Part 38 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

I feel we’re into the dregs now. Chewie awkwardly shuffles down some sand while the Knights of Ren watch on for whatever reason. Those guys sure do a lot of standing about and looking imposing and not a lot of anything else, other than get beat up by their own boss in a wordless brawl.

After that we’re in the desert again with Rey, and we’re going to do the trailer. I saw this so many times over the course of 2019 that I was absolutely sick of the sight of it. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t have any interest in seeing the finished film; certainly I wasn’t spoiling myself for Cats in the same way. This is fully a set-piece, a concept-driven piece of action that is adhering solidly to the rule of cool. I am obliged to note that it’s not totally dissimilar in that concept to the appearance of Maul on his little scooter on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace, though frankly that’s as weak as these connections get – this could just as well be inspired by The Searchers or Trigun.

Yes: a lone figure stands on the desert. From a distance, sands are thrown up by a great approaching craft. It’s on a collision course. She jumps just in time – while mid-flip, she severs an essential connection. She lands. It crashes. This is as core a character piece for Rey as we might ever get, the infamous Rey Movie being in the limbo that all post-Rise of Skywalker projects have slipped into. We might imagine Luke in this scenario steeling himself to trust the force, unsure of abandoning the practical option of finding cover. Anakin would have been less surgical – maybe driven the craft directly into the ground. Obi-wan is the character most likely to take Rey’s tack here, a little showy, a little violent. She’s not afraid of injuring her love-hate partner Kylo Ren here, a refreshing frankness in a film that is otherwise reflexively sentimental.

That’s Rey, and we’ll see her in this much fickle detail for a moment later when she runs Kylo Ren through with his own sword then heals him back up. Sadly she doesn’t really appear again after that.

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As well we get a grotty as all hell long-distance telephoto of Kylo Ren walking away from the wreck which is such a badass shot it may have been worth the rest of the film just to get that. In a small irony it almost looks like something out of Sorcerer, the film that got infamously steam-rolled by Star Wars at the box office in 1977. Sadly there’s a quick cut away and when it cuts back the cool shot has been replaced by a different one, a perfectly crisp wide shot with mediocre composition. The Rise of Skywalker experience again, flashes of greatness immediately torn away.

Oh yeah, and then Rey shoots Chewie.

To be continued.

♞ Knights of Ren status: 🛏️ Stationary

Next: Rey shot Chewie. In the last scene I watched, I mean. In this scene they steal something that looks like a pod racer. But wow, am I still thinking about how Rey shot Chewie.

Part 37 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s starting to feel like I’m trapped in a hall of mirrors: is this the first time Palpatine is explaining his plan to Rey? Surely that has already happened, once if not twice. She has come to him; they are kin; she’s going to strike him down and take his place in a literalised re-staging of Return of the Jedi. She won’t do it: she has the force of the Jedi behind her. He has the power of the Sith. The battle between the largely impersonal Resistance and the totally impersonal Final Order fleet rages in the skies above them. This is some kind of purgatory – the purgatory that Palpatine fell into after being thrown down that pit perhaps, a purgatory where the cycle of Star Wars episodes never ends and each victory is dissolved into the next failure. Luke becoming more and more self-satisfied with each loop, Leia more abstract. Lando more present.

There’s a part in Shadows of the Empire (sorry) where Palpatine thinks about picking out his favourite throne to sit on, the one that sits a meter higher than the rest of the room. That must be this throne, a great spiky monstrosity with more than a touch of Game of Thrones about it. As we noted in Scene 33, Rise of Skywalker pitches itself as Star-Wars-as-horror, the gleaming sci-fi aesthetic of evil here given way entirely to an aesthetic that looks like if The Pit and the Pendulum was given the lighting designer from a Prodigy set. Ian McDiarmid has never looked so viscerally unpleasant as he does hanging off that great dangling arm, death’s grin on his face as he assures Rey that everything is going according to plan.

Of course you can’t remove aesthetic from content, and what’s gained in the thrill of making this a monster mash is lost in the part where this is nominally a story about Empire, but let’s be honest: this movie isn’t even slightly about Empire. It has no idea what Empire is. Even the real Star Wars Holiday Special knew you had to show an actual crying Wookie to drive home that this system produces huge dickheads. Here, although we see people doing Holiday Special nonsense, going door to door looking for fugitives, they don’t do anything specific. And then they blow up the whole planet, because as an organisation they’ve decided they love blowing up planets. Where in Revenge of the Sith we had a great Republic senate cheering for autocracy, here we have an arena full of cloaked nothing characters in the same role. You don’t have to think Star Wars is a great satire to recognise that something has been lost here in terms of ambition.

Next: The Trailer

Part 36 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

This marks the final appearance of Kelly Marie Tran’s character Rose Tico, who may as well not appear in this film. No character is required to appear in any film of course, but it must suck to get the script and realise that you’re on rotation with Maz Kanata for being the character who says whatever Leia needs to say but that isn’t on tape. Even the guy from Lord of the Rings who only exists to read from the wiki article has a better role here. Even the giant slug man got to stand on the Millenium Falcon. Instead, Rose Tico gets her only substantial scene here, politely telling John Boyega that Leia thinks it’d be better for her to stay home and work on her Youtube channel. She’s making an hour-long video about rare Star Destroyer designs. It’s only going to get a few hundred views. Her big hit was a few years ago now, a kinda click-baity video about Death Star II titled “They put the trench on the inside?!” with a thumbnail of Sheev falling down a pipe.

Everyone else is getting ready to go on a capital-A Adventure, the looming threat of Palpatine’s infinite fleet not really inspiring much hustle. I guess when you can’t reach the fleet without going on a fetch quest, it’s easy to conclude that the fleet can’t easily get to you. Or if they do, that’s one less job on your plate. C3P0, who is going on the adventure, says goodbye to R2D2 (who isn’t) in such a manner as makes his fake death basically inevitable – ‘you were my best friend’ indeed. Those two tin cans hated each other.

And look, this is the second-to-last time we’ll see Leia here and I’m going to say it again: I think the film would be remembered a lot more fondly if it got out of it’s own way and let the talented younger leads do their thing without being interrupted every five minutes to remind you that Carrie Fisher is in this film, which she isn’t on account of having died several years before it started filming. Because acting is an art-form and compositing archive footage of someone into an unrelated scene simply isn’t good enough. No amount of technical fidelity is going to get past that core lack of the thing that makes acting an interesting thing to do: seeing a real person try to inhabit a role.

“Rey [tape crackle] never be afraid of who you are.”

• Leia Skywalker

Next: Empress Palpatine