Part 7 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
The load-bearing part of this scene is also the shortest – the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it recap of the relevant events of the previous movies as Kylo Ren attempts to call Rey on the force telephone. This the closest this film ever comes to a hard dependency on its predecessors, incorporating flashes of Han Solo’s death from The Force Awakens in amongst the images of Rey sitting on a cool evil throne and that sort of thing. Like everything else in Rise of Skywalker, this crucial context is blasted through at high speed.
Otherwise this is a dumping ground for otherwise useless footage: Rey performs a training montage which seems built around the idea that she’s going to find wielding a lightsaber hard work, given her affinity for a good solid staff, but the idea is never returned to. I do feel like ‘crossing a rope bridge’ would be an occasion where I personally would not want a lightsaber involved, connection to the universal force or no. Her red-eyed training droid seems particularly aggressive as if it may be going rogue, but once she smashes it the question never comes up. Hope they aren’t expensive.
Meanwhile Kylo is ringing Rey on the force telephone again, but we can’t really know that from this scene – only that he’s mildly distracting her from afar. And to do so, he’s either defrosting Vader’s helmet or he’s just baked it in an oven – either way he’s rightly wearing gloves to touch it – but there’s no connection between Vader and Rey so it’s unclear how one is aiding in sending visions to the other. I think we just needed to see that he’s got the thing because it’s used in an action sequence later. I will say here that something that is done well throughout this film is the contrast between the sterile, glossy, all-white interiors of the First Order sets versus the various alien planets (even if the planets themselves are a little derivative). It makes the smash cuts back and forth between Rey and Ren very effective.