#Sylo ren movie#

This is a more interesting journey than Vader - or his alter ego of Anakin Skywalker - travels throughout the entire saga. Being “the next Vader” no longer interests him He wants to be the first Kylo Ren, a new kind of terror who is easier to provoke but harder to predict. He becomes his own man, a rageful tyrant who will burn the galaxy down if it suits him. He no longer has any illusions about becoming the stoic, faceless enforcer of the new Empire. He steps out of Vader’s shadow, smashing his off-brand helmet, blasting his dear mother Leia Organa into open space, and slaying his master, Snoke. Humiliated by his failure at Starkiller Base, Kylo Ren doubles down on his violence and aggression in a desperate attempt to prove that he can be taken seriously. This allows us to spend the following film, The Last Jedi, watching Ben Solo complete his transformation into Kylo Ren. It takes murdering his father, Han Solo, to give him the confidence to go full-bore evil, and that confidence dissolves mere minutes later when untrained Jedi potential Rey fights him to a stalemate. When things don’t go his way, he vents his frustration by trashing equipment with a lightsaber, a display of bluster with no real consequences. In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren aches to exert this kind of authority, but he doesn’t have it in him. To fail Darth Vader is to invite death, and the act of killing you won’t even raise his heart rate. The Darth Vader we see in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (and, to a lesser extent, Return of the Jedi) is irrepressible and self-possessed. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, has plainly modeled himself after his grandfather and attempted to claim his legacy, but it’s not working out for him. Rey may be a fan of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but she isn’t hung up on being the galaxy’s next great hero.

That may not do any favors for the new heroic trio Rey, Finn, and Poe, but in the case of the new film’s villain, the fact that Kylo Ren cannot escape being viewed as “the new Darth Vader” is actually built into the text. Abrams’ reboot, but it’s hard to deny that it feels a bit like a Greatest Hits album. Reverence for the original Star Wars seeps through every pore of J.J. The most common knock by fans and critics against The Force Awakens is that it’s less of a follow-up to Return of the Jedi or a new beginning for Star Wars as a whole than it is a remake of A New Hope. Kylo Ren’s inadequacy is what makes him a great villain Quite the contrary - Kylo Ren being a pale imitation of Darth Vader is precisely what makes him an interesting antagonist. However, that doesn’t make him a worse character. Sick crossguard lightsaber notwithstanding, that makes the last of the Knights of Ren less cool, by definition. Just as the First Order is essentially a Galactic Empire cover band, Kylo Ren is a Darth Vader impersonator. Everything about Kylo Ren’s Sith Lord persona is derivative of his famous forbearer, from the black helmet whose shape implies a pained grimace, to his cape, to his distorted voice. So, naturally, his grandson, Kylo Ren (aka Ben Solo), had some huge boots to fill when he debuted in Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015. (RIP to those younglings, Remember Alderaan, et cetera.) Our point is that, since 1977, Darth Vader has been the standard by which all other Big Bads are measured. Vader is so superficially awe-inspiring that we have to remind ourselves occasionally that this guy is a mass murderer and that gushing about him to this extent is probably a bad look.

#Sylo ren movie#

He’s outer space’s greatest movie monster, an unstoppable half-human menace whose powers are limited only by the available special effects. We’re talking about a figure so imposing and confident that he makes wearing a respirator look rad as hell. Judging by pure cool factor, there are precious few villains in cinematic history who can contend with the OG Sith Lord himself, Darth Vader. Darth Vader is unquestionably cooler than Kylo Ren Disney