J.J. Abrams Talks About Bringing Back the Knights of Ren for STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
A lot of fans were disappointed when The Knights of Ren were nowhere to be seen in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You introduce this group of interesting badass characters and then do nothing with them?! That’s just silly. Well, J.J. Abrams is bringing them back for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and in a recent interview with Esquire, the director says he’s excited to be able to expand on who the Knights of Ren are, but don’t expect them to take their helmets off or get to know them on a personal level:
“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.”
Keeping them more mysterious is definitely the right move. I kinda wish that they would have treated Kylo Ren the same way. They should have treated him more mysteriously and never let him take his helmet off until a major story moment, like how they handled Darth Vader. Once the helmet was off, Kylo Ren stopped being menacing. I know it’s hard for some fans to take him seriously as a villain. The helmet should’ve stayed on.
Anyway, I’m excited that we’ll get to see The Knights of Ren in action, and I hope that Abrams actually gives us some backstory on them. What we do know about the group is that they are connected with the dark side of The Force and they operate outside of the First Order command structure. With Kylo Ren now leading the First Order, I’m sure he will bridge the gap between the two groups.
It was also already revealed that Kylo Ren led the Knights of Ren against Luke Skywalker and his new Jedi Temple. The Knights of Ren burned the temple and slaughtered all of Luke’s students who chose not to join them.
What are you hoping to see from The Knights of Ren in The Rise of Skywalker?