Watching through this edit, I realized that we don’t get Ben’s name until his confrontation with Han. I thought I had just cut a line somewhere, but no, that’s actually how it is in the theatrical as well. Even odder, Rey and Finn only arrive in the scene after he says it, so they don’t learn his name onscreen in this film. Rey has to learn his name from Luke in TLJ, as far as we know. We’re not even sure if she suspects Ben’s relationship with Han until their confrontation at the end of the film, which is odd since she’s one of our POV characters and we know this information less than halfway through the film in the Theatrical version.
Maybe keeping Ben’s name a secret for so long was to drag out the mystery of his full identity, but we know basically everything about him before that so there seems little reason for it.
All this to say, I thought it would be interesting to work in Ben’s name earlier in the film. It would be fairly easy to put this info during Rey’s force vision by having audio of Luke’s “Ben, no!” when he is killing in the rain. That way Rey and the audience learn his name at the same time, and it’s close to the confirmation of his familial origin.
What would be even better would be to have Rey use this information during her interrogation to rattle Ben instead of talking about how he fears not being as strong as Vader, which isn’t really supported by the rest of the sequels. I tried making her final line ‘You’re afraid…that you will never be [] strong as Ben Solo!’, but it is an odd sentence structure that loses its original impact. The ideal line would have been ‘You’re afraid…that you will never be more than Ben Solo!’, but of course that would have to be frankenstitched to death.
Ah well.
