Part 8 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
In some ways Rise of Skywalker feels like the last round in a fight between two ways of making a new Star Wars film: one approach being what you might term a soft reboot, with a new cast of characters taking up the mantle and having a new story that connects to the old one but doesn’t necessarily continue it – consider Blade Runner 2049 or Ghostbusters (2016). The other is the model that became dominant in pop cinema over the period in which the sequel trilogy were released, that of the ‘legacy sequel’ where the old characters (and actors) are dragged out for one last go round – such as Jurassic World: Dominion or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. In Rise of Skywalker the story of Rey, Kylo, Poe and Finn is competing for screen time with what you’d have to generously term a send-off for Luke, Leia and Han (two of whom make appearances despite being fictitiously dead and the other despite being actually dead).
If Scene 6 was the throne room fight from Return of the Jedi, this is Luke fighting Vader in Empire Strikes Back, given all the wow and pizazz of the mid-2010s blockbuster. It’s got all the elements – a slow, tense confrontation. A revelation about lineage. A fraught escape (although the creators of Rise of Skywalker have left off the ambiguity over whether or not Luke expected to be rescued when he threw himself down that shaft). As with the Sheev throne room scene, this is the model for some of Rise of Skywalker‘s best assets: taking a sequence from the original trilogy and rendering it anew with the aesthetics of a modern blockbuster. In this way it’s not dissimilar to something like SC 38 Reimagined, or more charitably Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes.
Taken seriously, this could be a third approach to making new Star Wars that isn’t either of those described above: literally remaking it, treating Star Wars as a stock text to reinterpret and reinterpolate, with new actors taking on the old roles. All the old complaining about The Force Awakens being too similar to A New Hope aside, this could be a creatively interesting way of doing things, and it would be thematically appropriate to the big story of Star Wars: making special-er and special-er editions. Go full pop and have Wes Anderson do a few scenes.
It’s perhaps unlikely that Disney will take on this mantle, and maybe a Star Wars film that was an anthology of creative reinterpretations of individual scenes wouldn’t be all that successful. But while Rise of Skywalker is largely nonsensical both as a single narrative or as the climax of a trilogy that includes The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, understood as a sort of fan writing – a studied reinterpretation – it’s often enjoyable. If nothing else, I’m certain George Lucas would have enjoyed the visual of the Millenium Falcon‘s exhaust blowing all the stormtroopers down while Kylo Ren remains upright.