Part 26 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s the lightsabers, of course. A recurring totem among Star Wars fans online is the prospect of a show with fewer Jedis, fewer force powers, fewer lightsabers. Often I think what these fans really want are original stories, which is a fine thing to be asking for (of course.) With regards to Star Wars though – and putting aside the estimable Andor – I think they are absolutely wrong. The core concept of the lightsaber fight is and always will be genius: pure visual storytelling, the emotions expressed in bars of light meeting and clashing on the screen. It doesn’t matter if the characters are talking absolute nonsense or the contrivances that brought them to the same place were absurd: once the lightsabers are out, it’s hard not to love it.

So it is here with the spectral duel between Kylo Ren and Rey that takes place entirely over the force telephone: once the lightsabers come out, it’s just good to watch. Assisting is the visual motif of cutting back and forth between locations both with smash cuts and by mashing up the sets, a genuinely striking bit of composition that sadly doesn’t make a return again after this point. There are of course bad lightsaber fights – lest we forget the lessons of Obi-wan – but despite everything working against it, this isn’t one of them.

In content: Kylo Ren has apparently immediately decided to flip back from supporting Palpatine, or at least he wants Rey to think that – we’re aping scenes from the Lucas films again, here riffing on both Vader’s appeal to Luke and (more tenuously) Dooku’s appeal to Obi-wan. All of Rey’s backstory for this film is crammed into this one conversation, with what is obviously cut material used to fill out some flashbacks. How else to explain wasting Prima Facie‘s Jodie Comer in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as Rey’s unnamed mother, an odd diversion where she’s sending Rey down the river like Moses. Jodie Comer is then unceremoniously turfed out of the movie by Ochi of Bestoon, a man with a very ornate Sith dagger whose lightweight backstory strangely aligns with that of erstwhile Luke Skywalker love interest Mara Jade, a link between old Star Wars and new that I’m obsessed with even if I’m sure it’s not intended. Ochi of Bestoon will later turn up as a desiccated corpse in the Tatooine (or wherever it is) sands, destined to be the Constable Zuvio of this film, the impact of his absence felt more keenly than his presence. I wonder if they made an action figure of him.

Alongside all this we have the capstone of the Chewbacca rescue mission, a dire bit of treading water, the only function of which seems to be to clear long-time First Order toady General Hux off the board so that Richard E. Grant can fully assume the secondary antagonist role of being pleasingly smarmy but otherwise wasted. It’s unclear if Hux only managing to maintain his deception for all of five seconds before getting comically blasted down the bridge of the Star Destroyer is meant to be funny or shocking – along with Hux’s declaration that his spying is motivated entirely out of petty personal enmity towards Kylo Ren, the overall message just seems to be that the First Order is very stupid. Well, our heroes are the guys losing to them.

Next: And Leia looked down and whispered ‘no’

Part 25 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

We’ve already seen how Han is crammed back into proceedings as a memory – admittedly to quite strong effect – and stock footage of Leia has been blasted into the film with a shotgun. We now get to the main course, so to speak. “The dead speak!” cries the title crawl, and for this movie it’s an appropriate motif. It stands to reason that the third member of that original trifecta must have a part to play, death notwithstanding, and it’s here that we get a lengthy scene of Rey and (the ghost of) Luke Skywalker. The visual of Rey hurling bones at a burning TIE Fighter is a strong start, but sadly also an early peak. The root of the problem is that Mark Hamill is just too pleased by far to be revisiting the character and it’s making him tedious to watch, the simple confidence of Luke Skywalker replaced by a hectoring, smarmy oaf all too pleased to rattle off banal nonsense like “Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi”. Guess that’s what Yoda was doing in that hut on Dagobah, ‘confronting fear’.

In with this we get a curiously out-of-place flashback, of all things, with computer generated young Luke training computer generated young Leia in the Jedi arts. The models used have a little bit of The Polar Express about them and the faces get a shock reveal to really heighten the uncanny effect. It’s a real injection of madness that I don’t think quite rescues the scene as a whole (the worst excess of which is yet to come) but saves it from being a total wash. The main outcome is Luke giving a second lightsaber to Rey, someone he knows for a fact already has a lightsaber because he just stopped her burning it. Well, maybe it will come in handy later on.

There’s an odd set of symmetries here that don’t quite resolve into anything meaningful: Rey arrives in Kylo Ren’s TIE and leaves in Luke’s X-Wing. Rey throws Luke’s lightsaber into the fire and finds Leia’s lightsaber in a wall. Kylo Ren crushed Rey’s wayfinder on the Death Star ruins but she pulls his from the wreckage of the TIE. Luke tried to kill Kylo and fled to the island and Rey healed Kylo and fled to the island. Han’s ghost inspires Kylo to turn good and Luke’s ghost inspires Rey to continue the plot. Someone was trying to make a film that was about something here, but all we have is torn up patterns in the sand. And two lightsabers.

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Also tagged in here just before the business with Luke is an abominable Resistance base scene, with Finn and Poe exercising their considerable combined charisma to try and make you forget that “we found the information in a droid” isn’t really an acceptable plot point – not that it matters because Rey immediately gets on the regular telephone to give them the same information. The more of these we get the more I start to suspect that every single one of the jungle resistance base scenes are late-in-the-day reshoots designed to paper over gaps in the plot produced by other cuts.

Next: Oh my god, is that Jodie Comer?

