Part 22 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Of all the scenes in the movie Rise of Skywalker this might be the most difficult one to write about. Not because it’s particularly awful, because it isn’t, and not because it’s particularly good. It’s just straight down the middle. Default Star Wars. And don’t get me wrong, Ahsoka wishes it could put together an action sequence as tight and casual as this, with the Falcon deftly out-manoeuvring TIE Fighters through some squiggly sheets of ice that were probably derived from the most stunning concept art you have ever seen in your life. It’s all to acquire some forbidden intel from Boolio, a horned blue chap who’s been passed it along by a secret, unnamed spy from within the First Order (it’s Hux). Honestly this pretty much just works.

Even Boolio, voiced as he is by Mark Hamill in a decision made specifically to irritate me personally, is hard to fault: he’s a big blue muppet man. He’s got a giant chunky data cable that you just know is incredibly satisfying to plug into R2D2’s side-socket. And his big bouncy head just looks so… separable. I’ll bet Kylo Ren couldn’t resist. He actually stands out as a memorable bit of design for an alien species in Disney Star Wars, which has often suffered from a lack of ambition in this regard.

Even the downtime part, with Finn and Poe accusing Chewie of cheating at space Warhammer, is charming and efficient. The pedant in me wants to mark down the naked appeals to nostalgia, the flickery stop-motion figurines from A New Hope being hauled out again (and not for the last time) despite being a wholly inconsequential part of that movie; it’s weird that it’s the same, that we never see a different space board game. Where’s space Settlers of Catan, maybe Chewie sucks at that. Maybe he gets all the bad dice rolls. Still, it’s all charming and it makes something of Chewbacca’s mostly unremarked-on status as the elder statesman of the group – this guy knew Yoda, was involved in the destruction of two Death Stars, and introduced his mother to Han Solo for Christmas. They should give him a medal.

The slug guy is here! I can’t hate the slug guy, although it was mentioned to me that it’s somewhat awkward that there was space for the slug guy to ride along on this adventure but not Rose Tico, who is stuck back at base talking to the Leia automaton and hanging out with Merry Brandybuck. I think they both could have come along.

So this is an acceptable default level of Star Wars. Okay, not great, but pretty good. And that’s pretty positive! If the whole film was on this level I think you’d end up with something like Solo, enjoyable but a bit unremarkable. So it feels appropriate for this to fall where it does, dead centre of the 43 scenes.

Next: The End.

Part 21 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s touching, really. C3P0 is the very first character to speak in a Star Wars film, and he’s present in every instalment, old and new. For much of the runtimes he serves in a comic relief role, pottering around with his diminutive friend R2D2, the pair of them inspired by the underclass peasants from The Hidden Fortress, one of Lucas’ original inspirations for Star Wars. Threepio (as he is unfailingly dubbed in supplementary material) is prissy, uptight and ill-adapted to the adventurous environments he always seems to find himself in, but with the death of Leia C3P0 is in fact the last remaining Skywalker – Rey’s nominal brother.

Given his central role in the series – assembled by a young Anakin Skywalker using one of those magazine subscriptions where they send you one part every month – it’s odd that Threepio has not really had a moment to take centre stage in the movies at least (he was the nominal star of the Droids cartoon). The closest he comes to the role of protagonist in the original trilogy is when Luke sends him in to Jabba’s palace to deliver his threat, which would perhaps be a noble self-sacrifice were C3P0 actually aware of it. And he has a specific history with memory wipes, given Bail Organa casually ordered him returned to a blank slate after the events of the prequel trilogy. Bail apparently unaware of this droid’s proximity to all the major events of the preceding decade, and his close connection to the man about to become Darth Vader.

So it’s nice that despite everything else about the script for Rise of Skywalker, here it allows C3P0 the genuinely heroic act of choosing oblivion for himself in service of the Rebellion (as-was) and in service of his friends. Eternal robo-butler, first to Anakin and Padme and later Luke and Leia and Han, here C3P0 is his own droid and makes his own call. It’s a moment of sincerity that the movie around it doesn’t seem quite able to believe is taking place.

Also – it’s just very fun when his eyes go red. Much more fun than when his arm was red for some reason.

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Meanwhile, Rey is very excited to finds out that Chewie is still alive. Hope nothing bad happened to him!

Next: Hello, Boolio

Part 20 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Three short scenes in one – Rey leaves the Death Star ruins in Kylo’s TIE, Finn and Poe leave in the Falcon (and the look of hurt and betrayal Finn gives at the departing Rey is absolutely fantastic, for what it’s worth). This leaves Kylo without a ship, but we aren’t going to start sweating the details at this point. Smash cut back to Rancho Resisto, where a respectful sheet has been pulled to form a Leia-shaped shroud. To be fully on brand they should really have propped a little voice box up next to it that occasionally said “Have hope!” or “Droids, am I right?” while the mourners nod. Lando is not present, so that’s either history’s greatest snub or he’s just deliberately waiting for the moment of greatest dramatic impact to make an appearance. Maz Kanata is front and centre, as you might expect of a character for whom the tidal wave of positive fan sentiment has never once broken on a shore. We also get Chewie’s wail of anguish, which I can only assume translates to “Well I’ll never get that medal now.” Hang in there buddy!

Back at the Death Star ruins it’s time for the start of the big tear-jerker scene between Kylo Ren and Han Solo, who very thankfully does not appear in the form of a luminous ghost. I strongly suspect they did some testing of various effects for making Solo slightly ghost-y here and rightly thought better of it – you can just about get Alec Guinness to rattle off some dramatic lines with panache despite glowing blue and wobbling at the edges, even if he will need to rest his ghostly legs, but as we see later in this film you absolutely cannot do the same with Mark Hamill. Ford’s strength of emotion here comes from his vision of stoic acceptance, a grounded presence that cuts through the campy melodrama inherent to the character of Kylo Ren.

This scene is better than most everything else in this film by some distance, but the part we’re getting here is very much the chaff to Scene 15‘s wheat. There’s some fantastic bits like:

Han: I miss you son.
Kylo: [blubbering incoherently] Your son is dead.

Lines that could have been awful but are saved by the quality of the performance. But there’s also irredeemable tosh like:

Han: Your mother’s gone. But what she stood for, what she fought for, that’s not gone.

It’s what she stood and fought for that he didn’t like, Han! He’s been fighting a war over it! Countless dead!

I’m still in love with how wet everything is at the Death Star ruins. Half a point docked for whoever it is who says “Goodbye, dear Princess” 🤮

Next: Threepio’s moment of heroism

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