Part 32 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
One of the interesting things about watching this movie in a randomised form is how little the energy of each scene changes. Aside from some minor jolts going to and from specific scenes of Palpatine blasting lightning at the sky or interminable spaceship combat with lasers going blip blip, everything is mostly proceeding at the same pace. Part of what makes that possible is that so many scenes are like this one, what you might call functional scenes – scenes that proceed from point A to point B in a mostly self-contained fashion. It’s rare that anything depends on something than hasn’t happened in the last five minutes.
Consider this scene, where the protagonist gang are reeling from the apparent death of Chewbacca immediately before, find out that C3P0 contains a secret message in his memory banks and decide to go get a shifty droid technician to extract it. You could take a pen to the script of Rise of Skywalker and remove the characters of Luke, Leia, Han and Lando and not have to change a word of this scene. You could remove Sheev and replace him with Snoke, or cut Kylo Ren. The only events this scene depends on are those which happened immediately before it.
It gives the film something of the property of JC Denton’s infamous monotone in Deus Ex – chopping it up generates something very self-similar to the original work. There are surely many films where chopping up the scenes at random would quickly render the whole incoherent. Even something deliberately non-linear like Nolan’s Memento would suffer from a totally arbitrary order. But here, where the individual scenes are so self-reliant, you just don’t lose very much from jumping about.
All that aside, both halves of this are a swing and a miss: Hux’s presentation of Chewie to Richard E. Grant achieves little more than really driving home that Chewie isn’t dead, and thus that the protagonists are being idiots in their subsequent scene where Oscar Isaac really strains his acting muscles to pretend he has an issue with going to Planet Kojimi to get C3P0’s mind wiped. I don’t know if this is all reshoot material, but it’s interesting to note that the set is now dressed in a really half-assed manner with a bunch of fake spider webs and Oscar Isaac has suddenly grown a five-o-clock shadow.
Rise of Skywalker is not sending its best here. ‘For Chewie’ indeed. And look, to really nit pick, how are all these spiders getting into a spaceship anyway?