The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Wastes Its Coolest Invention
If someone held a DL-44 blaster to some Star Wars fans’ heads and asked them to say something nice about the Sequel Trilogy—well, a lot of those fans would get blasted like Greedo before they gave Disney their due. These films really did have a few great ideas, but they were just buried by a few metric tons of bantha poodoo. For example, the Knights of Ren are the coolest things in these movies, but they are wasted just to be fodder for flashbacks and Kylo Ren’s redemption arc.
The Knights Of Ren
First, let’s talk a little about who the Knights of Ren are and what their whole deal is. In short, they were like a bunch of watered-down Dark Jedi, but they had some very unconventional ideas regarding their powers—for example, they called the Force “the shadow” and basically worshiped the lightsaber because they believed it to be the ultimate symbol of moral grayness.
Little was known about these dudes by the galaxy at large because they hail from the Unknown Regions.
Kylo Ren Murdered The Old Ruler
The Knights of Ren followed a leader named Ren who used a lightsaber named The Ren (no, really). Kylo Ren became the new leader by killing the old one, but he had a distinct advantage: while everyone else had only a little bit of Force power, he had the full destructive abilities of grandaddy Darth Vader coursing through his veins.
Soon, this merry band of murderers became Kylo’s trusty sidekicks, but he only found out after his redemption that their true loyalty was to the resurrected Emperor Palpatine.
Only In Books And Comics
At this point, you might be asking yourself a simple question—“why didn’t I already know all of this?” The simple answer is that the Sequel Trilogy didn’t reveal any of this in the movies themselves, leaving it up to fans to piece all of this together from ancillary media like books and comics.
It’s a very sloppy approach to storytelling that underscores a simple truth: the Knights of Ren were probably the coolest new addition to this franchise, but Disney ruined it by hardly ever showing or even mentioning these characters.
A Unique And Smart Group
Think about what a cool story the Knights of Ren really have: these are dudes who are the equal of the Empire’s Inquisitors but somehow managed to stay ahead of the Imperial purge of all Force users despite having inferior powers.
They discovered the Force and lightsabers and built an entirely new religion out of these things, one that is arguably more compelling than the boring binary of “Jedi preserve peace” and “Sith crave power.”
They even managed to strike a behind-the-scenes deal with the resurrected Palpatine, showing more political awareness and self-preservation skills than Kylo Ren ever did.
The Rise Of Skywalker
Speaking of Kylo Ren, he is indisputably the most interesting main character of the Sequel Trilogy, and that’s largely due to the acting chops of Adam Driver. He’s so interesting, in fact, that it’s wild that the Knights of Ren were seemingly thrown into these movies as flashback background dressing and, later, disposable foes for Kylo Ren to defeat.
Honestly, it was hard to even care about him killing them in The Rise of Skywalker because they seemed just as nameless, faceless, and unthreatening as the average Stormtrooper.
Reading all of the details the movies didn’t give us, the Knights of Ren are an amazing addition to the franchise, and the fact that their costume design is so cool is just the icing on the cake.
This makes the Sequel Trilogy even more depressing in retrospect—these movies obviously had cool ideas, but the best ones got buried so could get more scenes of Luke guzzling green milk instead of training Rey or Finn visiting a big casino planet so he could learn that (gasp!) war is bad.
These films clearly needed a brutally honest editor, and I can’t help but wish it was Marcia Lucas who returned to Star Wars rather than Emperor Palpatine.
