Part 27 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

An extremely brief sliver of movie here, where the cast collectively do a handbrake turn from what was going on at the start of the movie (Boolio, Jedi training) into what will be going on shortly in the film (sand planets, Sith Wayfinders) while delicately navigating how thin the motivation is here – a long time ago Luke was looking for someone somewhere, but stopped – and the need for Leia to somehow engage in the planning of this despite all the issues with Leia’s involvement in any scene that requires her to do more than sagely nod.

Daisy Ridley is working hard to inject energy, energy, energy into this but it just isn’t coming. Of all things, it’s a bit of a riff on Indiana Jones, with the dramatic slamming open of books and need to get on a plane to a remote location now and fast to find a forgotten artifact – but of course Indiana Jones is setting off to places that are exotic in real life. Rey is already an alien, presently on an alien planet. In fact, by travelling to a sand planet she’s actually returning to the exact kind of place we know she grew up in – and that’s before you get to the bait and switch where sandy Pasaana is so un-forbidden and un-forbidding that Lando is already there, hanging out on a bus.

Similarly with the ancient Jedi texts and the Sith Wayfinder (and by extension the Sith dagger that leads you to the Sith Wayfinder): this is Star Wars. Every item here is already from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. It’s not clear as a viewer what the meaning of something being ancient is in this context, what we’re meant to take away from it. The Republic stood for a thousand generations we were told, giving a notion of stability with an undertone of stagnation. That’s the setting of Star Wars: there’s the Republic (before) and the Empire (now).

The sequel movies never managed to establish much of a distinction between the Empire and the First Order as settings; while the First Order was nominally at war with the New Republic nothing ever happened in that setting – it’s all the Resistance, which is effectively the same as the Rebellion. It’s the flip side of the Old Republic and High Republic settings both collapsing without too much trouble into the tropes of the prequels: to make something that was decidedly not Republic or Empire you’d have to go so far that what you were making might not read as Star Wars, and that’s scary if you’ve just paid billions of dollars for the right to make Star Wars.

And without wishing to press the point too hard, the need to go back to Leia is stretched to the breaking point here. Every technique is brought out to try and make her function in these fast-paced dialogues: pregnant silences, vague aphorisms, Maz Kanata reading her lines instead. It’s awful. End it now.

Next: Extreme boating 2: Return of the skimmer

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.