Part 9 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the straight-laced secondary protagonist knows a guy from his own mysterious past with a skill set (or access to a skill set) that will help the good guys overcome their – okay let’s just say “locate their Sith wayfinder” because it’s not like that’s making it any less generic. But whoops! He/she/they left their life of crime on bad terms (there is no other way to leave a life of crime than on bad terms) and going back leads to an embarrassing showdown, at least until the former amigos put aside their long-simmering disagreements. Okay, you’re caught up. It’s Keri Russell in a mask. Poe used to be a spice runner because he used to be Han Solo (He still is Han Solo).

We’ve reached the doomed planet of Kimoji, where the First Order are hard at work making it be the Star Wars Christmas Special every day of the year. It’s a curious choice to give the planet a Christmastime theme, and the fake snow is a little distracting absent a context that requires it (unlike dry ice, snow was not an original component of Life Day, at least to my knowledge). As an aside, in drafting I wrote ‘fake Snoke’ there instead of ‘fake snow’. Wouldn’t that have been something.

One thing that does jump out to me about the set here though is the prominent use of staircases. Star Wars is not a setting that makes copious use of staircases, outside of Anakin chivalrously carrying Padmé’s suitcase that one time, and some of Andor‘s brutalist excesses. It’s a world of elevators, first and foremost, with rarely more than a handful of steps in sight and always a focus on aesthetics over practicality – the Star Destroyer bridge pits lacking any steps, while the Chancellor’s office contains entirely frivolous steps that must be a huge pain when a protocol droid comes to clean his desk. With all that in mind it’s extra adorable that the staircases here have little droid accessibility ramps to allow BB-8 and the other guy to plod along after the more leggy characters, even if you struggle to imagine that it would make mobility any more convenient for R2-D2 or C3P0.

Again matching the Holiday Special as closely as possible, there’s a micro-cantina scene here with a handful of ugly monster suits who get quickly panned past. I wouldn’t have mentioned except that one of them appears to be a Sontaran? Most curious. We also meet the extremely marketable Babu Frik; he perfectly straddles the line between endearing and irritating, like a Crazy Frog that’s capable of love.

“Who are you hanging out with that speaks Sith?” is a great line delivery. That’s why you pay the big dollars to put Keri Russell in the mask.

♞ Knights of Ren status: 🎄 Festive.

Next: General, what’s our next move?

Part 8 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

In some ways Rise of Skywalker feels like the last round in a fight between two ways of making a new Star Wars film: one approach being what you might term a soft reboot, with a new cast of characters taking up the mantle and having a new story that connects to the old one but doesn’t necessarily continue it – consider Blade Runner 2049 or Ghostbusters (2016). The other is the model that became dominant in pop cinema over the period in which the sequel trilogy were released, that of the ‘legacy sequel’ where the old characters (and actors) are dragged out for one last go round – such as Jurassic World: Dominion or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. In Rise of Skywalker the story of Rey, Kylo, Poe and Finn is competing for screen time with what you’d have to generously term a send-off for Luke, Leia and Han (two of whom make appearances despite being fictitiously dead and the other despite being actually dead).

If Scene 6 was the throne room fight from Return of the Jedi, this is Luke fighting Vader in Empire Strikes Back, given all the wow and pizazz of the mid-2010s blockbuster. It’s got all the elements – a slow, tense confrontation. A revelation about lineage. A fraught escape (although the creators of Rise of Skywalker have left off the ambiguity over whether or not Luke expected to be rescued when he threw himself down that shaft). As with the Sheev throne room scene, this is the model for some of Rise of Skywalker‘s best assets: taking a sequence from the original trilogy and rendering it anew with the aesthetics of a modern blockbuster. In this way it’s not dissimilar to something like SC 38 Reimagined, or more charitably Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes.

Taken seriously, this could be a third approach to making new Star Wars that isn’t either of those described above: literally remaking it, treating Star Wars as a stock text to reinterpret and reinterpolate, with new actors taking on the old roles. All the old complaining about The Force Awakens being too similar to A New Hope aside, this could be a creatively interesting way of doing things, and it would be thematically appropriate to the big story of Star Wars: making special-er and special-er editions. Go full pop and have Wes Anderson do a few scenes.

