Part 17 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

“This weapon is your life!”

Obi-wan Kenobi (Attack of the Clones)

“This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”

Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)

“Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”

Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)

“Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”

Sheev Palpatine (Return of the Jedi)

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

Luke Skywalker (Return of the Jedi)

“A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect.”

Luke Skywalker (Rise of Skywalker)

“You want to kill me. That is what I want. Kill me, and my spirit will pass into you. As all the Sith live in me you will be Empress. We will be one.”

Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)

“The ritual begins! She will strike me down and pledge herself as a Sith! She will draw her weapon, she will come to me, she will take her revenge… and with a stroke of her saber the Sith are reborn! The Jedi are dead!”

Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)

Sadly Old Sheev never considered – what if two lightsabers?

It feels like a churlish complaint given how utterly shameless the film is about this, but it’s impossible to escape from: Palpatine wants Rey to strike him down (just like Luke didn’t.) After some to-ing and fro-ing and a big column of lightning, ultimately: she does. Does that mean he won? There’s not even the hint of a notion here to suggest why this method of exploding the old man is preferable to any other. Rey just cracks out second lightsaber and lets him have it.

Aside from absolutely anything else, this feels like a chronically insubstantial way to see off a villain who not only started the film by having escaped his certain fate from Return of the Jedi but also just described how doing this will mean he wins. Palpatine’s second return isn’t so much an option as a necessity. Hunting down the Emperor’s clones must be the entire purpose of the New Republic once they find out what happened here. Begun, the clone wars have!

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Felt a bit sad at the obliteration of the hooded Sith masses, given we never saw them do anything more than chant and operate the big machine that makes Snokes. Give me their story! Anyway, after the wax chancellor has been melted down in a VFX extravaganza we get the contemporaneous destruction of the Sith fleet, and shed a tear for Richard E. Grant who never saw or spoke to a single member of the Resistance prior to being blown out of his front window by them. Also, Lando’s here! And Kylo Ren emerges wordlessly from a pit.

Next: Somehow, Palpatine returned.

Part 16 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’

Kylo Ren has his helmet fixed
Those are the Knights of Ren
There’s a spy among the First Order
No honour in this villain’s den.

Lord Vader had a big black hat
It helped to fix his voice
Kylo Ren just sounds like that
It must be a conscious choice.

In the first two films we all found out
Luke failed to found a school
Disavowed by all, a lonely man
Because he lost his cool.

So Kylo went to old man Snoke,
Who promised him fame and glory
Together they ran the First Order
But that’s a different story.

This time Kylo’s just Vader
His flaws are a perfect fit
And that’s why he’s got his helmet back
Even though it looks quite bad on screen.

The subtitles say that Stormtrooper is calling the Knights of Ren ‘Ghouls’ but I’m pretty sure he’s saying ‘Goals’. Normally I would have much affection for the First Order officer who says an unprompted “I like it” but it’s all a bit self-aware. Not buying it. And commiserations to Commander Not-sure-about-this-one-sir who ends up the victim of this turbo-charged version of Vader’s Death Star conference. RIP, I thought you were making a good point. Bonus points awarded for throwing the head of a totally unknown-to-me character onto a table as a way of starting a meeting. Hello Boolio!

♞ Knights of Ren status: 🐵 Ape-reciative

Next: Exeunt Sheev.

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.”