I sort of feel like The Knights of Ren have become this Star Wars trilogy’s version of Boba Fett. Everyone has been expected so much more and yet they have hardly appeared on screen, mentioned only once by Snoke in The Force Awakens and seen in one flashback moment to Rey. The characters were neither mentioned nor made any kind of appearance in The Last Jedi, but they are present in this December’s The Rise of Skywalker.
I think one of the aspects that disappointed some fans on The Last Jedi was the lack of these characters who fans were eager to see more of. So why have they been kept back for the final part of this trilogy and only teased so little thus far? The Rise of Skywalker and The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams recently spoke with Esquire and he was asked this very question, here is his response.
“They’re characters that, when we came up with them in Force Awakens and had very brief sighting of them, it was something that we had a lot of ideas of sort of further adventures with them, backstory, you know, and all sorts of things that were not the focus of the central story, and never made it into the movie. And Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, didn’t address that, at all, and it just allowed for us to bring them back in. I mean, they’re best kept more mysterious than familiar, which is just to say there aren’t going to be a lot of scenes with them taking their masks off and hanging out and eating sandwiches, but it felt like I definitely wanted to see more of them than we had, and I felt happy that we got a chance to do that in this movie.”
This is where I think perhaps this trilogy has suffered a little by not having an overall outline for the trilogy. Abrams had his ideas, Johnson came in with his own ideas, and now Abrams is back and doing some of the things he imagined in the first place. I thought the Knights of Ren were interesting back in The Force Awakens, but their absence from The Last Jedi has made me realize they are unimportant characters, and I’m guessing they will be used for action scenes alone.
I remember a lot of fans predicted these Knights of Ren were actually the handful of students that rebelled against Luke along with Ben Solo, something mentioned in The Last Jedi, but recent comic books have made it clear The Knights of Ren existed before that. I think a lot of fans had hoped these other ex-students of Luke would turn out to be the Knights of Ren, aka they would be Force users.
As to why The Knights of Ren did not appear in The Last Jedi, we have to go back to Rian Johnson. Here is what the director said on an Empire podcast back in January 2018
“We have a very full movie already there literally was just not room for another element…I guess I could’ve used them in place of the Praetorian guards but then it would feel like wasting them because all those guards had to die. And if Kylo had some kind of connection to them it would’ve added a complication that wouldn’t have helped the scene…truth is I just didn’t see a place for them in the movie.”
I accept that from a storytelling point of view of course, however, I still feel like there were opportunities to give some more hints or even an appearance without having a major effect on the story Johnson wanted to tell. Just off the top of my head we could have had Snoke command the Knights of Ren to head off somewhere else just after he tears Kylo Ren a new one at the beginning of the film. Or a couple of Knights could have shown up with Kylo Ren and were summarily dismissed by Snoke early on?
I guess it’s irrelevant now, the only thing that remains is to see whether The Knights of Ren live up to some of the hype fans have built around them, or whether they will be expendable faceless nobodies dispatched by the likes of Rey band perhaps even Kylo Ren himself? And for that answer, we need to wait till December 20th.
RELATED: Star Wars: The Rise of SkywalkerJ.J. – Abrams On Being Less Secretive With The Film
What do you think of The Knights of Ren and how they have been used by both directors of the sequel trilogy so far, and what are your hopes for them in The Rise of Skywalker? Leave your comments below if you have time.
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