Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Diane S — 24 Jan 2018

This movie was such a depressing and destructive mess. I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand how Disney could have allowed this to happen to a property for which they expended so much capital and resources. It is simply mind boggling.

Lately, however, I have turned my mind towards how on earth any sort of coherent story arc can be salvaged out of the plot and character elements that remain. I can't fix everything that has gone wrong, but here's what I have come up with.

Ben Solo is severely mentally ill. He is suffering from a fragmented personality disorder. Think James McAvoy in Split. Unfortunately, he is also the most powerful Force user ever known in the Star Wars universe.

Ben's psych was permanently damaged when he dabbled in the Force early in his training. He couldn't handle the ugliness he experienced, and his emotional distance from all of the adults in his life prevented him from working through his cognitive dissonance. He therefore dissociated, forming four distinct personalities. Luke realized that Ben was severely ill and could not be healed. There was simply no hope for a cure, and Luke tried to end his life as a mercy killing, to end Ben's terrible suffering.

Ben's personalities manifest in various ways, all powered by his unusually strong Force abilities:

The first was Snoke. Snoke was a force projection from Ben's tortured mind. Snoke manifested as a harsh and critical father figure. He is cruel and violent and can never be pleased. He is seemingly all powerful.

Kylo Ren is the dominant personality, but he is not stable. He is not aware of the other personalities, and he is highly emotional. His struggle to maintain control makes him extremely unstable and subject to uncontrollable rages.

Ben is repressed, but he still exists. Ben is the one who spoke to Rey so rationally and calmly during the force connection sequences. Ben is the one who asked Rey to join him, but he would not have been strong enough to control Kylo, even if she had said yes.

The final personality has no name, and does not manifest itself as a part of Ben. This is the part of him that is tortured by guilt, remorse and self-hatred and that wants to be stopped and killed. This part of him has reached out to Rey. It has projected onto her all of Ben's Force skills and powers, as well as his mechanical and piloting skills. This is also the part of him that saved his Mother when she was blown out of her ship. This final personality knows that Luke was right to try to kill him. It wants Rey to defeat Kylo and to end of all of their torment by killing Ben.

The trilogy will end when Ben unifies these personalities long enough to repent, to engage in some act of self-sacrifice that redeems him, before using his powers to compel Rey to kill him. I would imagine a scene that is the mirror image of Kylo's murder of Han Solo, except this time Rey is pleading with him not to make her do it, and to choose life with her instead. But we all know that Ben cannot come back fully from all the evil he has done, and he is not strong enough to hold the personalities together for long. Ben knows what he has to do. He forces her to kill him with his own lightsaber.

I realize that this strips Rey of all of her supposed powers, and makes her a pawn, but at least she will no longer be a Mary Sue. Her character can continue in other movies, perhaps this time choosing to study the Force herself and become adept.

Anyway, that's all I can think of to salvage this complete mess.

Maybe they can bring Luke back in some form in the last film to explain some of this. Luke's character needs to be fixed somehow if this trilogy is to be salvaged.

Oh, and, PLEASE leave the contemporary USA politics out of the next movie.