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The Rise of Kylo Ren: Chapter One

What is it ? : Long Ago: Ren speaks to two brothers, while the Knights of Ren fight with some guards, he tries to recruit one of them telling him he can join if he kills his brother, but the other brother strikes first. But Ren refuses to recruit him because he is not force sensitive, killing him instead.
New: A young Ben Solo stands at the burning Jedi Temple, when a starship arrives carrying three other Jedi Students, they approach Ben asking what happened and he tells them Luke attacked him and he killed Luke. They can't believe what he's saying, but he tells them that at the moment it mattered he was more powerful than Luke Skywalker. He tells them that he is leaving and they should too, but they ignite their lightsabers to block him, one leaps at him and he catches them with The Force and throws them aside, and then blasts debris from the temple injuring another.
He boards a starship and tells his droid that they are leaving, and the other Jedi board their ship to follow, but he turns around and blasts them before escaping into Hyperspace as he hears a voice in his mind. The voice reframes what happened in the Jedi Temple, as being the fault of the Jedi, of being Luke's fault.
The Jedi realise that he shot at them and exactly disabled their engines, if he hadn't been so accurate their ship would have been destroyed. They try to use the force to track him, but one of them just switches on the tracker for the droid on his ship telling the others that "it doesn't have to always be the bloody force."
Meanwhile Ben arrives at a large bio dome space station, with roots hanging out into space, he lands and meets with Snoke, a younger Snoke either wearing a wig or with long hair. He comforts Ben over what happened, telling him Luke has stolen too much of his life already and asking what he will do next. And Ben tells him he's been thinking about The Knights of Ren. . . .

High Points : So a story trying to get us to empathise with Ben Solo, showing us how Snoke was manipulating his from the very start, and we get moments where he still shows the good in him. He advises them to leave, he then pushes the Jedi Students away, and then disables their ship rather than killing them as we know Kylo Ren would do.
I also like the designs of the starships, Ben's vessel shares some design elements with the Millennium Falcon, which makes sense, and the Jedi Students vessel looks like a kitbash of various Rebel Starfighters, the cockpit of a Y-Wing, engines and one wing of an X-Wing, and the two shorter wings of a B-Wing, it looks very much like something that Luke might scavenge up for his students to use (or since it was originally a design for The Force Awakens, a vessel put together by Rey from the wreckage surrounding her on Jakku).
I also adore the look of the Space Station that Ben meets Snoke on, and reading up on the background of it I like it even more. It's a space bio dome with plants in it, so looks like a natural place for meeting a hiding Jedi Master, he's in space but among nature. But the background reveals that it was a station built in the High Republic Era, which was taken over by the Drengir, and the Sith later killed them here. So it's a place of dead and corruption, somewhere you'd totally expect a Dark Sider like Snoke to use. So just like Snoke, its current appearance covers it's true nature,

Low Points : But there's a huge scale problem with the Jedi Students vessel, since it has the cockpit of a Y-Wing, how does it sit two pilots side by side, and where does it keep its fairly expansive sick bay? Also as a ship obviously pieced together from parts, why are there a number of identical vessels sitting next to it at the Jedi Temple?
And Snoke's wig? What the hell, he looks ridiculous. I can't believe he had a head of hair, as his face is as messed up with scar tissue as it was in the sequel trilogy, and hair doesn't grow on scar tissue. So it's a wig, and he looks silly. He's trying to look like a calm and pacifistic tutor who is taking over the teaching of Ben Solo, trying to not look evil. But he looks like a bad cosplayer.
So when we were reading Legacy of Vader, we saw Snoke first meeting and recruiting Kylo, and deciding to destroy the Knights of Ren, but now we see that it's Snoke kind of sending Ben to join the Knights of Ren. Which seems contradictory, especially from parts within the same arc of stories (Rise of Kylo Ren, Reign of Kylo Ren, and the currently being released Fall of Kylo Ren).

So what do you really think ? : So it's a retelling of the background story of how Ben Solo becomes Kylo Ren, and it's adding to it by having some Jedi Students, people that Ben presumably likes trying to track him down and bring him to justice. But it's obvious that he's just going to kill them later, when he goes full evil. What is less obvious is where Luke is. The temple is still burning, but the students can't sense Luke so assume he's dead. I guess we're supposed to think he's cut himself off from the force already, but that just makes Luke worse, as not only did he go into hiding, but he totally abandoned students under his care.

Final Words : Not a great start to the story, I suppose it's try to set a lot up, showing us how Ben becomes Kylo, and becomes leader of the Knights of Ren, and to give us some resistance to this path, we've got his fellow Jedi Students trying to bring him to justice. So we've got some elements which might bring us to a good story later, but this one mainly feels like set up and exposition.

Score : 7/10

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