[controversial] did ben have to die?

motherofpearl1 wrote:

Darth Snoopy wrote:Death does not equal redemption - and I wished the writers and directors had actually utilized TLJs setup of internal conflict within the First Order to channel a redemption arc for Ben. It would have been different, more nuanced and opened up plot avenues for so many characters that were seriously lacking one in 9, e.g. Finn and Hux. Also, Snokes death allegedly being at the hand of Rey was just accepted or they could have addressed her not wanting or allowed to go on missions off planet (in the beginning of TROS) due to the fact that the supposedly zealous First Order sees her as enemy number one or something.

I'm also so tired of the many people who think that Ben had to die because of his actions - But the most hilarious, thing is that there's this popular line of thought that Kylo was absolutely responsible for the destruction of Hosnian Prime - almost like they watched an alternate scene with him pushing some big red button labelled 'genocide', while cackling Palpatine style. Theres also a fervent belief that TFA somehow definitively or unambiguously lays the deaths of Luke's students on Ben's hands. Han was so vague and so speaking as Obiwan, that you had to know there was more to the story.

On a cynical note, I once thought that Han dying by and for his son, meant that Ben would not die, so as to not devalue his sacrifice and hope for his child till the end. How wrong was I...

If people argue that in real life Kylo would be prosecuted for war crimes, then you could also point out that Poe should have been court martialed for his actions in the evacuation of D'Qar, Luke prosecuted for the attempted murder of his nephew ( his excuse that it was a 'moment of weakness' wouldn't carry water in a court of law) , and that the Resistance were in fact a terrorist group.
As for Han.....yes his sacrifice was ultimately for nothing,. But the entire Skywalker clan were sacrificed, from Shmi to Ben Solo.

All to save Palpatine's granddaughter, who blew up a ship with Force lightning, stabbed an unarmed man in the gut, and enjoyed shooting down TIE fighters ( all of them brainwashed kidnapped kids) yet was still more worthy of survival than anyone else.

motherofpearl1 wrote:

motherofpearl1 wrote:

Darth Snoopy wrote:Death does not equal redemption - and I wished the writers and directors had actually utilized TLJs setup of internal conflict within the First Order to channel a redemption arc for Ben. It would have been different, more nuanced and opened up plot avenues for so many characters that were seriously lacking one in 9, e.g. Finn and Hux. Also, Snokes death allegedly being at the hand of Rey was just accepted or they could have addressed her not wanting or allowed to go on missions off planet (in the beginning of TROS) due to the fact that the supposedly zealous First Order sees her as enemy number one or something.

I'm also so tired of the many people who think that Ben had to die because of his actions - But the most hilarious, thing is that there's this popular line of thought that Kylo was absolutely responsible for the destruction of Hosnian Prime - almost like they watched an alternate scene with him pushing some big red button labelled 'genocide', while cackling Palpatine style. Theres also a fervent belief that TFA somehow definitively or unambiguously lays the deaths of Luke's students on Ben's hands. Han was so vague and so speaking as Obiwan, that you had to know there was more to the story.

On a cynical note, I once thought that Han dying by and for his son, meant that Ben would not die, so as to not devalue his sacrifice and hope for his child till the end. How wrong was I...

If people argue that in real life Kylo would be prosecuted for war crimes, then you could also point out that Poe should have been court martialed for his actions in the evacuation of D'Qar, Luke prosecuted for the attempted murder of his nephew ( his excuse that it was a 'moment of weakness' wouldn't carry water in a court of law) ,  and that the Resistance were in fact a terrorist group.
As for Han.....yes his sacrifice was ultimately for nothing,. But the entire Skywalker clan were sacrificed, from Shmi to Ben Solo.

All to save Palpatine's granddaughter, who blew up a ship with Force lightning, stabbed an unarmed man in the gut, and enjoyed shooting down TIE fighters ( all of them brainwashed kidnapped kids) yet was still more worthy of survival than anyone else.

@motherofpearl1
Yes, exactly! The entire skywalker family was sacrificed, and it was done so, in the most off-putting and ill-conceived way ever. I focused on Han, as a retrospective on how I thought or thought I understood the narrative post-TFA.

And when it comes to people bringing real-world law and moral judgment to star wars - a modern representation of monomyth, hahaha! Though every person may have their opinion - there are some who are hung up on fictional likes and tastes reflecting their moral code. That's what irritates me, when people judge others for liking a character.

I think Kylo is complicit in the destruction of Hosnian and I didn't feel like TFA really showed how he felt about that. Hux felt absolute zealous fervor about it, but it shows Kylo watching from space as sad music plays. Kylo is guilty of war crimes no matter how it is painted. I liked to look at it in a myth framework that Kylo isn't a character who is meant to stand in for the mass murderers of the real world; he's a character in which a lot of tendencies that exist in people in general are exaggerated to an insane degree. It's part of the deep drama of falling to the dark side in Star Wars. Although I think the most amazing story would be to have a darksider redeemed and live as a sort of transcendental path out of our greatest darkness and back into the light in which we must actually live past that transition, I was always skeptical that Star Wars could do anything other than redeem and die for such a character, because they've never done it before. They even killed off Ventress post redemption and she wasn't nearly as bad as Kylo. For each example, one can come up with reasons why it is so in this case specifically, but it is so in every case. I'm sad they couldn't do something new and more incredible with it, but I think I wanted a miracle or a way into new stories that could be consumed by the masses and make them feel like overcoming their own personal darkness as well: to return to that Rumi quote, that there is a place beyond good and evil (beyond our conceptions in which we cement one another into roles as a society), I'll meet you there.

