Part 37 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
It’s starting to feel like I’m trapped in a hall of mirrors: is this the first time Palpatine is explaining his plan to Rey? Surely that has already happened, once if not twice. She has come to him; they are kin; she’s going to strike him down and take his place in a literalised re-staging of Return of the Jedi. She won’t do it: she has the force of the Jedi behind her. He has the power of the Sith. The battle between the largely impersonal Resistance and the totally impersonal Final Order fleet rages in the skies above them. This is some kind of purgatory – the purgatory that Palpatine fell into after being thrown down that pit perhaps, a purgatory where the cycle of Star Wars episodes never ends and each victory is dissolved into the next failure. Luke becoming more and more self-satisfied with each loop, Leia more abstract. Lando more present.
There’s a part in Shadows of the Empire (sorry) where Palpatine thinks about picking out his favourite throne to sit on, the one that sits a meter higher than the rest of the room. That must be this throne, a great spiky monstrosity with more than a touch of Game of Thrones about it. As we noted in Scene 33, Rise of Skywalker pitches itself as Star-Wars-as-horror, the gleaming sci-fi aesthetic of evil here given way entirely to an aesthetic that looks like if The Pit and the Pendulum was given the lighting designer from a Prodigy set. Ian McDiarmid has never looked so viscerally unpleasant as he does hanging off that great dangling arm, death’s grin on his face as he assures Rey that everything is going according to plan.
Of course you can’t remove aesthetic from content, and what’s gained in the thrill of making this a monster mash is lost in the part where this is nominally a story about Empire, but let’s be honest: this movie isn’t even slightly about Empire. It has no idea what Empire is. Even the real Star Wars Holiday Special knew you had to show an actual crying Wookie to drive home that this system produces huge dickheads. Here, although we see people doing Holiday Special nonsense, going door to door looking for fugitives, they don’t do anything specific. And then they blow up the whole planet, because as an organisation they’ve decided they love blowing up planets. Where in Revenge of the Sith we had a great Republic senate cheering for autocracy, here we have an arena full of cloaked nothing characters in the same role. You don’t have to think Star Wars is a great satire to recognise that something has been lost here in terms of ambition.