Part 33 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

At long last we arrive, safely, to the start. The Rise of Skywalker opening crawl.

The dead speak! The galaxy has
heard a mysterious broadcast,
a threat of REVENGE in the
sinister voice of the late
EMPEROR PALPATINE.

GENERAL LEIA ORGANA
dispatches secret agents to
gather intelligence, while REY,
the last hope of the Jedi, trains
for battle against the diabolical
FIRST ORDER.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader
KYLO REN rages in search
of the phantom Emperor,
determined to destroy any
threat to his power….

Picking up exactly where I left off with Scene 32, this opening crawl is notable for the tiny little arms it reaches into the story surrounding it. Each paragraph links to exactly one scene and one scene alone – first, to the Fortnite tie-in, second to Boolio (RIP), third to the scene immediately following the crawl where Kylo Ren slaughters some anonymous goons. The one thing about text is that it is extremely fungible; there’s no other scene in this film that could have been so easily replaced or reworked. So to a certain extent we can assume that this crawl represents the matters in the forefront of the creators’ minds at the very end of production: Fortnite, Boolio, the opening scene.

“The dead speak!” is a great opener, obviously. Similar to Revenge of the Sith‘s “War!”, it’s immediately staking a claim for the mood this film is going to strike, full of campy horror and melodrama. Full marks. We then have the perplexing-in-context description of Sheev’s Fortnite appearance, then a cloying, sentimental all-capitals invocation of Leia – who will be appearing in this film, you can be sure – and then an utterly bare-bones description of what Rey’s been up to.

Finally the most evocative part of the opening crawl, setting up a tense conflict between Kylo Ren and the revived Emperor that the film then immediately quashes. It’s hard not to feel a little robbed, even if the version of the film where Kylo Ren quests in search of the Emperor instead of Poe, Finn and Rey doing the same thing probably never existed. It’s also very perplexing – if you were wildly trying to simplify your film, why keep this detail that Kylo is originally against the Emperor, quests to find him, then immediately turns? Why not just have Sheev summon him hither and send the coordinates himself?

But ask too many questions like this and the whole edifice unravels: if Sheev spoke a message to the universe (in Fortnite), why would Poe et al need to hear it from Boolio? This is a film of parts rather than a whole, and that is the only way to love it.

Next: I made ‘Snoke’

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’