Part 13 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Moreso even than some of the infamous big hitters like ‘Somehow, Palpatine returned’, this is the scene that had me wondering what on Earth went wrong here. Rise of Skywalker is a constant curiosity, for sure, and there’s strange gilts to every crease and edge. Nowhere else is it this poorly made. The setup, like many set piece sequences in this film we have discussed, is a riff on a Lucas original: specifically breaking Leia out of the Death Star in A New Hope. The gang land in a hangar bay, ambush some Stormtroopers, and are setting off to break out a prisoner when the most sage one of the group feels a psychic tremor that they simply must go investigate, separating them from the group.

It looks awful. The high-definition glossy sets are lit with garish colours, giving the ship the feel of a laser tag arena. The camera is in full long-shot swoop mode, which might help the action feel smooth if the blocking weren’t so awkward and stilted: ‘Cameras!’ shouts Rey, letting loose a shot. We wait; the camera moves just long enough for you to reflect that at least one camera is getting a good long look at Poe; he too shoots. If you watch a classic TV sci-fi like Red Dwarf, one of the tricks they pull is cutting shots of the same sets together from different angles to create the illusion of a larger, coherent spaceship than the five square meters of painted chipboard they had access to. Here we have the opposite problem: the set they’re running around on is huge, looks like a million dollars, and yet somehow feels tiny and incoherent because we see all of it in these long tracking shots and it doesn’t suggest anything. It literally is a bunch of corridors that don’t go anywhere.

I guess it’s important to note that if it weren’t for the actors, none of this would be working in the slightest. John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Daisy Ridley are all genuinely talented and have good chemistry with each other – Boyega’s cry of anguish when Poe gets shot is perfect. They’re reading their characters out in basic physical movements, Poe with his over-tense look down the barrel, Boyega with his swift and precise movements, and Ridley’s calm, confident pacing. But everything else is thoroughly half-assed: Stormtroopers gamely limping up an inexplicable ramp in a sad, meandering march.

There’s a momentary interlude with Kylo and his guys down on Planet Holiday Special which does nothing. After Poe and Finn get captured, their scene closes out with the shock reveal of Stormtrooper-with-Female-Voice – truly we have broken through every ceiling. And we get just a little snippet of Rey in Ren’s trophy room, gazing with intense equanimity at Vader’s frazzled helmet as the Imperial March drones in the background. What does Vader (a conspicuous absence in this film where Kylo Ren most closely mimics his character) mean to Rey, the woman who will so proudly adopt his name? We never find out.

Next: Large Semi-Humanoid Slug Man

Part 12 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

The randomiser format serves up a number of most serendipitous moments but this one might be the best, placing the utterly incoherent section of Scene 11 with Finn and Jannah where the “just a feeling” motif is introduced immediately before this scene which pays it off: Faced with a highly telegraphed Resistance attack on the sole point of interest at ground level on Exegol, the First Order quickly decides to use a different radio tower. At which point Finn serenely announces that the force has told him where the plot needs them to go – ‘just a feeling.’

We then do the rightly maligned cavalry charge on the upper surface of a Star Destroyer. Aware that I’m putting my tactical realism hat on, but this theoretically striking visual concept has one or two practical issues:

• The utility value of landing people on the hull of a spaceship, even one in atmosphere, seems pretty low.
• There are Stormtroopers (in a very fetching red) landing on the surface of the ship to meet the Resistance charge within seconds, meaning any element of surprise evaporates.
• The horses are primarily used for mobility – the cavalry charge never smashes a line of Stormtroopers or anything, and the Resistance members all engage at range so it’s unclear what the advantage of closing that distance on horseback was vs just landing there in the first place.
• There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a Star Destroyer has to remain upright to enable fighting on the upper surface with relation to the ground. In fact, free three-dimensional movement is a defining feature of a spacecraft.
• The horses are used because speeders would be ‘jammed’, something we have never seen happen.
• They brought BB-8 along, who sucks.

Rise of Skywalker has lots of big-image filmmaking, and to be fair lots of it works. The horses kinda don’t, but alongside them we do get Rey encountering the Sith throne for the first time, with the reveal shots for the associated Sith hordes and Palpatine’s collection of strobing light fixtures. It’s a very cool visual, like something out of an maximalist anime adaptation of Return of the Jedi.

