triumphant hero in the end, so that’s not it. “He’s angry!” So is Rey.

I realized that Ben’s chief sin in the eyes of the writers is that he rejected the legacy of his family.

In grief: none of these a-holes Threepio is looking at have treated him with a shred of respect, decency, or friendliness through the whole movie. He has no friends there to look at. And his husband isn’t there to object to this BS and teach these people a lesson - R2 probably could’ve prevented this whole fiasco. 

Ben Solo: