Part 25 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
We’ve already seen how Han is crammed back into proceedings as a memory – admittedly to quite strong effect – and stock footage of Leia has been blasted into the film with a shotgun. We now get to the main course, so to speak. “The dead speak!” cries the title crawl, and for this movie it’s an appropriate motif. It stands to reason that the third member of that original trifecta must have a part to play, death notwithstanding, and it’s here that we get a lengthy scene of Rey and (the ghost of) Luke Skywalker. The visual of Rey hurling bones at a burning TIE Fighter is a strong start, but sadly also an early peak. The root of the problem is that Mark Hamill is just too pleased by far to be revisiting the character and it’s making him tedious to watch, the simple confidence of Luke Skywalker replaced by a hectoring, smarmy oaf all too pleased to rattle off banal nonsense like “Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi”. Guess that’s what Yoda was doing in that hut on Dagobah, ‘confronting fear’.
In with this we get a curiously out-of-place flashback, of all things, with computer generated young Luke training computer generated young Leia in the Jedi arts. The models used have a little bit of The Polar Express about them and the faces get a shock reveal to really heighten the uncanny effect. It’s a real injection of madness that I don’t think quite rescues the scene as a whole (the worst excess of which is yet to come) but saves it from being a total wash. The main outcome is Luke giving a second lightsaber to Rey, someone he knows for a fact already has a lightsaber because he just stopped her burning it. Well, maybe it will come in handy later on.
There’s an odd set of symmetries here that don’t quite resolve into anything meaningful: Rey arrives in Kylo Ren’s TIE and leaves in Luke’s X-Wing. Rey throws Luke’s lightsaber into the fire and finds Leia’s lightsaber in a wall. Kylo Ren crushed Rey’s wayfinder on the Death Star ruins but she pulls his from the wreckage of the TIE. Luke tried to kill Kylo and fled to the island and Rey healed Kylo and fled to the island. Han’s ghost inspires Kylo to turn good and Luke’s ghost inspires Rey to continue the plot. Someone was trying to make a film that was about something here, but all we have is torn up patterns in the sand. And two lightsabers.
Also tagged in here just before the business with Luke is an abominable Resistance base scene, with Finn and Poe exercising their considerable combined charisma to try and make you forget that “we found the information in a droid” isn’t really an acceptable plot point – not that it matters because Rey immediately gets on the regular telephone to give them the same information. The more of these we get the more I start to suspect that every single one of the jungle resistance base scenes are late-in-the-day reshoots designed to paper over gaps in the plot produced by other cuts.