Part 5 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Not to be outright provocative here, but when Rian Johnson said “Let the past die” I think he should have had Rey set fire to the homestead set. Actually set fire to the real thing in a deliberate act of arson. For this and this alone I am a practical effects enthusiast, because then it couldn’t have been used in the horrible Obi-wan show and it couldn’t have been used here. Star Wars, like any other legacy media setting, is prone to nostalgia – to reusing the trappings of the previous films just for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing them again. Part of the genius of the prequels is the way they continually recontextualise or subvert the elements of the original films that they return to: Jabba the Hutt is a respected dignitary, the Jedi’s humble robes are an affectation of poverty, the Stormtrooper armour was first used by the Republic and so on.

The homestead has a similar reuse. Where for Luke it was a symbol of the normal life that he strained against but then found taken from him by the Empire, when it is revisited by Anakin in Attack of the Clones it contains all the old horrors of his childhood – his mother, taken from him and imperiled. He leaves and never goes back, and his former friend Obi-wan chooses it as a safe location to hide Luke with that knowledge.

What then to make of Rey turning up and burying some e-waste in the sand? Or Luke and Leia turning up as force ghosts to cheer her on a bit? It’s hard to understand what any of this means to any of the characters present. Luke’s affection for the place was based on his life there, not the bare fact of the buildings. That’s why Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru got the charred corpses and Luke didn’t sob over some sooty brickwork. Look, I know why the scene is set here. It’s because this is the big famous Star Wars location that isn’t the Millenium Falcon and it’s so that Rey can stand in front of the two suns while the music does a big swell. In the context of this film it means nothing. In the context of the sequel films as a project, or Rey’s character, it means nothing. Even Obi-wan knew Tatooine was a place where you were by definition slumming it. It’s cheap and incoherent and I hate it.

Anyway, a passing stranger asks Rey why she’s bumbling around the old Skywalker place and she looks directly into the camera and says “MY NAME IS REY SKYWALKER”. That’s the name of the film. The force ghosts look really stupid. Rey claws some cool points back for her silly little sand-sled though, that’s great.

Most importantly, we get the credit roll here! Thank you JJ Abrams for your efforts. Despite my broad distaste for this one, it’s crazy how much stuff has actually been packed in to these five scenes, we’ve had the whole gamut from “The FINAL Order” through to “I am Rey Movie Skywalker,” and near on every important character has appeared and made a face. This is a dense block of filmmaking, by any measure.

Next: ‘All you want is for me to hate’

Part 4 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

“Good people will fight if we lead them” – Poe Dameron

It’s not exactly ‘Once more unto the breach‘, is it? This is a scene that is very much of a type that will be reoccurring through this film, that I think is fairly described as ‘a pot of plot glue’. The bigger, more well-defined sequences in the film which we can identify by their locations (Pasanna, Kojimi, Exegol, Death Star ruins, Star Destroyer, Boolio’s Crystal Palace) are held together by a run of scenes like this, almost all of which take place at the aforementioned rebel forest jungle base. In these scenes a short monologue or back-and-forth will seamlessly sweep into a montage of people running around a bit, that explains how what we just saw is going to be replaced with what we’re about to see.

In this case, Poe is papering over how the Death Star ruins sequence (and its weird little coda on Luke Island) are going to connect to the Exegol climax. He’s also trying to codify the internal justification for “The Resistance” as a movement and failing quite badly, missing “Bolshevik vanguard” and landing on “Bourbon Restoration” instead, the gift of leadership being bestowed on the masses by a God-given few.

Something I talked about a lot when watching Andor was the ability to depict a bureaucracy or a chain of command making decisions and executing them. For whatever reason, much modern media either fails at or just plain isn’t interested in depicting anything other than heroic individualism. Rise of Skywalker is certainly no exception – there is no desire to depict the Resistance engaging in any kind of coordinated resistance, so they instead give the impression of being a bunch of friends on a camping trip who happen to own X-Wings rather than anything approximating a fighting force. We never see a meaningful difference in rank or standing, or even some old cliche about being a loose cannon and defying the chain of command. Poe appears to take command by consensus – or less charitably, by virtue of being the protagonist.

Another recurring element of these scenes is the large, choreographed sweeping camera movements. In the (excellent) Empire Wreckers video about Rise of Skywalker it’s posited that there are so many of these shots in here because of the accelerated pace at which the movie was put together, the long takes somewhat counterintuitively burning up runtime – allowing more of the film to be made with a given setup. It seems quite an intense way to be thinking about making a motion picture! This one isn’t the worst of them but it’s still bad, the hard limit on the number of extras available combined with the desire for this to be a grand, sweeping image of motion means that what we actually get is a shot of a bunch of mostly individual people running around in all different directions like they’re doing an improv warm-up. It definitely doesn’t convey urgency.

