Film Review: STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019): A Hodge Podge Film with Lifeless Plot Twists, A Blind Eye Towards Canon, & A Tepid Ending

The Knights of Ren Are Nothing

One of the biggest disappointments of The Rise of Skywalker (and this trilogy) are The Knights of Ren. When first glimpsed in a flashback in The Force Awakens, they were intriguing. Fans hoped to see them in The Last Jedi but didn’t, with director Rian Johnson saying there was no way to fit them in (yet he fit in Rose Tico and a completely pointless casino world sequence). In The Rise of Skywalker, the promise of The Knights of Ren was revived – in one of the film’s promos, the viewer could clearly see them striding down a hallway behind Kylo Ren.

In the actual film, The Knights of Ren are nothing. They are completely vapid in The Rise of Skywalker and are involved in some of the worst moments in the film’s narrative. They never speak, they never use the Force (they are standing around the corner from Finn John Boyega on Pasaana, don’t sense he’s there, or that other people are in the immediate area), and they never use lightsabers. They are given absolutely no development at all in the film and are merely background props, Stormtroopers in outfit upgrades.

Where were The Knights of Ren all this time (from the Jedi Temple’s destruction in The Force Awakens to their first appearance in The Rise of Skywalker)? What were they doing? These questions are never broached nor answered in the film.

The Knights of Ren can’t even be called a poorly written plot element because they exist in a poorly-written film. As a plot point, The Knights of Ren don’t stand out as bad. They remind the viewer that this type of writing is par-for-the-course in this trilogy i.e. an underdeveloped plot-string that goes nowhere.

Example 1: The Knights of Ren are searching for Rey and company after a Stormtrooper chase on Pasaana. There is desert all around except for a lone, derelict spaceship on a giant stone pedestal above the desert floor. It doesn’t occur to The Knights of Ren, the Stormtroopers, or Kylo Ren to search that ship for the rebels they’ve been chasing?

Example 2: At the end of the film, The Knights of Ren, Kylo’s men and women, his followers, his acolytes, show up on Exegol, and Kylo just kills them.

There is no emotional moment when he, the new do-gooder Kylo Ren, tries of reason with them, his own men.

He just kills them.

He doesn’t try to turn them back to the light as he has turned or tell them that he’d been wrong.

He just kills them.

This is a pivotal moment in Kylo’s life where his past actions are confronted by his present self and it is reduced to a re-run of the throne room battle in The Last Jedi.

It’s like the writers of this scene don’t know or are too unqualified to recognize the type of moment that they potentially have on their hands i.e. Kylo pleading with the Knights because he doesn’t want to fight them, the closest things to friends that he has.

Example 3: Why is Kylo Ren a better swordsman than every single Knight of Ren? This created an insipid, boring, and one sided fight sequence in the third act of The Rise of Skywalker. Just because Kylo is the evilest Jedi trainee in his class doesn’t mean he is the best swordsmen. Wickedness and swordsmanship are not synonymous with each other.

Example 4: The very existence of The Knights of Ren, Sith users of the Force, violates the Sith Rule of Two established in Revenge of the Sith. Did the writers of The Force Awakens not realize this? Did anyone research the Sith before writing this plot-point in The Rise of Skywalker?