LAST EDITED ON Dec-26-15 AT 09:22 PM (EST)
 
>A lot of people seem to be disappointed that Ren wasn't scary
>impressive like Vader but I think that was the point.

I'm not disputing that making him "scary impressive like Vader" would have been asking for trouble. I'm just a little puzzled that they didn't make him scary impressive in any way. There's more than one, you know. :)

>He gets shit on by Space Nazi Bill Weasley in a way Vader would never
>have had happen.

I've long found it interesting, now you say that, how not in charge of anything Vader obviously is in the original movie, compared to his position in Empire. In Star Wars, though personally intimidating, he's administratively pretty clearly just Grand Moff Tarkin's lackey. Tarkin orders him around like he's a minor functionary who also happens to be good at killing people, and the military bigwigs in the meeting scene don't particularly seem to respect him until he nearly kills one of them (and even then, some of the rest of them don't seem very impressed). He is plainly not the #2 man in the Empire; if anything, he seems more like a sort of Imperial double-0 agent, badass, but far from the top of the power structure.

Come the second film, and he just as clearly answers to no one but the Emperor. Sure, some of that may be simply because Tarkin is dead (and presumably so are those other guys), but still, that seems odd in retrospect. Being the highest-ranking survivor of a cockup like the Death Star operation is usually not a path to career advancement, and yet Vader seems to have come out of it in a better position than he went in.

Anyway, that's not directly germane to the Ren thing, but I was reminded of it by this line of inquiry—how much less impressive a figure Vader is within the setting in the first movie than the other two.

There are a lot of things in the first couple of movies that argue pretty strongly, based on what I know of my own creative process, against George Lucas's long-maintained claim that he had the whole story arc plotted in advance. It reads to my eye much, much more like he was making most of it up as he went along. Vader's changed status between Star Wars and Empire is one of those signposts. Now I freely admit that this is a personal interpretation—that's how it would look if I had done it—and maybe George's process works totally differently, but the overall effect is a bit uncanny. :)

(I'm not dissing him for that, by the way. If I were proven right at some point, I would diss him for fronting about it all these years, but the phenomenon itself? Shit, like I said, that's how practically everything I do works. :)

Anyway.

(Also, just as an aside: Not having seen either movie, I have to wonder, are people calling him Space Nazi Bill Weasley because he just resembles Bill Weasley, or is he actually played by the same actor, à la Space Nazi Doogie Howser in Starship Troopers? :)

>I don't think he was every supposed to be the new Vader.

I'm not saying he should have been the new Vader. I'm just saying it would have been nice if JJ et al had at least managed to make him seem important in some way, because as it stands, he just isn't. He's wearing Darth Revan's mask, but his character actually reminds me a lot more of Revan's erstwhile sidekick in Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak, who similarly never managed to give any impression of significance despite all the linchpin-of-plotline stuff he did.

And if you're right and it's not a mistake—the creators of the film actually did want their Big Bad to be actively, unmistakably pathetic—that's even worse in my mind, because what the fuck. :)

--G.
"They jussst don't make terrorissstsss the way they usssed to. COBRAAAAA"
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.