Film

The Internet Is Trying To Solve The Mystery Of Kylo Ren’s Helmet In ‘Rise Of Skywalker’

So, what was up with that chimp?

by Joseph Earp  28 December 2019
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

The Rise of Skywalker, the conclusion of the Skywalker saga, spends a large amount of its running time trying to undo decisions made in The Last Jedi.

Spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker follow

Within the very opening crawl, co-writer and director J. J. Abrams has already set-up a brand new set of stakes, reviving the big bad of the original trilogy and knocking the pieces arranged by The Last Jedi‘s Rian Johnson onto the floor.

That retconning gets more dramatic from there. Abrams turns Snoke into a fleshy puppet, relegates Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico to glorified babysitting duty, and pulls a complete left-turn on the subject of Rey’s heritage.

But no decision is as  abrupt as the one to stick Kylo Ren back in a helmet.

See, in The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren smashes his helmet to pieces, symbolically breaking with the past and going it alone. But within The Rise of Skywalker‘s very first act, Ren has put the thing back together, enlisting the help of a Sith Chimp (no, seriously, what was up with that?) to patch it back up.

The only question is: why?

Some of Abrams’ other narrative revisions are, if very complicated, at least kinda sensical. For instance, Abrams clearly didn’t want to tell a story without a shadowy man in a black cape, and when Johnson axed Snoke, he was forced to revive Palpatine.

But why put Kylo Ren back in the helmet? The character tells Rey that he’s planning to betray Palpatine, so it’s not like he’s returning to his old ways — why have him retreat to a crutch he’s already outgrown?

In interviews, Abrams has said that Ren reforged the helmet for a “specific purpose.” But which one? It’s not clear.

In fact, so baffling is the whole left turn, that the internet has begun the complicated work of trying to understand the whims of J.J. Abrams and piece together why the helmet was revived.

Here’s the solutions they’ve come up with.

They Wanted To Use Body Doubles For Kylo Ren

The immensely popular Disney+ TV series The Mandalorian features a character permanently donned in a helmet. It’s a cool look for the titular hero, but it also serves another purpose — it allows body doubles to do the work when the show’s lead actor is off playing Shakespeare.

Yep, although Pedro Pascal might be credited as the hero of The Mandalorian, that’s not always him under the mask, as a recent interview with series director Bryce Dallas Howard revealed. 

“He was in rehearsals for King Lear on Broadway,” Howard said. “And so, while we were doing my episode, I wasn’t working with Pedro.”

Inspired by that news, fans of Star Wars have begun guessing that the decision to revive Kylo’s helmet was motivated by practicalities, and that it made it easier to shoot around Adam Driver’s hectic schedule.

To be honest, that’s probably not right. Driver would have had The Rise of Skywalker on his schedule for a long time — these big-budget movies block out huge sections of their actors’ time way ahead of production. In fact, those strict timetables do more to explain why the film was so rushed: after The Rise of Skywalker‘s original director Colin Trevorrow was fired, production had a matter of days to replace him.

So nope, probably not body doubles.

Sign up for a free Disney+ trial to watch your favourites from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars & more.

They Don’t Have Rights To Adam Driver’s Face

This is a slightly weirder conspiracy theory, one brought to life on Twitter by Star Wars superfan Jenny Nicholson. Nicholson has opined that Disneyland doesn’t have the rights to Adam Driver’s face, and thus needed him back in the mask to fit the continuity of the post The Last Jedi-set ride.

Although this one is wild, I don’t think that it’s true. Even after extensive digging, I could find no information about Adam Driver’s face rights (there’s a sentence I never imagined I’d type.) Also, surely Ren could simply have put the helmet back on in the world of the ride? That’d only be briefly confusing for Disneyland visitors. And anyway, it sure seems like the continuity of a ride matters much less than the narrative cohesion of a major, multi-million dollar film.

Or at least, I hope that’s the case.

Nope, my sense is this one isn’t quite right either.

Reforging The Helmet Makes Sense To The Arc of Kylo Ren

It doesn’t. Like, at all.

So no, not this one either.

Although, it’s worth noting that this has been listed as the official reason for the helmet. In an interview with Driver, the actor described the back-and-forth with the helmet as part of his journey.

“He’s a very unformed person, which is exciting to play and to have that be represented physically in a costume piece, or a lighting choice or, in this case, a helmet,” Driver said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “He’s cherry-picked things he’s looked at through his history and that he’s decided he wants to claim for who he is. So it’s a physical representation of how that character has grown.”

Disney Wanted To Sell New Merch

I mean, probably.

J. J. Abrams Is Unbelievably Petty

This might be our winner. Given how much of The Rise of Skywalker Abrams spends thumbing his nose at Johnson, it sure does feel like he put the symbol of Ren’s suppression back together to undo everything that makes the character special and interesting in The Last Jedi.

Of course, Abrams probably isn’t vocalising that pettiness in like, writer’s room meetings — my guess is he felt that putting the helmet back together would fulfill some weird circular arc for the character.

But, like we already covered, it doesn’t. All it does is make the whole Disney trilogy feel like a strange, lopsided and increasingly complicated game of exquisite corpse.

Hey, just FYI, if you buy something from one of the links in this article, we may earn a small commission.