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.