It’s perhaps unlikely that Disney will take on this mantle, and maybe a Star Wars film that was an anthology of creative reinterpretations of individual scenes wouldn’t be all that successful. But while Rise of Skywalker is largely nonsensical both as a single narrative or as the climax of a trilogy that includes The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, understood as a sort of fan writing – a studied reinterpretation – it’s often enjoyable. If nothing else, I’m certain George Lucas would have enjoyed the visual of the Millenium Falcon‘s exhaust blowing all the stormtroopers down while Kylo Ren remains upright.

Next: Keri Russell in a mask

Part 7 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

The load-bearing part of this scene is also the shortest – the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it recap of the relevant events of the previous movies as Kylo Ren attempts to call Rey on the force telephone. This the closest this film ever comes to a hard dependency on its predecessors, incorporating flashes of Han Solo’s death from The Force Awakens in amongst the images of Rey sitting on a cool evil throne and that sort of thing. Like everything else in Rise of Skywalker, this crucial context is blasted through at high speed.

Otherwise this is a dumping ground for otherwise useless footage: Rey performs a training montage which seems built around the idea that she’s going to find wielding a lightsaber hard work, given her affinity for a good solid staff, but the idea is never returned to. I do feel like ‘crossing a rope bridge’ would be an occasion where I personally would not want a lightsaber involved, connection to the universal force or no. Her red-eyed training droid seems particularly aggressive as if it may be going rogue, but once she smashes it the question never comes up. Hope they aren’t expensive.

Meanwhile Kylo is ringing Rey on the force telephone again, but we can’t really know that from this scene – only that he’s mildly distracting her from afar. And to do so, he’s either defrosting Vader’s helmet or he’s just baked it in an oven – either way he’s rightly wearing gloves to touch it – but there’s no connection between Vader and Rey so it’s unclear how one is aiding in sending visions to the other. I think we just needed to see that he’s got the thing because it’s used in an action sequence later. I will say here that something that is done well throughout this film is the contrast between the sterile, glossy, all-white interiors of the First Order sets versus the various alien planets (even if the planets themselves are a little derivative). It makes the smash cuts back and forth between Rey and Ren very effective.

Next: Ren remains upright

Part 6 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

The dialogue in this scene isn’t bad, but it is from a different film than this one. This is not a film about Rey’s parents or what happened to them – at best that is a subject that is touched upon. That’s not even really what this scene is about: This is the throne room sequence from Return of the Jedi but with Daisy Ridley in the role of Luke as Sheev enjoys himself trying to get under her skin – before doing the big reveal of her fighter pilot friends being blown out of the sky. Sadly nothing here has the melodramatic chops of “Fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station” but otherwise it runs straight through the checklist.

It does seem like the creators of this film had a very literal interpretation of the throne room scene in Return of the Jedi; I don’t think the Emperor really wanted to actually be struck down. He was manipulating Luke and Vader to bring them into conflict. I think it would actually have been quite bad for the Emperor if Luke chopped him up like a potato. In this however, Sheev walks us through his exacting plan while his adoring audience of hooded Sith extras looks on: Rey’s gonna do it, strike him down, and in doing so she will become a Sith, and because being a Sith is manifested in the Sith traditions and makes you somewhat the culmination of those traditions, being a parent is its own form of immortality. I may not be being literal enough here. He really wants her to kill him, either way, which is good for him because she’s going to.

Either way, they mix it up a bit at this point with Luke (Rey) instead passing the sword to Vader (Ren) over the force telephone, who immediately starts a fight with… a bunch of guys. It’s the fabled Knights of Ren! They’re going to be in this film a lot. Because they don’t say anything and Kylo Ren doesn’t say anything the only thing we have to go on is his physical acting, so it’s fortunate he’s Adam Driver and can kind of make it work. Ridley – who is generally also quite good – has to face off with literally faceless mooks, the Emperor’s red-cloaked guards, and it’s markedly less engaging. Oh, she pulls out a second laser sword by the way. Two lightsabers: Always a safe bet.

At this point we do arrive at our first glimpse of the protagonist of the final act of this film, ‘Screaming Oscar Isaac in an X-Wing’. He’s overseeing a bunch of stuff. It’s just kinda noise and sound here.

♞ Knights of Ren status: 💔 Unfriended.

Next: Air Fryer Vader