Part 32 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

One of the interesting things about watching this movie in a randomised form is how little the energy of each scene changes. Aside from some minor jolts going to and from specific scenes of Palpatine blasting lightning at the sky or interminable spaceship combat with lasers going blip blip, everything is mostly proceeding at the same pace. Part of what makes that possible is that so many scenes are like this one, what you might call functional scenes – scenes that proceed from point A to point B in a mostly self-contained fashion. It’s rare that anything depends on something than hasn’t happened in the last five minutes.

Consider this scene, where the protagonist gang are reeling from the apparent death of Chewbacca immediately before, find out that C3P0 contains a secret message in his memory banks and decide to go get a shifty droid technician to extract it. You could take a pen to the script of Rise of Skywalker and remove the characters of Luke, Leia, Han and Lando and not have to change a word of this scene. You could remove Sheev and replace him with Snoke, or cut Kylo Ren. The only events this scene depends on are those which happened immediately before it.

It gives the film something of the property of JC Denton’s infamous monotone in Deus Ex – chopping it up generates something very self-similar to the original work. There are surely many films where chopping up the scenes at random would quickly render the whole incoherent. Even something deliberately non-linear like Nolan’s Memento would suffer from a totally arbitrary order. But here, where the individual scenes are so self-reliant, you just don’t lose very much from jumping about.

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All that aside, both halves of this are a swing and a miss: Hux’s presentation of Chewie to Richard E. Grant achieves little more than really driving home that Chewie isn’t dead, and thus that the protagonists are being idiots in their subsequent scene where Oscar Isaac really strains his acting muscles to pretend he has an issue with going to Planet Kojimi to get C3P0’s mind wiped. I don’t know if this is all reshoot material, but it’s interesting to note that the set is now dressed in a really half-assed manner with a bunch of fake spider webs and Oscar Isaac has suddenly grown a five-o-clock shadow.

Rise of Skywalker is not sending its best here. ‘For Chewie’ indeed. And look, to really nit pick, how are all these spiders getting into a spaceship anyway?

Next: The dead speak!

Part 31 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Remember Scene 25? This is the second half of Rey’s deeply obnoxious interaction with the ghost of Luke Skywalker on that island full of Porgs he secluded himself on. That was bad, if anything this is worse, all the smug satisfaction of Luke’s hectoring reappearance condensed into him standing ramrod straight, holding himself like a playing card monarch and moving his grotty old X-wing around like he’s conducting a symphony. Why isn’t Rey, the protagonist of this movie, performing the great feat of conquering your inner demons and silencing the mind? Is it common for the ultimate goal of a teacher to be the adulation of their students? Yet another reminder why his awful school failed.

Then it’s back to the Resistance base, because it’s time for C3P0 to get his memories back. Of the film’s many fake-out deaths, this one bothers me least: It’s exactly C3P0’s kind of misfortune to have bravely sacrificed himself in a way that’s trivially undone, and for it to happen at the hands of his knowing little friend R2D2 is appropriate. The dialogue between them is also simple, funny and well done, not going too hard on C3P0’s arrogance or dimwittedness as he wildly misinterprets the recent events of his life.

The purpose of returning to the Resistance base is so we can see their mild excitement at receiving a transmission from Luke(‘s X-Wing.) I’m not surprised that they don’t seem too blown away by what seems to be the ghost of Luke sending them radio messages. He certainly seems to be able to do everything else.

But it’s Rey of course, Rey has shrunk herself down to the size of a cell and is flying through a giant blood vessel to get to Exegol. All the bozos back at base are going to follow her. Brief shot of people running around the Resistance base set – how many times did they film people running around this set? Lando’s here! Presumably in recognition of the implausible nature of sending Maz Kanata out to inspire hope, this time it’s Lando filling in what should obviously be Leia’s role here, of doing some political canvassing for support back at whatever central galactic community exists that we never see in this film.

Next: ‘For Chewie’

Part 30 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

She doesn’t say it though. Maz Kanata says it. The weird thing is that this whole concept would surely have more impact if it actually came as a shock, if the fight between Kylo and Rey was just suddenly interrupted by them both detecting a disturbance in the force. Instead, we get this awful teeing up with Maz Kanata talking into the camera and Leia shuffling off to die, that saps the momentum out of what otherwise continues to be a very enjoyable laser sword fight.

