Conclusion

For any reader unaware, in 2021 I released an essay titled Sixteen attempts to talk to you about Suicide Squad in which I picked apart that film, the decisions made which resulted in the end product, and how I gradually came to love it through understanding it. In many ways, Rise of Skywalker is another Suicide Squad, a film that is less than the sum of its parts, but one where within those parts are little pearls of quality, little markers of the great effort that went into building it. In another way the films are very different: Suicide Squad was about so many things that it felt like there was a kaleidoscope of ideas in competition for every scene. Rise of Skywalker does not have that.

It’s not a film with anything to say about family, other than to avoid having an evil wizard for a grandparent. It’s not a film with anything to say about camaraderie, other than that if you save someone’s life they may return the favour. What does it have to say about leadership? About calcified power structures or the people who serve them? Nothing, more or less. The original Star Wars trilogy was not the most sophisticated story ever told, but it made its point at the climax of Return of the Jedi regardless: the hero discarding his weapon and turning the other cheek, a bagatelle of radicalism in the hero’s journey. Rise of Skywalker is not a film with a concealed radicalism. You can justify each and every decision that was made, but at the end of the day it’s more interested in puppeteering Leia about to make sure she gets her due than it is in anything Finn or Poe or really even Rey does. If it’s about anything, it’s about retreating into the known. About choking back any interesting decision for fear you won’t be able to withdraw it.

In short, this is an unlikeable film. But the flame still burns. By thinning out the plot to nothing, by removing the ability for themes to emerge over time, we can more readily discover the parts within the whole. And while they don’t cohere, they don’t build into anything more, there is something to love. Talented actors in the prime of their careers spinning rushed-off material into gold. Unimaginable amounts of money spent on turning vast concept art into physical spaces. Laser swords. It’s something.

I don’t think they could have ever made a satisfying Episode 9. I don’t think the project of making a sequel trilogy is really coherent – the original six films already contain the last word on anything tried in Episodes 7 or 8. Trying to come up with one film that would stitch all of that together was and remains a doomed endeavour. I don’t think you can watch a scene from The Last Jedi and then watch a scene from Attack of the Clones and really feel like they’re in dialogue in any way. So maybe it’s better this way. A total burnout rather than a fizzle, Star Wars going out with an explosion of cool imagery without trying to be the last word on how Luke, Leia, Anakin and Rey Palpatine all form a unit.

Or maybe not. I never wanted to watch the Disney sequels, although the other works have been of varying levels of interesting to me. I watched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi out of mild curiosity and received very little for the effort, outside of recognising that Rian Johnson wanted everyone to know how much he loved classic sci-fi. But with Rise of Skywalker I think with the full context now I regret watching it. It was better to remember Star Wars as something that drifted away from me, rather than as something that ended poorly. Hearing all the silly little things that happen in the film was better than experiencing them first hand, and the good things I found by watching were thin soup versus what I’d have gotten from a scene from The Creator, or a scene from Rebel Moon, or a scene from Avatar: Fire and Ash, or a scene from The Acolyte. Ultimately I watched Rise of Skywalker because it was the thrilling conclusion of the ‘Skywalker Saga’, and I got exactly what I deserved.

Fin(n)

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

Wow, Chewie’s hair looks great here.

All Star Wars has to end with a celebration, it seems. Much like the rest of Rise of Skywalker, this is both impossible to explain and yet also somehow a perfect individual piece of nonsense. Finn, Poe, Rey, Chewie, BB-8 and C3P0 have arrived at the planet where they’re hoping to find Ochi of Bestoon. I don’t remember why they think they need to find Ochi. They want the guy to get the thing to get the thing to go through the cloud to get to the place. On arrival, they are surprised to find that a famous festival is taking place. We are then treated to a bizarre, haunting scene of the gang meandering through the large but socially distanced crowd, discussing how every tent post or hanging sheet might conceal a copse of Stormtroopers. Finally we see Rey traumatised by the sight of some horrible little alien children. One of them speaks directly to her worst fear, tormenting her over her lack of family connections. Rey steps away and the hot insanity of day-time flips into a slow-motion night as Kylo Ren calls her on the force telephone, as we say all the way back in Scene 3. It’s haunting, it’s really oddly haunting, and it’s a perfect setup for the magical realism of the force telephone scene, lines between realities becoming blurry and permeable.

And yet obviously this is an awful scene. It’s a Fortnite dance party on the big screen. They should have played the Emperor’s message to the galaxy over this. How were the gang surprised by a festival they must have flown over? How are the First Order going to hide in such a sparse, open crowd? Why is Rey terrified of alien children? Why is that child asking her such invasive questions? Surely she can’t be the first visitor to lack a surname? Is the child trying to pull a scam? Why does the force telephone make it night-time? Are we supposed to think Rey has lost those hours in a trance? And of course nothing that happens here has any effect beyond the immediate setup of the next scene. They don’t find Ochi or his dagger by investigating, or even by bumping into Lando. They steal speeders and escape, pursued, before stumbling on it by accident. Maddening.

And that’s The Rise of Skywalker in miniature, isn’t it? All the awful, all the good. A film that is chronically less than the sum of its parts, which often can’t even get the parts to be basically coherent. But the parts themselves? Some of them are pretty entertaining. And as the ending taught us all, it’s okay to hate if you possess the power of two lightsabers.

Next: Conclusion

Part 42 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s unusually bleak for a Star Wars movie to posit that a major plot character was just walking back to their ship at some unknown point in the past, fell through quicksand into the lair of a large worm and just got eaten. Thus falls however the fate of Ochi of Bestoon, the bug-eyed Sith assassin with a Sith hood ornament on his beast of a car and a surprising amount of compromising material engraved on his fancy dagger.

He doesn’t even get to be the star of his big scene though, losing out in the goofy alien stakes to a big sock-puppet worm who appears fearsome, but can be reached through Rey’s tender yet firm care. His injury healed, the worm slides aside like a block puzzle to reveal the exit from the sand trap. I hope you were paying close attention, because that scene was the closest Rise of Skywalker gets to successfully deploying subtext. The worm, you see, is like Kylo Ren: threatening, a killer even, but ultimately reachable through compassion and care. Maybe somewhere off-screen, the worm’s mother passed on into the force while Maz Kanata watched.

It’s notable because there are so many themes that Rise of Skywalker threatens to invoke before veering away at the last moment: we might have thought about loss, with Chewie and C3P0 and Kylo Ren all getting what are ultimately fake-out death moments. We might have considered friendship, with Rey testing the limits of Finn’s love with her erratic behaviour, but it goes nowhere. Could Kylo Ren be forgiven? What would that look like? We never find out, because he kills all his friends then passes briskly into the force. Even nitty gritty details like Rey appearing much more comfortable throwing a stick than swinging a lightsaber resolve only into the awesome power of two lightsabers. In this very scene, Rey passes the lightsaber to Finn for safe-keeping, much as Luke and Leia both pass one to her at different points in the film. Nothing.

The Last Jedi provoked much feeling by asserting, or trying to assert, that Rey was a protagonist selected by the tides of fate of alone. The major contribution this film makes to Rey’s story is to actively refute that, placing her origin within the outline of an existing character and her redemption¹ in the name of another. It’s an appropriate move for this film, interested as it is in placing Rey parallel to Kylo Ren, who is defined by his failure to live up to his own sparkling lineage. You can choose good or choose evil – that’s as much of a summation of the Star Wars world view as you’ll ever get. But what does it mean to be still fighting the same Star War as your parents and their parents? This just isn’t a film that wants to answer that question. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect it to.

♞ Knights of Ren status: 👁️ Panoramic

Next: These are the exact coordinates

1. Of a kind; she did shoot Chewie after all. ↩︎

Part 41 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Four scenes disguised as one scene here, fired off in quick succession as the movie speeds towards completion. First off the bat: in a cold fury Rey swears to Finn that she will destroy Palpatine for killing her mother and father. This is solid ground – you could bin the rest of the film off and place just this quick exchange before Rey lands on Exegol for the dénouement, without losing too much coherence in Rey’s journey. In fact you’d gain a little bit, as you’d lose all the hints that vengeance isn’t the way, when in the end vengeance kind of is the way. Daisy Ridley’s got good chemistry with John Boyega as ever, their closeness really is something the film takes for granted as it’s given no active development whatsoever, outside of calling on Boyega to yell “Rey!” occasionally.

Secondly we see a very silly little clip of Sheev ringing up Kylo Ren on the force telephone to find out what’s taking him so long. Get Rey killed now! It’s unclear why he wants Rey killed. Later he claims he never wanted Rey killed, so this is a funny way of going about it. I have a strong suspicion that this scene was dubbed in at a late stage, because there’s only two shots in it: one a close-up of Kylo’s motionless helmet and the other a shot of him turning around in an anonymous corridor and walking into a room, giving the slightly humourous impression that he’s had to step out of a meeting to take this call.

Finally the Millenium Falcon crash lands on Planet Death Star Ruins. Or I guess it does, because we don’t see it happen. In a curious bit of absent content, we see the Falcon fly past Jannah – Naomi Ackie on a space horse – then a distant crashing noise, then a smash cut to a wide shot of a spaceship that has already done a great big skid down a muddy slope. What happened to the footage of the crash? What happened to any scenes set inside the spaceship informing us that it was about to crash? I guess we’ll never know. Sometimes it’s like these scenes have been put together at random.

I don’t think I’ve really discussed Jannah: Naomi Ackie plays a capable fighter who is introduced as a Warrior Queen of sorts, leading a troop of horseback riders. The riders may as well be the Knights of Ren for the amount they appear on screen after their introduction, but Jannah herself has an extensive role playing off against Finn in a way you might assume was written originally for Rose Tico before her Youtube channel took off. The worry would be that Jannah is there for Finn to manfully assert his heterosexuality against but thankfully neither of the actors play it like that – Finn in this film only has eyes for Rey and Poe, even if it’s left unrequited.

Finally we have the scene where Rey uses secret markings on the ancient Sith dagger to pinpoint the location of the Sith Wayfinder in the Death Star ruins. It’s magnificently silly, absurd from any angle you look at it. I think you could have cut it entirely if so much of the film wasn’t about the passage of the stupid dagger between various people and places. There’s nothing especially implausible about having Rey just turn up at the ruins without a magic dagger and doing her space parkour (aided, of course, by her ability to fly without external propulsion) until she finds Sheev’s bathroom. Certainly no more so than crash landing on a grassy hillock that’s full of Resistance-friendly nomads who collect spaceship parts and have heard of Babu Frik.

Next: Force Heal