We Need To Talk About General Hux

How the Tertiary Villain of The Last Jedi Became the Butt of Some Jokes

*SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Last Jedi*

There. You've been warned.

This is General Hux, one of the leaders of the First Order, behind Kylo Ren & Supreme Leader Snoke. He's played by Domhnall Gleeson, one of Ireland's greatest gifts to humanity.

Via starwars.com

There's a lot that can be said about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, some of it is confused (like...Canto Bight? Why?). Unfortunately, this article is about the second of the three. We need to talk about General Hux.

General Armitage Hux was introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as an instrumental member in the leadership of the First Order. He wasn't Kylo Ren's friend, but more of a rival. A disciplined, military leader who had no patience for emotional trepidations that Kylo Ren was experiencing throughout the film. In the middle of that film, Hux gave a dramatic, shrill, Hitler-esque speech to his troops before Starkiller Base blew away an entire system of planets. That moment solidified General Hux's place as this trilogy's equivalent to Grand Moff Tarkin: a villain worth fearing because he was clearly devoted to the fascistic agenda.

Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi offers us a very different interpretation of the general. From the first moments of the film, Hux becomes the butt of Poe Dameron's jokes, in a moment that exists to undercut the expectation that the film is always going to take itself seriously (it's not, and that's okay). This isn't a critique of the film's comedy, but rather, a critique of how the direction taken with Hux was a misstep in character development. He becomes something of a punching bag, getting thrown around by Snoke and Kylo Ren, and verbally abused by Poe. Domhnall Gleeson plays the character with an increasing sense of vulnerability over the course of the film, sort of like the Igor to Kylo Ren's Frankenstein. He goes from one of the bad guys to a stock character.

Now, why is this bad? Comedic relief should always be appreciated, shouldn't it? Yes, but in this instance, turning Hux into the ugly stepchild of the First Order undoes the previous film's work of painting him as a threat. He goes from wiping out billions of lives and giving Space Nazi speeches to a punchline in a film that is supposed to take place immediately after the previous one. It's almost like the two films were written by different people...

But the other issue with Hux's recent character development is that it strips us of the potential for real conflict, specifically between Hux and Kylo Ren. In The Force Awakens, the two were kind of rivals. Hux wasn't impressed with Kylo Ren for letting his emotional conflict get in the way of the hunt for BB-8, and Kylo Ren...sort of didn't care? (because he's an evil wizard with a laser sword, why would he?) In this film, Kylo Ren kills Supreme Leader Snoke, and that should've driven a wedge between him and Hux. Hux is a general, he's by-the-book, so he should probably have a problem with the moody Darth Vader Jr. who just cut their boss in half. When Hux tries to raise this in the film, Kylo Ren just Force Chokes him. It's hard for their to be conflict between two characters if one of them can just get out of that conflict by Force Pushing the other into a wall (which happens). Why do we care about General Hux now? We don't. We didn't. But we could have. And that's the problem.