They couldn't top the hopeful ending of ROTJ, so I don't know why the sequel trilogy is "better." It wants to be the original trilogy so bad, all over again, but it can't even match it because it doesn't seem to have the mythological substance or spirit to do that. It doesn't even know what it wanted to say. I suppose it just wanted to talk about space Nazis and the rise of such movements as a warning, but it has nothing valuable to say about that, and doesn't even present a way for the new characters not to repeat the past all over again. It seems that Palpatine is the great evil and if he's defeated then there won't be anymore problems because he is the product of thousands of generations of Sith accumulating power, so killing him diffuses all that power and no evil like him can arise again until at least a thousand years in the future because it takes time to unbalance the Force and hoard power to that extent. This isn't how the re-emergence of evil in the real world works at all (in the real world it happens over and over with great rapidity and it seemingly never ends). So it doesn't say anything relevant to that either.

I'm just left with, what does it say, what does it mean, and all I get is nothing. It means profits for corporations.

I think a lot of problems are that during the slaughter of Hosnia, Kylo was masked so it was hard to tell what he was feeling, but his body language plus the musical score showed his regret.

@Acritiqua
Yeah he can be considered complicit as he was aligned with the first order, and did nothing major to stop it - the destruction of Hosnian Prime. Though I've always interpreted his asking for more time to get the map to Luke was a slight inferral of him not agreeing with the action. Maybe a little weird, but it was the way I read it on my first viewing of TFA. But that's more my own headcanon I guess I do wish we got a little more (in the films) in the way of the state of galactic politics - not too much to detract from the real story, but more to enhance character motives and world building. When I first watched TFA in the cinema and saw Hosnian prime being destroyed, I was confused - momentarily thinking Coruscant had turned up in the film.

@motherofpearl1
I also thought that scene was meant to communicate that, some guilt or sorrow as he watched. Which is why I find it strange when people cite it as or refer to it as a criminal action he ordered or was singularly responsible for.

I personally would have loved to see Leia in a more on the nose political environment or role, separate from the Resistance. Though I do know that Bloodlines delivers that as a novel. The Vader reveal is something I wish was a plot in the films - if things were written differently it would have linked up well with other characters and not gone over any audiences heads. I think.

I don't think I'll ever get over how poorly made TROS was. I remember Reylo reactions to the leaked script, how we refused to accept it was genuine not just because of Ben's fate, but because it was so awful.

I'm still astonished, tbh, that they got away with it on celluloid!
I have this image of some faceless corporate hack saying:
"Oh well, it's rubbish but the audience will eat it up as it's Star Wars!"

"Oh well, it's rubbish but the audience will eat it up as it's Star Wars!"

This was a slight miscalculation.
Although it still worked, concernig a way too big (in my opinion) part of the audience, sadly.

Well, it was made for them, those who hated on Rian, Kelly, and Adam. The idiots who sent death threats, spouted bigoted poison.

They got their wish, but I wonder if one day they will realise that thanks to their stupid demands....
The bad guy won.

Regarding the question of if Ben had to die, it seems he did given what they were trying to set up. They apparently started with wanting to end the Skywalker bloodline and have Rey as the new "Skywalker," as a way of changing the meaning of the name??? If Ben were to live there would still be a blood Skywalker when they want the Skywalker Saga (as they decided to call it) over. They first decided that everything that could have been more about the Force in general was really only about Skywalkers, and then they had to get rid of the Skywalkers to open it up more, but of course they can't ditch the name (Skywalker) or important blood lineages (Rey Palpatine), rendering the whole thing pointless. But still, living Ben would undermine it all.

If there's one thing I get fed up with, it's a lot of people blaming TROS's failure on that there wasn't enough time to make a good film.
But Rian made the far superior TLJ in the same time frame.

My brother, a huge Star Trek/DC comics fan, was flabbergasted that they gave the final film to the two men who in his opinion destroyed Star Trek and Batman v Superman. Terrio's track record isn't great. My brother told me BvS was more like a computer game than a film. This is something many people have said about TROS. I actually loved both TFA and Star Trek Into Darkness, but most of my love for the latter stems from Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan. I thought he was an amazing character and could have carried his own film. Simon Pegg and Zachary Quinto were also fabulous.
As for TFA.....I wonder how if it was so good because of Kasdan's writing? Because it was MILES better than TROS.

As for TFA.....I wonder how if it was so good because of Kasdan's writing? Because it was MILES better than TROS.

That´s for sure.

