Hmm, that scene is much darker, isn’t it? It brought Sharon Stone’s chip toss scene to mind more to me.
I saw it, I liked it a whole lot, most of the criticisms I’ve read don’t matter a damn to me.
I know I’m in a minority here but I have no interest in Driver as an actor. People fawn over his performance and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. I’m not even saying “he sucks!” since enough people seem to think otherwise that maybe it’s me who is missing something but it just ain’t there for me. Kylo Ren is the only part I can remember him playing though (I know he was in Girls but I didn’t watch that).
The weakness of Kylo Ren as an antagonist is a large part of why TFA and TLJ didn’t really work for me. Aside from the silly casino rampage, I liked most of the Driver-less scenes (thought the Luke/Rey stuff was really good) but then Ren comes on and I’m just “Meh”.
His default presentation facially is one of petulance. That’s HARD to overcome when sitting in a darkened theater, looking at a 40 foot high petulant man. The buff body work doesn’t overcome or alter that.
I just cannot agree. I found his performance sensational.
Some of my takes.
The problem with the space battles is that they work however the director decides they should work. Yeah, that sets up awesome set pieces, but it also means that the space battles don’t hold narrative tension for me. Things happen, stuff blows up, and the outcome is whatever they decided the outcome should be. Of course this is true for all fiction, but in good fiction you don’t see the strings being pulled. But since this is Star Wars you don’t have the real world to lend your battles verisimilitude.
So take blowing up the Death Star in ANH. Why did they have to go in with small fighters and run down a trench and drop a bomb at the exact right spot? Because George Lucas had seen “The Dam Busters” and wanted to rip that off. Which is awesome. And so there’s a few mumbled “It’s ray shielded” “they aren’t expecting small fighters” and so on. But all that is just technobabble to explain why this set piece works the way it does.
And for me, the technobabble doesn’t matter. Just set up the battle and let it go, you don’t have to make up reasons. Why isn’t every space battle a giant ramming fest? Because that’s not how WWII naval/aerial battles worked, and Star Wars is WWII IN SPAAAAAACE. So ramming isn’t a standard tactic because it wasn’t a standard tactic in WWII. If Star Wars was the Punic Wars IN SPAAAAACE, then there would be droids rowing space oars and space centurion boarding parties and ramming would be the primary tactic. But it isn’t, so it isn’t.
So the ramming tactic isn’t standard because in WWII it was a last ditch no-hope ineffective tactic. But of course it has to work in the movie, million to one odds work out about half the time.
Do I wish there were a few lines of dialog about how “normally this wouldn’t work, but they’re emitting tetrion particles from their main deflector dish, so…”? Naw, what’s the point? That, for me at least, would be the opposite of adding verisimilitude. It’s narrativium all the way down, don’t insert canon fanwanks explaining it. It’s like the mission briefing in the StarCraft campaign explaining why you don’t have Siege Tanks for this mission. You just don’t, let’s get on with it.
So much for the space battles.
I love the fact that Ren and Hux and the Nazis IN SPAAAACE are such losers. Because the real life Nazi leadership were losers and buffoons. Such people are not ultracool badasses. They’re tortured pathetic figures, and the results of them working out their personal psychodramas results in untold suffering and misery and death for millions of people. Darth Vader was a badass motherfucker. Kylo Ren is not, no matter how many masks he wears or how many times he kills his father or how many younglings he massacres. This is perfect.
Also great. Luke Skywalker fucks up Ben Solo’s Jedi training, and so he fucks off to a hidden planet. And the whole last two movies everyone’s expecting him to come out of hiding to save the day. Except in this movie Luke is totally right. The Jedi fucked everything up in the first place, they need to end, and Luke ain’t gonna ride in at the last minute to save the day after refusing the call for 20 years. He doesn’t need to redeem himself for wrongly taking himself off the table. He was right all along, and he was right to send Rey off by herself, have fun storming the castle.
Not so great: Space Monte Carlo. Again, Finn and Rose can go on a mission while the fleet is being chased because that’s what you do. We pause the main action while we resolve this side quest. But it’s kind of lame, the narrativium is really showing hard here.
The problem is that Star Wars movies don’t bother to make chronological sense. In ANH, how long does it take between Luke buying the droids from the Jawas to the final Death Star trench run? Two days? A couple of weeks? Hard to say, and of course the point is that it’s beside the point. How long does Luke train on Degobah? How long are Han and Leia on Cloud City? A couple of days? A month or two? Doesn’t matter.
But this is a bit more blatant. We accept that the chronology is unimportant in ANH and ESB because nothing depends on it. But in TLJ the slow-speed Bronco chase establishes a ticking clock, and the ticking clock doesn’t work as device to drive the action forward if the audience doesn’t believe in the ticking clock, which I didn’t. Super-important side mission, and normally it’s fine in Star Wars Land to fly over to some random planet and get your plot coupon, except it makes no sense in this context and shows the machinery working. Still, I liked seeing Finn and Rose on their mission, because they’re just ordinary people, not demigods and princesses. Great rejection of some implicit ugly themes from the prequels that only the demigods matter.
