The Tragedy of The Knights of Ren

It's fairly popular these days to beat down on the Disney Star Wars sequels... and that's for good reason.

Among the many missed opportunities from these movies, we find the Knights of Ren.

Kylo Ren's elite squad of powerful warriors that we see only briefly throughout the films, until their eventual demise in Episode 9.

Episodes 7 through 9 are lacking compelling villains beyond Kylo Ren, and it would have been great to get to know antagonists that we could see go back and forth with Rey and the rest of her rebel crew.

Perhaps with some of them maybe turning back to the light or dying tragically... or even just at least being an in-between challenge for Rey to help show her growth as a Jedi, or even challenges for Finn or Poe.

But no, they get no dialogue, are basically window dressing for scenes, and only ultimately exist to expand a Kylo Ren action figure set.

There's actually some interesting lore to Ren and the predecessors of the name and lightsaber, but we never got any of that even hinted at in the films. Instead we got... well, what we got in the sequels.

The angle of Ren and the philosophy of The Ren in comparison to the order of the Sith is a pretty interesting idea, and again, considering that Ben Solo took the mantle of Kylo Ren while still not taking the lightsaber The Ren... could have all been interesting to see and would have been more interesting than “somehow, Palpatine returned.”

It's an interesting direction to take to expand the Dark Side and the ways to become corrupted by it.

Instead of villains like that, we get rushed high stakes villain Palpatine, Palpatine's gloried bath robe puppet and... Hux.

And Captain Phasma, I guess... but damn she could get her own video-- there's another huge missed opportunity of a character right there.

The worst part about this is that unlike a lot of Star Wars where more shallow parts can be effectively explained and expanded on through spin-off media, I wouldn't want them to elaborate more on who the Knights of Ren were.


#starwars #DISNEY #disneystarwars #starwarsexplained #knightsofren #kyloren #reypalpatine #finn #bensolo #hansolo #lukeskywalker #princessleia #sequeltrilogy #wasted #critique #critical