I'm pretty sure the reason why TFA stuck the landing has everything to do with Kasdan's writing, as he managed to get that script done in the 6 weeks before production started, the same way he did with ESB.

Why exactly did he quit?

AFAIK he was grandfathered into the Story Group thanks to Lucas asking him to work on Solo prior to the Disney sale. When Arndt couldn't deliver a script in time for the scheduled kick off of TFA's production, he was asked to table Solo and took over TFA as a writer/producer. He was a part of the SG and based on one of Mark Hamill's interviews, part of the decision to remove Trevorrow from writing/directing IX. But it sounds like he left in part because he'd gone above and beyond the original terms of the agreement he had with Lucas and also the studio making decisions around Solo's release which he felt hindered it

(source)


I always knew that there was a possibility that what we saw in TFA, TLJ, and Solo reflected his writing and ideas. Which the biggest one about the burden of legacy, especially when looking back at one's youthful idealism is a big theme of his. Part of why I loved TFA and TLJ was showing the OT3 like the characters in The Big Chill taking an honest account of time's passage. More than likely the script he turned away was TRoS and that's a shame for us as an audience. But can't fault him if he felt like he'd done more than the original agreement with LFL and especially if some of the studio decisions hindered his work.

Darth Snoopy wrote:@Acritiqua
Yeah he can be considered complicit as he was aligned with the first order, and did nothing major to stop it - the destruction of Hosnian Prime. Though I've always interpreted his asking for more time to get the map to Luke was a slight inferral of him not agreeing with the action. Maybe a little weird, but it was the way I read it on my first viewing of TFA. But that's more my own headcanon I guess I do wish we got a little more (in the films) in the way of the state of galactic politics - not too much to detract from the real story, but more to enhance character motives and world building. When I first watched TFA in the cinema and saw Hosnian prime being destroyed, I was confused - momentarily thinking Coruscant had turned up in the film.

@motherofpearl1
I also thought that scene was meant to communicate that, some guilt or sorrow as he watched. Which is why I find it strange when people cite it as or refer to it as a criminal action he ordered or was singularly responsible for.

@Darth Snoopy

Well it wasn't like he was celebrating the bombing... he was on his own, watching, his shoulders set in arguable regret, but yeah antis will spin that to their own ends....

I'm relatively certain that if the OT came out in our contemporary society, we'd get this same reductive line of argument, that Vader "didn't deserve" to come back to the Light & reconcile with his son because of Leia's planet getting blown up and killing Obi-Wan in the duel. Same way we'd get the same arguments that Han "doesn't deserve" Leia because he's done "bad stuff" like killing Greedo, smuggling spice, and his debt for dumping cargo would be spun as "he's irresponsible with money." Or how you genuinely see people complaining that he forces himself on her or that "it's more important" that we see her as a leader in the Rebel Alliance (if these people ever stumbled across TCM and saw the inspiration from His Girl Friday, they'd have an aneurysm).

That's why they had Poe as "Neutered Han". making him the spice runner was a desperate attempt to give him an edge but missed the context entirely.

The context is what Kasdan has always said about Han, he's somebody who constantly wrestles with the angel and the demon he has on each shoulder, which one wins out in the decisions he makes. Which frequently it's the demon because he's impulsive and self-destructive but the angel is how he responds to Luke's idealism and Leia's commitment against his better judgement in the first movie. That's part of what DJ toys around with in TLJ, with the demon winning out and showing the consequences. Same with Ben, as Kasdan said for both him and Han, they haven't got their sh*t together or head figured out when they meet at that moment on the bridge. They had something for Poe in that his desire to be a hero instead of a leader ends up costing Paige her life (and forcing Rose to the forefront) and almost destroys the entire movement. Which the author of Resistance Reborn has low key grumbled on Twitter about "former spice runner" Poe as apparently her novel actually tackles the aftermath of his behavior on the Resistance and people's willingness to trust him.

I'm genuinely astonished regarding Poe as a character. He went from being little more than a cameo character who was supposed to be killed off in TFA, to essentially hogging most of the screen time in TROS.
He actually ruined Finn's character arc, reducing him to the role of sidekick, and along with Rey was the 'worthy' heir to the Skywalker legacy. Rey got the name. Poe got to sit at Leia's deathbed and fly Han's ship, apparently because their real son, who they neglec, didn't deserve these honours.
Rian had the right idea in TLJ, by separating the characters they got to shine in their own light. Poe should have been taking charge of the Resistance at the start in TROS, but instead was given the lion's share of the screen time. Ironically on social media JB seemed peeved about Adam having what he thought should have been his screen time yet Adam didn't have half as much as Oscar.

I actually hoped they would have killed off Poe, it would have been a genuine twist, but alas, no.
They wanted to milk this character in other media. And frankly, I for one am sick of the sight of him.

Almost a year later from posting this...
I've been listening to the lyrics of James Blunt's I'll Take Everything...I think it could be Kylo's theme song. And looking through the Secrets of the Sith...stunning artwork, but it makes me sad seeing the words;
'Rise And Fall of the Skywalkers'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkEujZHtiq8 Can't stop thinking about Kylo after listening to this.