Part 14 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
If nothing else came of it, the randomiser would be fully justified for giving me this totally contextless set of clips of the Millenium Falcon in flight, wherein Poe repeatedly slams the hyperdrive between a series of curiously vertical but extremely crisp panoramas. They’re visually complex, hard to parse, at one point there are two Falcons for some reason. Only at the climax of this chaos do we see that there is a large semi-humanoid slug man standing in the cockpit as part of the crew. Words fail me.
As an opening set-piece I do think light-speed skipping works quite well: it’s striking and memorable, and people in a space cockpit slamming levels and hitting buttons is a big part of what Star Wars is all about. The only bum note here is the final swerve past the giant worm monster, which is a bit too similar to the space worm sequence in Empire Strikes Back for my liking and doesn’t match the rest of the sequence for conceptual grandiosity. But the whoosing, the yelling, the unexpected slug man: that’s all pretty damn good in my opinion.
Meanwhile, the training we saw Rey finish back in Scene 7 starts here with Rey achieving the dream of unpowered personal flight, an ability that will not be coming up again in this movie. We also see a very unwise lightsaber jog. Rey has the first of a string of conversations various characters have with Leia, wherein Leia says short, curiously generic things and Rey as the interlocutor is forced into some very unwieldy phrase construction:
Leia: Rey. Be patient.
Rey: I’m starting to think it isn’t possible to hear voices of the Jedi who came before.
Leia: Nothing’s impossible.
Rey: Nothing’s impossible. I’m gonna run the training course.
This is of course related to Carrie Fisher’s sad death between The Last Jedi and the shooting of this film, and the decision to have her still feature as a character using footage shot for The Force Awakens but unused. It is fair to say I am not a fan of this. Acting in cinema is the product of an actor at work, not merely the product of a particular face on screen, and while presumably the intent was some form of respect or tribute or something, it’s slightly perverse to take the death of a major participant in your movie as a technical challenge to overcome like this.