Part 23 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

It’s simple stuff, to be honest – they’re star-crossed lovers, fates inexorably tangled. They’ve defeated the great evil but at huge personal cost and one lies dead in the other’s arms. They make a quick choice. The deal is done. A life for a life, with just long enough to share a single kiss before their fates are reversed. Driver and Ridley are in their element here, mucking around on the floor like it’s a black box theatre room. As with all the other instances, I’m a big fan of this. Could do without Kylo Ren’s already slightly bathetic fade away smash cutting to Maz Kanata standing over the Leia shroud as it does the same. I believe you should take art as you find it and trust that decisions were made sincerely and with real intent but also whichever editor made that cut belongs in clown school and not the editing bay.

Kylo Ren fading away is an odd one because it doesn’t really read as an act of Jedi transcendence or whatever, despite being paired with Leia disappearing which definitely is. It’s more suggestive that his passing of all his life mana through the force dyad has turned him into a being of pure energy or some such. I don’t know and the film doesn’t particularly care to explain. Obi-wan’s physical form disappearing at the end of his duel with Vader was always a strange quirk of A New Hope. You can’t remove it, because it’s the stinger to “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”, in death Kenobi has very literally escaped Vader’s grasp. Vader is reduced to that very pitiful shot of him poking the empty robe with his boot. Crucially, it’s quickly followed up with Kenobi’s spirit in the force yelling at Luke to make it plain what has happened here – Kylo just exits stage centre. Yoda vanishing feels like an unnecessary coda to his already pretty elongated passing, and Vader didn’t vanish – he still looks pretty substantial on that funeral pyre.

Luke turning to dust on the wind in The Last Jedi is logical enough in context, I guess – his teachers were Obi-wan and Yoda, so he kinda has to follow suit. But Luke is a character who ultimately follows a spiritual path (even if there’s plenty of adventuring along the way). It’s easy enough to read his passing from the mortal plane as a metaphor of transcendence, as with Obi-wan. He escapes Kylo and the First Order like Ben escaped Vader. Leia’s death, however, is much harder to explain. Unable (by virtue of the method used to keep her in the film) to explain what she’s attempting or why, she dies and subsequently vanishes like Leonard Nimoy in the Simpsons, a flat statement that the time for Leia to be occurring is over now.

As well as all this we get a facsimile of the parts of the celebration from Return of the Jedi we hadn’t already covered: a slightly obsequious montage with Ewoks and Bespin shown with cracked Star Destroyers floating about them. Guess they couldn’t really show a destroyer wrecked over Kojimi. As a scene overall though I’m forced to give this a cruel two thumbs down. You might think this is a harsh judgement on a fairly inoffensive bit of melodrama but cut away from my Adam Driver/Daisy Ridley scene to Maz Kanata again and I will fucking kill you.

Next: log.exe

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