When moviegoers lined up around the block to watch the original Star Wars movie back in 1977 and they were introduced to the faceless embodiment of pure evil that is Darth Vader, none of them expected that in six years, they’d actually feel sympathy for him. After The Empire Strikes Back’s shocking revelation that Vader is the biological father of Luke Skywalker, Star Wars fans had no idea what to expect from Return of the Jedi’s conclusion to the saga. In the final act of Jedi, that nefarious villain has a change of heart and kills his manipulative master to save his son. Vader isn’t necessarily redeemed for his years of war crimes, but he is at least redeemed in his son’s eyes. Luke believed there was still good in his father and, inspired by his son’s own heroism, Vader proved him right.
This was the perfect ending for the story of the Skywalkers, but unfortunately, it set a precedent for redemption arcs in sci-fi and fantasy. Countless post-Return of the Jedi genre stories are about brooding, cold-blooded killers who end up being forgiven for their atrocities and labeled as “antiheroes” following a noble act or sacrifice that’s nowhere near enough to make up for a lifetime of evil. Predictably, this ended up affecting Star Wars itself.
The nostalgia-baiting, Disney-mounted sequel trilogy sets up Kylo Ren as a wannabe Vader: a masked Skywalker who turned to the dark side and led an empire to take over the galaxy. Just as Anakin was brought back to the light by Luke, Ben Solo would be brought back to the light by Han and/or Leia. Yet another tired redemption arc for a fallen Skywalker was telegraphed from the beginning. But killing Han in The Force Awakens seemed to prove that Ben was truly irredeemable. Han gave him a chance to come home and abandon the First Order, and he murdered him. Making Ben irredeemable would’ve been a neat twist on his wannabe Vader characterization – if he wasn’t going to be as intimidating or powerful as Vader, then he could’ve been more evil than Vader.
After Abrams and his pesky “mystery box” left Ben’s redemption arc up in the air, one of the many subversive turns Rian Johnson took in The Last Jedi was to double down on Kylo being irredeemable. Throughout the movie, Snoke senses that Ben is struggling with guilt over murdering his father. He struggles to do evil things like blow up his mother’s ship or kill Rey, then he snaps and cuts his master in half. This was Ben’s make-or-break moment: after killing Snoke, he could either turn on the First Order and help the Resistance bring it down or take Snoke’s place and rule it himself. He went with the latter and took on the title of Supreme Leader, hammering home his inability to return to the light. Interestingly, in Colin Trevorrow’s leaked script draft for Episode IX, titled Duel of the Fates, Ben isn’t redeemed. Luke deems him to be irredeemable and tells Rey that killing him will bring balance to the Force, so Rey strikes Ben down and peace is restored.
When Trevorrow was fired and Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams was brought back to complete the trilogy, Abrams started the script from scratch and went in the complete opposite direction with Ben’s arc. In the opening scene of The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren is literally slaughtering a whole village full of defenseless people, seemingly for fun, on his way to pick up the Sith wayfinder. By the end of this movie, Rey is madly in love with him and makes out with him as he’s dying.
The romance between Rey and Ben was a strange juncture that Rian Johnson took in The Last Jedi. He recently clarified that a love story was always his intention with their dynamic, but that’s strange, because the movie is set across the couple of days that follow Ben’s cold-blooded murder of his father, Han Solo, who’d become a sort of father figure to Rey throughout The Force Awakens. There are several bizarre layers of wrongness in this romance. And what’s worse is that the romance always felt painfully forced. Reylo’s love story is even worse than Anidala’s panned romantic arc from the prequel trilogy. This weak writing of Reylo’s love story would’ve been much more obvious if it hadn’t been for the incredible on-screen chemistry shared by Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver.
But even Ridley and Driver’s chemistry couldn’t save The Rise of Skywalker. The sequels had always ignored Vader’s redemption, but The Rise of Skywalker took steps to invalidate the entire original trilogy. Throughout all three movies, Kylo Ren worships the charred remains of Vader’s mask and pledges to finish what his grandfather started. In all that time, Anakin’s Force ghost never appeared to his grandson to say, “Hey, Ben, I turned back to the light. The dark side is the wrong path.” Resurrecting Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker was a lazy way to shift villain status away from Ben ahead of his redemption and, for good measure, nullify Vader’s own redemption by revealing his final sacrifice stopped nothing.
J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson rejected Lucas’ framing of Vader as a tragic hero and instead wanted to make him a straightforward villain again. Meanwhile, their own “tragic hero,” Ben Solo, is a reprehensible mass murderer without a shred of remorse. In The Rise of Skywalker, Ben is forgiven by a vision of Han on the somehow-still-intact wreckage of the second Death Star. Han tells Ben it’s okay that he murdered him, and that it’s not too late to still be a hero. But Han wasn’t Force-sensitive, so that vision is just Ben’s imagination.
There’s no grand act of heroism that redeems Ben. He kills his own knights after the trilogy failed to characterize any of them in any capacity, then joins Rey in fighting Palpatine. Rey defeats Palpatine alone while Ben’s lying in a ditch, then he Force-transfers his life into her to bring her back from the dead. This sacrifice deserves some credit, but it’s basically nonsense in terms of the lore – only Darth Plagueis could cheat death. The kiss that Rey and Ben share before the latter dies for good is messed-up on a few levels, especially since Rey identifies herself as one of Ben’s relatives to a passing stranger in the next scene.