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

Wow, Chewie’s hair looks great here.

All Star Wars has to end with a celebration, it seems. Much like the rest of Rise of Skywalker, this is both impossible to explain and yet also somehow a perfect individual piece of nonsense. Finn, Poe, Rey, Chewie, BB-8 and C3P0 have arrived at the planet where they’re hoping to find Ochi of Bestoon. I don’t remember why they think they need to find Ochi. They want the guy to get the thing to get the thing to go through the cloud to get to the place. On arrival, they are surprised to find that a famous festival is taking place. We are then treated to a bizarre, haunting scene of the gang meandering through the large but socially distanced crowd, discussing how every tent post or hanging sheet might conceal a copse of Stormtroopers. Finally we see Rey traumatised by the sight of some horrible little alien children. One of them speaks directly to her worst fear, tormenting her over her lack of family connections. Rey steps away and the hot insanity of day-time flips into a slow-motion night as Kylo Ren calls her on the force telephone, as we say all the way back in Scene 3. It’s haunting, it’s really oddly haunting, and it’s a perfect setup for the magical realism of the force telephone scene, lines between realities becoming blurry and permeable.

And yet obviously this is an awful scene. It’s a Fortnite dance party on the big screen. They should have played the Emperor’s message to the galaxy over this. How were the gang surprised by a festival they must have flown over? How are the First Order going to hide in such a sparse, open crowd? Why is Rey terrified of alien children? Why is that child asking her such invasive questions? Surely she can’t be the first visitor to lack a surname? Is the child trying to pull a scam? Why does the force telephone make it night-time? Are we supposed to think Rey has lost those hours in a trance? And of course nothing that happens here has any effect beyond the immediate setup of the next scene. They don’t find Ochi or his dagger by investigating, or even by bumping into Lando. They steal speeders and escape, pursued, before stumbling on it by accident. Maddening.

And that’s The Rise of Skywalker in miniature, isn’t it? All the awful, all the good. A film that is chronically less than the sum of its parts, which often can’t even get the parts to be basically coherent. But the parts themselves? Some of them are pretty entertaining. And as the ending taught us all, it’s okay to hate if you possess the power of two lightsabers.

Next: Conclusion

Part 42 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s unusually bleak for a Star Wars movie to posit that a major plot character was just walking back to their ship at some unknown point in the past, fell through quicksand into the lair of a large worm and just got eaten. Thus falls however the fate of Ochi of Bestoon, the bug-eyed Sith assassin with a Sith hood ornament on his beast of a car and a surprising amount of compromising material engraved on his fancy dagger.

He doesn’t even get to be the star of his big scene though, losing out in the goofy alien stakes to a big sock-puppet worm who appears fearsome, but can be reached through Rey’s tender yet firm care. His injury healed, the worm slides aside like a block puzzle to reveal the exit from the sand trap. I hope you were paying close attention, because that scene was the closest Rise of Skywalker gets to successfully deploying subtext. The worm, you see, is like Kylo Ren: threatening, a killer even, but ultimately reachable through compassion and care. Maybe somewhere off-screen, the worm’s mother passed on into the force while Maz Kanata watched.

It’s notable because there are so many themes that Rise of Skywalker threatens to invoke before veering away at the last moment: we might have thought about loss, with Chewie and C3P0 and Kylo Ren all getting what are ultimately fake-out death moments. We might have considered friendship, with Rey testing the limits of Finn’s love with her erratic behaviour, but it goes nowhere. Could Kylo Ren be forgiven? What would that look like? We never find out, because he kills all his friends then passes briskly into the force. Even nitty gritty details like Rey appearing much more comfortable throwing a stick than swinging a lightsaber resolve only into the awesome power of two lightsabers. In this very scene, Rey passes the lightsaber to Finn for safe-keeping, much as Luke and Leia both pass one to her at different points in the film. Nothing.

The Last Jedi provoked much feeling by asserting, or trying to assert, that Rey was a protagonist selected by the tides of fate of alone. The major contribution this film makes to Rey’s story is to actively refute that, placing her origin within the outline of an existing character and her redemption¹ in the name of another. It’s an appropriate move for this film, interested as it is in placing Rey parallel to Kylo Ren, who is defined by his failure to live up to his own sparkling lineage. You can choose good or choose evil – that’s as much of a summation of the Star Wars world view as you’ll ever get. But what does it mean to be still fighting the same Star War as your parents and their parents? This just isn’t a film that wants to answer that question. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect it to.

♞ Knights of Ren status: 👁️ Panoramic

Next: These are the exact coordinates

1. Of a kind; she did shoot Chewie after all. ↩︎

Part 41 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Four scenes disguised as one scene here, fired off in quick succession as the movie speeds towards completion. First off the bat: in a cold fury Rey swears to Finn that she will destroy Palpatine for killing her mother and father. This is solid ground – you could bin the rest of the film off and place just this quick exchange before Rey lands on Exegol for the dénouement, without losing too much coherence in Rey’s journey. In fact you’d gain a little bit, as you’d lose all the hints that vengeance isn’t the way, when in the end vengeance kind of is the way. Daisy Ridley’s got good chemistry with John Boyega as ever, their closeness really is something the film takes for granted as it’s given no active development whatsoever, outside of calling on Boyega to yell “Rey!” occasionally.

