Kylo Ren’s mask is as good a symbol as any for the way Disney’s Sequel Trilogy went down. Established as imposing in The Force Awakens, deconstructed in The Last Jedi and then haphazardly reassembled in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Kylo abandoning his mask in one movie only to revert to it in the next is a great example of the lack of planning that went into this trilogy, but now we see that things could’ve been quite different.
Yesterday we got a treasure trove of cool concept art from Colin Trevorrow’s version of The Rise of Skywalker. His movie would have been titled Duel of the Fates and while it shared some elements in common with Abrams’ pic, a lot of it is very different. For example, Trevorrow was planning a scene in which Kylo Ren would have a vision quest similar to Luke’s own on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back.
As seen in the concept art in the gallery below, he’d face off against Vader while wearing a new mask, and according to the information released alongside the picture, it’d be created from leftover Mandalorian armor. Naturally, this was all planned out before The Mandalorian was a thing, but if this had happened, it’d have made a nice connection between the show and the movie.
And, from what we can see of the mask in this concept art, it looks really cool. The ‘jaw’ comes down to two sharp points, which feels like an evolution or iteration on Vader’s own mask. This neatly ties into Ben Solo struggling under the weight of the Skywalker family lineage, and a battle against Vader would have made that internal struggle an external one.
So, it’s a damn shame that all we’re going to get to see of this are some scattered pieces of concept art. While we can’t say that Colin Trevorrow’s Duel of the Fates would have been a great movie (I don’t trust the judgment of a man who thought that The Book of Henry was a good idea), it’s hard to imagine how it would’ve been worse than what we got with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