Part 24 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

‘Exegol’ is ‘log.exe’ backwards. I don’t think this can possibly be a coincidence. This is the biggest lazy naming scandal since Dash Rendar. These Star Wars bozos have gone too far this time.

I don’t recall if there was ever a bit of dialogue describing the nature of the red goo they have to fly through to get to Exegol. There may have been one. It gives the strange impression of a Fantastic Voyage-style trip for these various jaunts to visit the old man and his fleet, a delving into the very body of Palpatine where a thousand tiny hooded Sith operate all the levers that make him shoot lightning.

This is the scene that introduces the lone feature of interest on the surface of Exegol, that radio tower that briefly controls the infinite fleet that can’t shoot quite right as they try to fend off Poe Dameron and his expositionary force. Amusing to imagine the robed technicians and black-painted droids who had to hoist that thing up and climb it to configure the array. Really any thinking about the material concerns of Exegol ends up being pretty amusing, like picturing how Dracula finds the time to iron his cloak.

I’m sure this has been long since hammered into the dust of discourse, but it’s striking how unbounded the scope of the problem the Resistance face here is. Even the Death Star, the point of which is to grant the Empire seemingly unbeatable power, is circumscribed within that big, simple circle. If you can X that out, the rebels win. Here it seems like even if the Exegol fleet just flopped out of the sky it’d be a mammoth job to mop up the pieces – there’d be a trove of only slightly scuffed materiel just lying around that maybe wouldn’t be as impressive as a completed fleet for the First Order but surely would be a concern. There’s just way too many of them, and what are they doing? Hovering? Something went very wrong in the conception of this climax but it’s hard to imagine what because the rolling infinite fleet is the very concept, there’s no obvious way to handicap it that would make the Resistance fight against it seem even plausible. It’s meant to be the arrival of the also-infinite Lando fleet, I guess, but those two things don’t just cancel each other out.

What I do appreciate is Palpatine’s Sith architecture. I like that Rey’s approach up to the door here visually references the revised entrance to Jabba’s Palace from the Return of the Jedi special edition, that’s a fun touch. I also like the extremely video-game-coded hexagonal floating elevator (though as we have discussed ad nauseum, Rey does possess the skill of unaided flight). The whole section is very video game, in fact, from the load-screen-hiding narrow passage Rey enters to the cloning machines which appear to have been slapped down in the caverns by a very casual Factorio player. Sheev’s been down here gaming, he’s been playing Star(Wars)dew Valley. He’s been toying with some pets, he’s been placing some decorative statues, he’s definitely had a relationship. All that controller time has been hell on his fingers.

Next: The Power of Two.

Part 23 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s simple stuff, to be honest – they’re star-crossed lovers, fates inexorably tangled. They’ve defeated the great evil but at huge personal cost and one lies dead in the other’s arms. They make a quick choice. The deal is done. A life for a life, with just long enough to share a single kiss before their fates are reversed. Driver and Ridley are in their element here, mucking around on the floor like it’s a black box theatre room. As with all the other instances, I’m a big fan of this. Could do without Kylo Ren’s already slightly bathetic fade away smash cutting to Maz Kanata standing over the Leia shroud as it does the same. I believe you should take art as you find it and trust that decisions were made sincerely and with real intent but also whichever editor made that cut belongs in clown school and not the editing bay.

Kylo Ren fading away is an odd one because it doesn’t really read as an act of Jedi transcendence or whatever, despite being paired with Leia disappearing which definitely is. It’s more suggestive that his passing of all his life mana through the force dyad has turned him into a being of pure energy or some such. I don’t know and the film doesn’t particularly care to explain. Obi-wan’s physical form disappearing at the end of his duel with Vader was always a strange quirk of A New Hope. You can’t remove it, because it’s the stinger to “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”, in death Kenobi has very literally escaped Vader’s grasp. Vader is reduced to that very pitiful shot of him poking the empty robe with his boot. Crucially, it’s quickly followed up with Kenobi’s spirit in the force yelling at Luke to make it plain what has happened here – Kylo just exits stage centre. Yoda vanishing feels like an unnecessary coda to his already pretty elongated passing, and Vader didn’t vanish – he still looks pretty substantial on that funeral pyre.

Luke turning to dust on the wind in The Last Jedi is logical enough in context, I guess – his teachers were Obi-wan and Yoda, so he kinda has to follow suit. But Luke is a character who ultimately follows a spiritual path (even if there’s plenty of adventuring along the way). It’s easy enough to read his passing from the mortal plane as a metaphor of transcendence, as with Obi-wan. He escapes Kylo and the First Order like Ben escaped Vader. Leia’s death, however, is much harder to explain. Unable (by virtue of the method used to keep her in the film) to explain what she’s attempting or why, she dies and subsequently vanishes like Leonard Nimoy in the Simpsons, a flat statement that the time for Leia to be occurring is over now.

As well as all this we get a facsimile of the parts of the celebration from Return of the Jedi we hadn’t already covered: a slightly obsequious montage with Ewoks and Bespin shown with cracked Star Destroyers floating about them. Guess they couldn’t really show a destroyer wrecked over Kojimi. As a scene overall though I’m forced to give this a cruel two thumbs down. You might think this is a harsh judgement on a fairly inoffensive bit of melodrama but cut away from my Adam Driver/Daisy Ridley scene to Maz Kanata again and I will fucking kill you.

Next: log.exe