Secondly we see a very silly little clip of Sheev ringing up Kylo Ren on the force telephone to find out what’s taking him so long. Get Rey killed now! It’s unclear why he wants Rey killed. Later he claims he never wanted Rey killed, so this is a funny way of going about it. I have a strong suspicion that this scene was dubbed in at a late stage, because there’s only two shots in it: one a close-up of Kylo’s motionless helmet and the other a shot of him turning around in an anonymous corridor and walking into a room, giving the slightly humourous impression that he’s had to step out of a meeting to take this call.

Finally the Millenium Falcon crash lands on Planet Death Star Ruins. Or I guess it does, because we don’t see it happen. In a curious bit of absent content, we see the Falcon fly past Jannah – Naomi Ackie on a space horse – then a distant crashing noise, then a smash cut to a wide shot of a spaceship that has already done a great big skid down a muddy slope. What happened to the footage of the crash? What happened to any scenes set inside the spaceship informing us that it was about to crash? I guess we’ll never know. Sometimes it’s like these scenes have been put together at random.

I don’t think I’ve really discussed Jannah: Naomi Ackie plays a capable fighter who is introduced as a Warrior Queen of sorts, leading a troop of horseback riders. The riders may as well be the Knights of Ren for the amount they appear on screen after their introduction, but Jannah herself has an extensive role playing off against Finn in a way you might assume was written originally for Rose Tico before her Youtube channel took off. The worry would be that Jannah is there for Finn to manfully assert his heterosexuality against but thankfully neither of the actors play it like that – Finn in this film only has eyes for Rey and Poe, even if it’s left unrequited.

Finally we have the scene where Rey uses secret markings on the ancient Sith dagger to pinpoint the location of the Sith Wayfinder in the Death Star ruins. It’s magnificently silly, absurd from any angle you look at it. I think you could have cut it entirely if so much of the film wasn’t about the passage of the stupid dagger between various people and places. There’s nothing especially implausible about having Rey just turn up at the ruins without a magic dagger and doing her space parkour (aided, of course, by her ability to fly without external propulsion) until she finds Sheev’s bathroom. Certainly no more so than crash landing on a grassy hillock that’s full of Resistance-friendly nomads who collect spaceship parts and have heard of Babu Frik.

Next: Force Heal

Part 40 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

This is the introduction scene for the little cone-headed droid, a bold move for a movie that’s not got a huge amount for the droids to do in it. Structurally, this is a movie about some combination of Finn, Poe and Rey going places and doing things, and every other character is either with them while they do it or waiting patiently to hear whether they’ve succeeded from back at forest base. BB-8 and R2D2 are an immediate clash for the plucky companion role; I don’t remember if them being the same character was so much of an issue in the other sequel films but here’s it’s a drag. I almost asserted that BB-8 makes R2D2 redundant here, but I just managed to remember that it’s R2D2 receiving the information from treasured friend Boolio, possibly because that big chunky data transfer cable would have been hell to try and seat properly in a sphere. Still, the film manages the somewhat impressive trick of making R2D2 feel old, surrounded as he is by the modern, more overtly hyperactive droid that Disney prefers.

The cone droid is cute enough. He’s got the same kind of anxious little voice as the later, superior B2EMO from Andor which permits him a bit more agency than the mute BB-8 ever gets. Not that there’s much time or space for him to express that agency in this film, though the only outcome from this is that at one point back at forest base, Finn mentions Exegol to him and the tinny little droid says “oh yes, I know all about that”. And then Rey sends them the coordinates anyway. Otherwise he just wobbles about on his monowheel. It was nice of Rey to lubricate him though.

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With the new droid in tow, the gang finally reach Kojimi, where it’s the Holiday Special every day of the year. As I discussed in Scene 37, the staging of violent abuse of power by the First Order here isn’t hugely compelling. We get a slapstick alien stepping outside of his door, doing a big “Ohhh nooo!” and then dashing back inside. All these First Order Stormtroopers are supposed to be kidnapped children, but it’s hard to understand that when they’re exactly as officious as regular Stormtroopers, or dipping back into Andor the corporate security forces. It’s impossible to imagine that Finn was ever knocking on doors like this.

It’s not like it’s a totally unsuitable pitch for more Star Wars to portray a fascism that is cruel through incompetence and disdain, rather than bureaucracy and overwhelming force. It would help distinguish the First Order from the Empire. You could have the First Order troopers act in some particular way that strikes the viewer as wrong, as different. But come on, it’s far too late in the day to be having ideas like this. The movie is over. The trilogy is over. The Rey Movie is over. The Hunt for Ben Solo is over. It’s no good grasping for what-could-have-beens. What we got was a depiction of a reborn space empire that was strange and confusing but not ultimately in a way that came to anything.

At least it’s snowing, permitting the use of a large quantity of Snowtrooper uniforms. The oversized gang of protagonists are all in big parka coats, even C3P0.

Next: I’m gonna kill him