Part 10 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
More boring than you’d think a big effects sequence of thousands of ships arriving from light speed and being obliterated by a giant lightning storm could be.
Former spice runner Poe Dameron is a General in the Resistance army. Also Leia is a general, Han is a general, Lando, Luke, Finn and Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead are generals. There are so many generals in the Rebellion and Resistance armies! Poe suffers a lot from being a perspective character, particularly here in the Exegol sequence at the climax of the film. Finn, Rey and Kylo Ren all get things to do while he’s stuck narrating events from his extremely cramped-looking X-Wing. Other than his being a very Rogue Squadron kind of fly-boy, it’s unclear why he’s attempting to command this battle from the cockpit of a very explodable star fighter rather than at least a ship with a flight deck, if not a bridge. Oscar Isaac is a fine actor but it’s a struggle to do this much work purely through facial emoting, particularly while wearing a silly hat.
Anyway Lando’s here! Hurrah. He’s brought an aged Wedge with him, a cameo that is utterly befuddling unless you recognise Denis Lawson off-hand forty years after he was last in a Star Wars film. He’s also brought a vast flotilla of private craft and they are going to engage the unbelievably phallic Final Order ships en masse and win a victory against metaphor all round. Poe is understandably very relieved.
Pour a drink out for the member of the Final Order who gets their only speaking line here and has to spend it saying “It’s not a navy sir, it’s just people” which is a strong contender for the single worst line in all of Star Wars. The movies at least, it’s not as bad as some of those stinkers from Shadows of the Empire.
We get a little bit more Sheev too, I think this is the only scene where you can check out his incredible red undershirt and matching belt buckle. For a walking corpse who only just stepped off the robot arm, he’s dressed like Danny John Jules in Red Dwarf. Him throwing Kylo Ren down a hole as payback for Vader doing it to him is extremely funny. He then does Big Lightning, which looks cool but has no practical effect on anything.
Lando count: 4