Introduction
At last the work of generations is complete. The great error is corrected. The day of victory is at hand. The day of revenge. The day of the Sith!
- Emperor Palpatine [Fortnite, 2019]
At the end of 2019 I faced one fateful choice about the path my movie-watching would take for the next six years. Obviously, I chose to go see CATS. The rest is history.
Despite being the anointed finale to all of Star Wars, Rise of Skywalker just didn’t hold any appeal for me, having only begrudgingly and belatedly caught up with The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi well after the dust had settled on those two films. At root, I just wasn’t that interested in seeing the story of Star Wars continued by anyone other than George Lucas, and that had been taken off the table in 2012. So I just didn’t bother. And nothing I heard since about Rise of Skywalker suggested to me that I was wrong. That it’s a mess, that it’s incoherent, that it throws out all everything from the previous movie, and so on. That it’s so bad that it poisoned the entire sequel trilogy, to such an extent that Disney don’t even seem to be able to operate the great beast any more: the only Star Wars movie since has been notable non-sequel era effort The Mandolorian and Grogu, and that flopped anyway.
But over time, hearing this universally negative response starts to form its own attraction – and I’m no stranger to finding love for big franchise movies that get torpedoed by executive interference. Suicide Squad being my white whale, there’s something really fun about trying to reassemble the jigsaw on one of these films that’s obviously come out of the oven not-quite-right. It was inevitable that I was going to watch Rise of Skywalker at some point.
I’m also interested, when I’m writing at least, in the Big Concept. My Suicide Squad essay was built out of a succession of smaller essays that failed to cohere by themselves. I previously looked at the first season of Invincible – a show built around a last-minute twist – starting at the end and working back. Back in 2023, coming away from watching the Obi-wan show and contrasting it with The Phantom Menace, I had the big idea for looking at Rise of Skywalker: what if the film, which many people are happy to describe as being made of events happening almost at random, was literally assembled in a random order?
Video games provide a concept here: the ‘randomiser’, a user-made modification that shuffles some aspect of gameplay to provide a unique challenge. Why couldn’t a movie have a randomiser? A day or so of effort later, the Rise of Skywalker Randomiser was complete. Using scene select timestamps, a script the movie to skip between scenes in a predetermined random order. Rise of Skywalker, rather than merely figuratively having no connection between one scene and the next, really could have scenes occur in a random order.
And then I just never did it. The moment didn’t strike me. I held off on seizing my destiny. Until now! Three years later, I have finally watched Rise of Skywalker in fully random order. And I want to assess it in a format appropriate to the viewing, an essay on each individual scene in the random order which I came to it, for a total of 43 short essays on Rise of Skywalker as well as this introduction and a conclusion post.
It’s going to be fun.