But my oh my, who’s that handsome stranger in the middle of this looking appraisingly around the corridors of the Falcon?

Next: Rey fly-tips a lightsaber

Part 3 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

One of the many ways in which this film feels like more of an anthology than a single narrative is the approach taken to the force and force powers: individual scenes (including this one) are internally coherent, but the overall picture is extremely flexible. For instance, in Scene 14 we will see Rey casually levitating in the fashion of an air-bender. Later on still in Scene 28, she will be doing some free solo climbing with all the tense short jumps and leaps that implies. Neither scene is particularly coherent with either the original trilogy, where Luke never flew, or the prequel trilogy, where fully-fledged Jedi could leap great distances in a single bound. Here we have another incongrous introduction, the force telephone, with a visually striking cross cut back and forth between Kylo and Rey as they establish the bones of their relationship in this film. Not in what they say, because this is not a writer’s film by any measure, but in how they interact – which is to say the quality of the acting.

It’s nice – after so many years of playing these characters, Driver and Ridley have an effortless comfort with the parts that will serve to gloss over large amounts of indecision in the scripting over exactly what their relationship is. They might be furious rivals, they might be starcrossed lovers, they might be both. It’s not a tension the film cares enough about to resolve, but the ability of the actors to express that ambiguity places most of their scenes on a higher level than everything else.

Continuing with the theme of anthology vs single narrative, the gang have landed on Tatooine Jakku Jedha Pasaana, where they bump into – who else – that old rogue Lando Calrissian! He’s talking a bunch of nonsense about Sith do-hicks. He’s mentioning Exegol. He’s been hanging out with Luke. He’s apparently been here on the desert planet, on pause, since the conclusion of that adventure. Which was presumably before Luke went into exile. As we said back in Scene 1 – this is not a film which is going to sweat the facts. I don’t think anyone even mentions that Luke founded a Jedi school, totally screwed it up, then went to live on an island for a decade or whatever. Maybe it’s like the Obi-wan show, he was technically ‘in exile’ but in reality he was finding an excuse every five days to go on “one last” adventure with Lando.

Next: The rousing words of Poe Dameron

Part 2 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Demonstrating the power of this fully armed and operational randomiser, we are thrown from the start of the film to the very end. It’s a good scene to get out of the way here though, because it’s entirely disposable but it gives us an introduction to near every major character appearing in this film: Poe, Finn, Rey, Chewie, C3P0, BB-8, the nerd, the slug, fan favourite returning champion Maz Kanata, someone named Jannah, Zam Wesell Zori Bliss, miscellaneous other droids, and of course Lando Calrissian himself: the great Billy Dee Williams. Collectively they are team ‘good guy’ and they’ll be operating out of this forest-jungle positioned at the exact midpoint of Yavin and Endor for most of the film.

Something the film never quite manages to convey properly as an image is that they’re working in and around the good old Tantive-IV of A New Hope fame. Because the Tantive-IV is not particularly notable in its details, owing to how it was created by ILM as a kitbash model, there’s no real moment of recognition from seeing odd corners of it. Rather than a recognisable (if slightly aged) point of reference, it ends up working more like the generic sets TV shows used to use in studios; like they’re moving around four or five large white boxes to give the impression of a larger space. Plot-wise, it contributes to the sense that this is a Resistance that is working out of a suitcase, but really it’s the entire film production – some of the toughest material in the film will be set here, in among these anonymous fronds where all the actors listed above will be rattling off lines at an unruly pace as they attempt to keep the plot coherent scene-to-scene.

As a parallel to the celebration ending of Return of the Jedi this is oddly curtailed, a whistle-stop tour of all our favourites being just about happy. John Boyega is a great actor, but he is tasked with delivering a superhuman number of slightly ambivalent smiles here. Still, Poe and Finn get to share a platonic, non-suggestive reunion. Which is nice.

Fan favourite character Maz Kanata, who is one of several characters who are going to be doing a lot of odd proxy behaviour for an absent Leia, gives Chewie a medal. It’s an odd acoutrement for a character who doesn’t wear clothes. Perhaps he can put it on the wall of his parents’ house.

Much like the extended universe novels, Rise of Skywalker knows there’s one decision that will improve any situation and that’s to hit the “Also, Lando’s there” button, so he makes his first (non-chronological) appearance right here, sharing a curiously loaded scene with Naomi Ackie’s Jannah, a new character for this film of whom I know nothing. Fortunately I can simply turn to Google to find out what’s going on here:

Phew.

Next: Kylo calls Rey on the force telephone