Thankfully the “It’s not a navy!” guy gets a second line after all: “They’ve landed a troop carrier”. Congratulations to Geff Francis who played the Porter in The Singing Detective, more than enough acting credit to save him from any embarassment that Rise of Skywalker could possibly bring.

Next: Princess Chewie’s on this station!

Part 11 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

We’ve reached my favourite part of Rise of Skywalker by some distance, Rey’s impulse decision to do some extreme sports boating. It works perfectly. No notes. The ‘skimmer’ looks incredible with its weird asymmetric design, Rey is piloting it by flinging herself round the controls like it’s the TARDIS, Finn and Poe are pissed off at her for no perceivable reason other than that they wish they’d had the idea themselves. They’re all on the beautifully coarse hills of a planet that looks like the Chilterns, which is where the Death Star apparently beached itself some time after events on the Forest moon.

Naomi Ackie’s female counterpart to Finn, Jannah, gets her character-insight scene here, giving us a thoroughly implausible depiction of the dynamics of mutiny. It apparently occurs as a sort of shared rapture that spontaneously occurs when the cause is good and true, rather than being something which requires any kind of organisation or planning. “We laid our weapons down” Ackie proudly announces. She doesn’t expand on what happened next, so we’re forced to assume that the First Order went “Oh, fiddlesticks” and took their Star Destroyer home.

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Is this a good time to talk about how diverse the First Order is? It’s really diverse. In fact that diversity is one of the defining characteristics of the First Order versus Palpatine’s Galactic Empire, which was all white British guys doing received pronunciation. First and foremost we can assume that Disney really wanted both Resistance and First Order to be viable play-styles at their defunct LARP hotel, and not in a way that involved slurs. That much is apparent in the overall construction of the First Order: that it’s really designed around supporting viable theme park attractions. We already know Jedi are trained as younglings, but now we have a corresponding path for plucky kids to be ‘selected’ by the First Order, get to try out a plastic helmet and a space laser while interacting with a mean space-Sergeant, then participate in a spontaneous escape back to their parents and the next ride.

There’s also the even more cynical angle, which is that by making both the Resistance and the First Order the epitome of late-2010s Hollywood diverse, we shunt the series one notch further away from the feared and hated ‘politics’. Does making your villains less racist make it easier to sell your film to racists?

Really can’t overstate how much I laughed at Rey suddenly being on a boat.

Next: Horsin’ Around

Part 10 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

More boring than you’d think a big effects sequence of thousands of ships arriving from light speed and being obliterated by a giant lightning storm could be.

Former spice runner Poe Dameron is a General in the Resistance army. Also Leia is a general, Han is a general, Lando, Luke, Finn and Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead are generals. There are so many generals in the Rebellion and Resistance armies! Poe suffers a lot from being a perspective character, particularly here in the Exegol sequence at the climax of the film. Finn, Rey and Kylo Ren all get things to do while he’s stuck narrating events from his extremely cramped-looking X-Wing. Other than his being a very Rogue Squadron kind of fly-boy, it’s unclear why he’s attempting to command this battle from the cockpit of a very explodable star fighter rather than at least a ship with a flight deck, if not a bridge. Oscar Isaac is a fine actor but it’s a struggle to do this much work purely through facial emoting, particularly while wearing a silly hat.

Anyway Lando’s here! Hurrah. He’s brought an aged Wedge with him, a cameo that is utterly befuddling unless you recognise Denis Lawson off-hand forty years after he was last in a Star Wars film. He’s also brought a vast flotilla of private craft and they are going to engage the unbelievably phallic Final Order ships en masse and win a victory against metaphor all round. Poe is understandably very relieved.

Pour a drink out for the member of the Final Order who gets their only speaking line here and has to spend it saying “It’s not a navy sir, it’s just people” which is a strong contender for the single worst line in all of Star Wars. The movies at least, it’s not as bad as some of those stinkers from Shadows of the Empire.

We get a little bit more Sheev too, I think this is the only scene where you can check out his incredible red undershirt and matching belt buckle. For a walking corpse who only just stepped off the robot arm, he’s dressed like Danny John Jules in Red Dwarf. Him throwing Kylo Ren down a hole as payback for Vader doing it to him is extremely funny. He then does Big Lightning, which looks cool but has no practical effect on anything.

Next: The year is 35 ABY. Oceans are now battlefields.