Part 15 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

I made the randomiser using a list of scene timings extracted from the Blu-ray edition of The Rise of Skywalker, but I don’t know how accurate they are or if I’m matching them to the video file correctly. It’s been a long time since I used scene selection on a physical player, so it’s unclear to me how exact to scene transitions they should be, or if it’s common – as here – to catch just the end of a previous scene before rolling into the one selected. In any event, whether by chance or by choice, this one works perfectly.

We’re thrown halfway into a scene between returning champion Han Solo and his wayward son. All we get are the words “Dad?” and “I know.” Kylo Ren looks down at his laser sword, suddenly rendered a cheap toy with a battery line running down the side of it. He throws it into the sea. Solo is gone. Kylo looks downward. Wipe cut. This is so good that I cannot imagine it’ll be improved by whatever the first half of this scene is.

Adam Driver is making Kylo Ren work as a character in this film by force of will alone, it seems, and his enthusiasm is contagious – Harrison Ford is not shy of half-assing an appearance in a legacy sequel by any means, but he’s good here. The urge to make Ford into a force ghost has been resisted with a level of aesthetic judgement not exercised anywhere else in the film. The setting is dramatic but understated, there’s water dripping off everything (except the ghost) and Kylo Ren looks distraught.

This isn’t a writer’s film, surely due to the condensed production chaos resulting in a script that veers off in a new direction every five minutes. The big writing moments are perfunctory monologues delivered to paper over late transitions between scenes that no longer connect. Obviously this is a total mess. But it can throw up moments like this, where the inability of the characters to have meaningful lines becomes the inability of the characters to speak. It’s not very Star Wars – you couldn’t get this out of Mark Hamill in a month of Sundays, for one. But it’s really good.

Of course though it’s superglued to a bunch of old tat. God knows where the story was meant to go from here originally but all we get are some flash cards: Sheev is on the phone to Richard E. Grant, he says “you come here, btw blow up whichever set we aren’t going back to”, we get the completed VFX work for the destruction of Planet Holiday Special and then we get Poe and the gang hearing about it on the radio. Surprise! Leia’s dead. Double surprise! Lando’s here to deliver her lines instead.

Next: A close-up of computer-generated monkey teeth.

Part 14 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

If nothing else came of it, the randomiser would be fully justified for giving me this totally contextless set of clips of the Millenium Falcon in flight, wherein Poe repeatedly slams the hyperdrive between a series of curiously vertical but extremely crisp panoramas. They’re visually complex, hard to parse, at one point there are two Falcons for some reason. Only at the climax of this chaos do we see that there is a large semi-humanoid slug man standing in the cockpit as part of the crew. Words fail me.

As an opening set-piece I do think light-speed skipping works quite well: it’s striking and memorable, and people in a space cockpit slamming levels and hitting buttons is a big part of what Star Wars is all about. The only bum note here is the final swerve past the giant worm monster, which is a bit too similar to the space worm sequence in Empire Strikes Back for my liking and doesn’t match the rest of the sequence for conceptual grandiosity. But the whoosing, the yelling, the unexpected slug man: that’s all pretty damn good in my opinion.

Meanwhile, the training we saw Rey finish back in Scene 7 starts here with Rey achieving the dream of unpowered personal flight, an ability that will not be coming up again in this movie. We also see a very unwise lightsaber jog. Rey has the first of a string of conversations various characters have with Leia, wherein Leia says short, curiously generic things and Rey as the interlocutor is forced into some very unwieldy phrase construction:

Leia: Rey. Be patient.
Rey: I’m starting to think it isn’t possible to hear voices of the Jedi who came before.
Leia: Nothing’s impossible.
Rey: Nothing’s impossible. I’m gonna run the training course.

This is of course related to Carrie Fisher’s sad death between The Last Jedi and the shooting of this film, and the decision to have her still feature as a character using footage shot for The Force Awakens but unused. It is fair to say I am not a fan of this. Acting in cinema is the product of an actor at work, not merely the product of a particular face on screen, and while presumably the intent was some form of respect or tribute or something, it’s slightly perverse to take the death of a major participant in your movie as a technical challenge to overcome like this.

Next: “Dad?” “I know.”

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!