To a degree being a badass is about attitude and by that calculus you’re correct for the grown-up Vader. However, Vader didn’t successfully rebel when he got disrespected to his face like Kylo did. I don’t remember if Vader did get disrespected to his face by the Emperor but if he did it would be in his character to just stand there and silently endure the belittling.
Just a nitpick. The First Order isn’t Nazis In Space. The Empire was Nazis In Space. The First Order is NEO-Nazis In Space, which is why they’re so pathetic. They’re fanboys of an ideology that has already been proven defunct and valueless.
Well, that’s the point. Badass motherfucker Darth Vader was the Emperor’s minion. No matter what the Emperor said to him, his reaction was “Yes, my master.” He didn’t whine and complain about it, he accepted his subservient position like a boss.
Kylo Ren’s reaction is to throw a temper tantrum, because he’s a loser.
Darth Vader is iconic because he’s the perfect distillation of unmotivated evil. But in real life his sort doesn’t actually exist. Real life evil people are pathetic endlessly needy people like Kylo Ren and Hux. This is what the real life Nazis were like, and when we look around today figures of the same type all over the world are still at work creating misery with their transparent pettiness and insecurity.
Well, up until he threw his boss down a well 
But that, of course, was striking because we knew that watching his son die was the thing that finally made stoic Vader snap after three films. Kylo Ren’s been whining since Day One.
I think of Kylo Ren being in the Dylan Klebold mold: whiny and immature, but no less dangerous for all that. He’s a villain for our times.
About that casino scene:
The rebels can’t keep fighting the First Order forever; that’s called “losing”. So, if they intend to make any movies after IX, a different type of Villain is needed. They are setting up amoral oligarchs as the next Villain. That’s my take. And Benicio del Toro will excel.
I saw something like that on Facebook. Kylo Ren is the perfect villain for the current generation. We don’t want a Hitler-esque villain, because these days we’re not afraid of Hitler. We’re afraid of whiny, pissed-off young men whose bedrooms are full of Hitler memorabilia.
But the thing that made Dylan Klebold dangerous was that no one knew who he was or what he was planning. If they did, it would have taken a visit by local police to stop him, not a rebel army. It was the randomness and unexpectedness of his actions that cause fear but we already know who Kylo Ren is and what he’s up to.
A movie about a fictional Dylan Klebold trying to conquer and rule the United States, for instance, would be ridiculous. Maybe that’s the issue and Ren would be a more suitable villain in a smaller scale conflict between opposing sides of the Force but he’s Peter Principle’d his way up to Galactic Overlord and really doesn’t fit into that.
So, while Finn’s driving of the speeder isn’t that much of a plot hole for me, someone pointed out recently a more subtle, but IMHO a somewhat deeper one.
Where did Rey learn to swim?
What about a fictional Dylan Klebold, who could DO MAGIC, and had been the right hand man of a dictator, trying to gain power in a fractured society with lots of dictatorial apparatus lying around?
Force powers never seemed “large scale” in a way that would make you a galactic threat in of themselves. You can zap people with lighting (you could have just shot them with a laser), maybe telepathy or projection, you can perhaps do a type of mind control which is certainly useful on an individual level but it’s not as though you’re blowing up mountains or causing meteor storms by force of will. Once upon a time it meant you could use a light saber but these days apparently anyone can swing a light saber and everyone else comes with energy melee weapons that are basically equivalent.
Force powers seem very useful in a one-on-one scenario (whether trying to kill the guy or just manipulate him) but nothing that saves you once the space tanks come rolling in. For that, you need actual organizational control and skill. Kylo Ren’s supposed threat doesn’t come from his ability to make light sabers twirl on tabletops, it comes from him being part of (and now leading) the First Order which is a position that makes him rather unlike a previously unknown teenager who decides to shoot up a school.
History is replete with enraged young dudes who manage to gain way more power than they should, often by being given the power by cynical older assholes who want to manipulate them for their own ends. In no way do I think Kylo Ren will lead the First Order with any of the subtlety or long-term planning Snoke used, but that’s kind of cool: he’s going to take this evil empire and use it as a battering ram against his own self-loathing.
Kim Jung Un.
But that’s not the story of Dylan Klebold, which is my point. I don’t see Kylo Ren and think “Wow, he’s scary because he’s like a random kid who decides to take a gun to school and kill classmates” because he’s not really like that at all. If Dylan Klebold was part of the First Order, he’d be some guy who decides to kill a bunch of storm troopers in the Starkiller cafeteria one day, not the Scary Galactic Leader.