The lightsaber battle has teleported slightly from being dry, inside and up many floors to being outside, extremely wet and down at sea level. I can only presume that Rey used the power of unaided flight, which as we all know she possesses. Perhaps Kylo Ren also has the power of unaided flight, it would surely come in handy for a man in his position. It doesn’t matter how cheaply it has been acquired, the image of Kylo and Rey fighting in the sea spray is just fantastic.

The visuals repeatedly reference the duel between Anakin and Obi-wan on Mustafar which is a really pleasant surprise, with crashing waves of water taking the place of lava as the duel progresses down a series of narrow bridges. The editing is a bit of a mess – there’s one particular zoom on a giant tidal wave that appears to simply vanish? The water in general never poses much of an obstacle to the duellers. John Boyega is doing some excellent “no don’t!” howls at Rey, who is matching Kylo move for move and ferocity for ferocity. Much as with the tiny lead in from Scene 28, there’s a story being told visually here about Rey giving in to impulse and to violence that doesn’t really go anywhere after this scene. It’s a shame.

And so it actually comes together quite well – Leia dies, and Ben (of the two duellists) is the one who is given pause. In that pause, Rey seizes his lightsaber and impales him on it, taking the villain’s place in the arrangement as realisation and horror cross her face. Wracked by guilt, she saves his life using the force, betraying the Resistance and probably messing up whatever plan we might think Leia was trying to pull off here. Good.

Next: I think I’d remember having a ‘best friend’

Part 29 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Rest in peace to the Knights of Ren, hanging out with Constable Zuvio and Ochi of Bestoon in “characters who were basically edited out” heaven. They were an odd bunch, a naked attempt to bottle the lightning that was the bounty hunters summoned up by Vader in Empire Strikes Back. Obviously their major flaw in this film was that in the final cut they never did anything beyond standing menacingly at the edge of scenes, but even if they’d had all sorts to do it’s hard to imagine they’d have the devoted fanbase that, say, IG-88 does. They lack whimsy, for want of a better word. They lack spirit. They’re too coordinated, too manufactured – like someone’s violence-themed backing band. Sorry, Knights of Ren. It’s not me, it’s you.

This is the second half of the fights that started all the way back in Scene 6, one between Kylo Ren and his knights and one between Rey and some guys. Neither half of the fight here is particularly memorable, but Kylo’s opponents are at least individuated and are attempting hand-to-hand combat, while Rey is forced to try and last out the scene doing long-distance force shoves on what were always some very ceremonial-looking red cloaked guards. Kylo Ren has changed into a particularly fetching black sweater since we last saw him.

Once that’s all wrapped up it’s Sheev cackling for the next few minutes as he hoovers up Rey and Ren’s force telephone credits to regenerate his fingers and presumably legs, because he’s walking again after this. The great mechanical arm that’s been supporting him through all the scenes before this point is a lovely bit of design, absurdly oversized as befits this grandiose interpretation of Palpatine with his black lips and hollowed eyes. It’s a real shame they didn’t go one even further and have him swoop around on it a bit like a vampire bat. The suction effect looks pretty rough – notable in a film which has every other marker of being rushed, but where the visual effects are normally still very sharp.

Meanwhile it’s going badly for the Resistance fighters, as we see Poe suffer the loss of that one guy from Heroes who takes the classic Porkins death, splatted in an X-Wing to let us know that the stakes are now high. So long, space cowboy.

What’s striking at this point is how many stages there are, cumulatively, to this climax. Of the 29 scenes that I’ve gone through in the movie so far, 7 of them have been set on Exegol – and we’re not even done yet. Palpatine is talking to Rey for a proportionally quite significant period of the movie, without really having anything to say. He just sort of wins in lots of different ways, then loses in exactly one. The film is leaning really hard on Ian McDiarmid’s ability to chew scenery, it’d be in serious trouble if he weren’t so up to the challenge.

Knights of Ren status: Severed 🔪

Next: Leia has a funny thought