HAN: There was too much Vader in him.
LEIA: That’s why I had him train with Luke.
The problem with this dialogue is that it implies that there was some inherent darkness in Ben from the beginning, while also implying that that same darkness was inherent in Anakin. It never was inherent. Anakin was an innocent who was corrupted, first by the trauma of his early life, then by Palpatine. It’s implied that Ben was maybe being telepathically corrupted by Snoke or Palpatine, but again, the movies are frustratingly vague about that, and that’s not what Han is saying here, anyway.
And they overcame their mistakes. Luke even apologizes to Ben on Crait.
Luke then spends the rest of the scene taunting and trolling him. “Every word of what you just was wrong.” and “See ya around, kid,” while messing with Kylo’s head. Luke was going out of his way to get a rise out of Kylo. He wasn’t acting at all like he was genuinely sorry about Ben, or trying to reach out to him emotionally.
No. Ben proves Rey is valuable by showing up to save her, and his sacrifice accomplishes what Anakin could not - saving a loved one from death.
Except the whole point of RotS is that you shouldn’t cling onto loved ones after their time in the world is done. You should let go of your temporal attachments once they leave your life, and allow those you love to return to the Force. Ben resurrecting Rey through the Light Side betrays a complete misunderstanding of the themes of the saga. Cheating death and resurrection of others was established as Dark Side knowledge.
How does this ruin their intimidation?
That means they don’t even fear or respect their leader. They’re like a bunch of gossiping children making fun of an impotent authority figure. It makes the faction as a whole look dysfunctional.
And yet Vader’s redemption spread across the galaxy anyways.
The Rebellion was much, much larger than the Resistance by the end of TLJ. Also, the ST’s handling of the legacy of the old characters is very inconsistent. Rey knows Han Solo as a famous smuggler, yet thinks that Luke Skywalker (who defeated Vader and the Emperor only 30 years ago) is a myth. Yet she somehow also knows about what happened aboard the Death Star and Anakin’s redemption. It’s sloppy writing.
Also, how are Luke’s odd actions on Crait somehow more inspiring than redeeming Vader and defeating the Emperor?
“The First Order will become a true Empire.” Kylo wants to hog Palpatine’s fleet for himself. They’re shown to be smaller than in TLJ.
That’s nothing. That’s not evidence. That’s just rhetoric. And nowhere are we shown that the First Order is smaller than it was before. You thought it was, and you’re reading that into the movie in order to make sense of it.
Because the galaxy was hopeless until Luke showed up on Crait. Even Leia lost hope at that point.
Don’t give me that. The entire galaxy just gave up after Hosnian? The whole galaxy was perfectly willing to just lay down and submit to First Order rule? Then the whole galaxy changed its mind because of some vague story from a handful of people of Luke’s actions on Crait? You hear how ridiculous this story sounds, right? It turns the entire galaxy, outside of the FO and Resistance, into some homogenous, cowardly hivemind that abandoned all hope because it needed to be taught to “believe in itself.” It’s childish storytelling.
He literally felt ashamed for Ben’s fall. That’s the point. He didn’t want to be reminded of that. His smuggling days were to cope with that guilt. And he overcomes it anyways.
And for years, instead of doing anything to help the woman he loved during this extremely difficult time in her life, he left her to fend for herself, just like Luke did. The idea that he spent years as an incompetent, petty criminal, feeling sad about losing the son he neglected, is pathetic for Han. It would be one thing if he had experienced a brief relapse into crime after his son’s fall, but he stayed in that lifestyle for years. Meanwhile, Leia powered through that shame and continued to be a responsible leader against the First Order. Leia acted like a responsible adult. Han did not. That’s the problem.
Kylo killing Han was literally the thing that caused Chewie to shoot him and ignite the bombs. Had it not been for his injury, Rey would’ve lost and certainly wouldn’t have defeated Palpatine.
Ah yes, that oh-so-important gut injury that Kylo sustained. If you rewatch that fight scene, you’ll notice that Kylo’s movement in combat shows no sign of that injury hampering him whatsoever. In fact, he was winning the fight until Rey just closed her eyes and believed hard enough. The injury never plays any noticeable role in how the fight progresses.
Of course, given what the bowcaster did in previous scenes, it should have just killed Kylo outright, but I guess consistency isn’t cool.
It’s fucking INFERENCE. I’m looking at surrounding facts, putting two and two together and drawing a conclusion to them.
What you call “Inference,” I call “making things up to cover for the filmmaker’s mistakes.” There is 0 evidence that the fleet was there because of Luke. None.
They were the ones invading Naboo and who have the droid army.
Yes, and it was an unprecedented situation during peacetime in the Republic, which was why the Republic was so caught offguard by it. But despite that, the Trade Federation was viewed as a legally accepted organization by the Senate. It was not an act by an outside, hostile nation state. It was internal conflict between members of the Republic.
That’s not the point. The point is that an army made the Republic become the Empire.
Holy oversimplification. You understand that a military existing doesn’t automatically transform a Republic into an Empire. It was a convergence of many different factors and crises engineered by Palpatine. The political message of the Prequels isn’t just “Having military bad.”
If that was the case, Palpatine would’ve possessed Snoke or contacted the Kaminoans to create a new healthy clone specifically for this.
You would think so, wouldn’t you? That would be a common sense approach for Palpatine. But TRoS is a film that doesn’t operate based on pesky concepts like “logic” or “common sense.” By suggesting those ideas, you’re already thinking more deeply than the writers did.
How do you know he DOES? And he was overconfident.
Palpatine sure seemed overconfident aboard the Death Star in RotJ. Yet TRoS makes clear that he had a contingency plan the whole time. Why couldn’t that also apply now? What gives TRoS’s ending any more finality than RotJ’s ending?
Except it DOESN’T undermine Anakin and Luke’s arcs.
Anakin isn’t the Chosen One destined to destroy the Sith anymore. Rey is. Luke isn’t the restorer of the Jedi anymore. Rey is. The entire purpose of those two characters now is just to pave the way for Rey, the true savior of the Jedi and the galaxy. The entire overarching story of the saga has been reshaped to really be about Rey. She succeeded where all her predecessors failed, and you can very well bet that Rey will never be supplanted or undermined in the same way that Luke and Anakin were. I guarantee you that.
Dude, Palpatine is reinforcing that Anakin needs to do his bidding. Replace it with “We need to take a shit on my cousin’s car” and it would still retain the meaning.
What?
It’s abundantly clear through basic interpretation of the text that Palpatine is referring to Plagueis as “the one with the power to cheat death.” Do you think Palpatine is referring to himself as the cheater of death? Then why does he say “but if we work together, we can discover the secret”? Notice the use of “We” in that sentence. And the word “but” implies that Palpatine is not the Death Cheater he was referring to, and that it’s something they will seek together.