Speaking of Kylo Ren, he is indisputably the most interesting main character of the Sequel Trilogy, and that’s largely due to the acting chops of Adam Driver. He’s so interesting, in fact, that it’s wild that the Knights of Ren were seemingly thrown into these movies as flashback background dressing and, later, disposable foes for Kylo Ren to defeat.
Honestly, it was hard to even care about him killing them in The Rise of Skywalker because they seemed just as nameless, faceless, and unthreatening as the average Stormtrooper.
Reading all of the details the movies didn’t give us, the Knights of Ren are an amazing addition to the franchise, and the fact that their costume design is so cool is just the icing on the cake.
This makes the Sequel Trilogy even more depressing in retrospect—these movies obviously had cool ideas, but the best ones got buried so could get more scenes of Luke guzzling green milk instead of training Rey or Finn visiting a big casino planet so he could learn that (gasp!) war is bad.
These films clearly needed a brutally honest editor, and I can’t help but wish it was Marcia Lucas who returned to Star Wars rather than Emperor Palpatine.