Part 19 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Shall we talk about Leia?

Carrie Fisher sadly passed away in 2016, well before this film started shooting. And yet she is – supposed to be – one of the main characters. Test footage recording from The Force Awakens is used to composite Fisher into a whole variety of scenes in this film, a technique that never quite manages to escape being ghoulish. More than ghoulish though, it just doesn’t work. Leia is limited to a handful of stock expressions, giving her something of the likeness of a fortune-telling machine. The actors placed in scenes with her are forced to awkwardly work around what was available to the script, often having to go some distance to make the key phrases work.

Rey: I will earn your brother’s saber one day.
Leia: …
BB-8: Beep boop
Rey: No [BB-8], you can’t do it for me.
Leia: Never underestimate a droid.

Why has this been done? I think as time went on and it started to seem like the wheels were coming off the big Disney Star Wars train, an amount of conservatism crept in to what was already quite a conservative project. After this film flopped, no more Star Wars films were released in cinemas until 2026’s The Mandolorian and Grogu, itself an odd artifact of shifting currents of production. Part of that conservatism has manifested in a movement away from what Disney was building in the sequel trilogy, a new Star Wars for new fans, back towards the tried-and-tested aesthetic and characters of the original trilogy. For the theme park, where characters are necessarily played by a variety of actors, this doesn’t present a problem. For the films, where recasting in the case of Solo was felt to be too avant-garde and fully computer-generated mannequins (as used for Tarkin in Rogue One) have consistently put off audiences, the mortality of the original actors must pose a real problem. Worse than that, the first two films in the new trilogy were devoted in part to passing the torch between old casts and new, with Han Solo and Luke Skywalker being given dramatic closure. Well, they’re all back in this one.

I think in part they thought they were buying these original actors. I think there must be some executive out there who, though they would never put it in these terms, feels quite aggrieved that the original cast have had the audacity to age and/or die. That’s part of what was being paid for so it had to be exploited in the end product – the sequel trilogy had to be ‘legacy sequels’ though the term was only just coming to the fore. As we’ve seen again and again since though, legacy sequels are a creative dead end. They’re a reprint. At best you can create a small, sad and hopeful coda to the original work like Matrix Resurrections. At worst, you’re mechanically extracting nostalgia from an old horse, like pressing an 87-year-old Ian McKellen back into a Magneto costume again. The new is the lifeblood of creation.

Rey, Finn and Poe are the protagonists of these films, in a way that just a few years later might not have been the case, not just because the ability for aging stars to be composited into action films was increasing – Ford was rolled out for Dial of Destiny after all – but also because appearing as second strings to legacy stars became a much less appealing prospect to up-and-coming actors. Everything worthwhile here comes from Ridley, Boyega and Isaac giving it their all against a production process that just wants to insert as many fawning appearances for Leia Lando as possible. Returns will always diminish. This is why the only aspect of Disney Star Wars to show genuine promise in the last few years was The Hunt for Ben Solo; unfortunately Disney is totally incapable of making it.

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Oh, the scene? It’s a 4/10. The fun argument Poe has with Rey over who damaged whose sentient machinery worse gains a few points, though why BB-8 doesn’t have any visible damage is unclear. I guess they ran out of time.

Next: Dead Leia, Wet Ben

Part 18 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

The first problem is that it’s all backwards, and in such a way that not even the randomiser can save it. In any order, this is backwards. It should go like this: the opening crawl states that dark rumours suggest evil is brewing somewhere far afield. The New Republic has reports that Palpatine has returned. They refuse to believe them, wanting to focus on the very real threat from the First Order instead. This is a breaking point with Leia’s Oscar Isaac’s Resistance, who want to pursue the lead however outlandish because it came from their good friend Boolio who lost his life delivering it. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren is on a quest of his own seeking out Vader’s something-or-other. Instead he finds – shock reveal – Palpatine lives! As we, the audience, find out so too do the Resistance, hearing Palpatine’s message to the galaxy broadcast across the stars and discovering that he’s throwing his weight behind the First Order. Now he’s everyone’s problem!

Let me be clear that I’m not proposing this as a better version of the film. It’s heavily clichéd and it doesn’t really change the content of the scenes, only the plot dressing. It’s a pretty boring bit of A to B writing. I’m only putting it out to contrast with what did happen, which is totally bonkers: the big Palpatine reveal happens six calendar days before the movie is released, during a tie-in Fortnite event. He gives his message to the galaxy then and there. The opening crawl of the movie then reminds us of this, followed by a whirlwind sequence where Kylo Ren has set out to kill him but on contact they immediately form an alliance. Finally the Resistance risk life and limb to hear from their spy Boolio (an avid Fortnite player) who can tell them… exactly what we already know. That’s how the protagonists find out, at a minimum six days later than the viewer, that somehow Palpatine returned.

Thats what makes this such a weird, uncanny scene. It would be one thing for it to be a boring bit of functional work connecting the Boolio sequence to the trip to the sand planet, the movie is full of those and they’re all much of a muchness. It’s that nothing in the film suggests that Palpatine’s return is an unknown quantity – everyone knows about it! Kylo knows, Richard E. Grant knows, Luke knows, the Knights of Ren know. And everyone in the Resistance kind of seems to know too. Oscar Isaac’s resigned sigh of the title line is well known, but just as odd is Merry Brandybuck’s rattled-off follow up: “Dark science, cloning, secrets only the Sith knew.” Aside from sounding like it’s the notes for writing the dialogue rather than the intended dialogue itself, it makes Palpatines’s return sound so inevitable that it cannot have been a surprise. And it wasn’t.

You have to wonder when this sequence was shot, and maybe specifically how the Fortnite event played into it – because multimedia events being what they are, there was always the possibility that the Fortnite event fell through and no-one got to see the message to the universe. Maybe they would have crudely prepended it to the movie as a cold open, or maybe they would have just thrown it on YouTube. Until someone writes a tell-all book, it’s difficult to speculate.

Taken straight, what does this tell us about the Resistance: that they’re the last to know. That their enemies are streets ahead of them, their allies don’t care to keep them informed, and they’re constantly resigned to the worst outcome however outlandish. It’s not got much of that hope they’re always going on about. Everyone sounds so tired. It’s much easier in fact to imagine that this is the result of a gruelling shooting schedule than it is to think that the scene was meant to come out like this, and even though this cast are often paddling upstream with these exposition scenes not all of them come out like this.

Either way, it’s not surprising that this is widely considered to be the nadir of the film. It’s just surprising that this happened at all.

Next: BB-8 crushed by a tree.

Part 17 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

“This weapon is your life!”

Obi-wan Kenobi (Attack of the Clones)

“This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”

Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)

“Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”

Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)

“Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”

Sheev Palpatine (Return of the Jedi)

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

Luke Skywalker (Return of the Jedi)

“A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect.”

Luke Skywalker (Rise of Skywalker)

“You want to kill me. That is what I want. Kill me, and my spirit will pass into you. As all the Sith live in me you will be Empress. We will be one.”

Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)

“The ritual begins! She will strike me down and pledge herself as a Sith! She will draw her weapon, she will come to me, she will take her revenge… and with a stroke of her saber the Sith are reborn! The Jedi are dead!”

Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)

Sadly Old Sheev never considered – what if two lightsabers?

It feels like a churlish complaint given how utterly shameless the film is about this, but it’s impossible to escape from: Palpatine wants Rey to strike him down (just like Luke didn’t.) After some to-ing and fro-ing and a big column of lightning, ultimately: she does. Does that mean he won? There’s not even the hint of a notion here to suggest why this method of exploding the old man is preferable to any other. Rey just cracks out second lightsaber and lets him have it.

Aside from absolutely anything else, this feels like a chronically insubstantial way to see off a villain who not only started the film by having escaped his certain fate from Return of the Jedi but also just described how doing this will mean he wins. Palpatine’s second return isn’t so much an option as a necessity. Hunting down the Emperor’s clones must be the entire purpose of the New Republic once they find out what happened here. Begun, the clone wars have!

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Felt a bit sad at the obliteration of the hooded Sith masses, given we never saw them do anything more than chant and operate the big machine that makes Snokes. Give me their story! Anyway, after the wax chancellor has been melted down in a VFX extravaganza we get the contemporaneous destruction of the Sith fleet, and shed a tear for Richard E. Grant who never saw or spoke to a single member of the Resistance prior to being blown out of his front window by them. Also, Lando’s here! And Kylo Ren emerges wordlessly from a pit.

Next: Somehow, Palpatine returned.

Part 16 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Kylo Ren has his helmet fixed
Those are the Knights of Ren
There’s a spy among the First Order
No honour in this villain’s den.

Lord Vader had a big black hat
It helped to fix his voice
Kylo Ren just sounds like that
It must be a conscious choice.

In the first two films we all found out
Luke failed to found a school
Disavowed by all, a lonely man
Because he lost his cool.

So Kylo went to old man Snoke,
Who promised him fame and glory
Together they ran the First Order
But that’s a different story.

This time Kylo’s just Vader
His flaws are a perfect fit
And that’s why he’s got his helmet back
Even though it looks quite bad on screen.

The subtitles say that Stormtrooper is calling the Knights of Ren ‘Ghouls’ but I’m pretty sure he’s saying ‘Goals’. Normally I would have much affection for the First Order officer who says an unprompted “I like it” but it’s all a bit self-aware. Not buying it. And commiserations to Commander Not-sure-about-this-one-sir who ends up the victim of this turbo-charged version of Vader’s Death Star conference. RIP, I thought you were making a good point. Bonus points awarded for throwing the head of a totally unknown-to-me character onto a table as a way of starting a meeting. Hello Boolio!

♞ Knights of Ren status: 🐵 Ape-reciative

Next: Exeunt Sheev.