Part 11 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
We’ve reached my favourite part of Rise of Skywalker by some distance, Rey’s impulse decision to do some extreme sports boating. It works perfectly. No notes. The ‘skimmer’ looks incredible with its weird asymmetric design, Rey is piloting it by flinging herself round the controls like it’s the TARDIS, Finn and Poe are pissed off at her for no perceivable reason other than that they wish they’d had the idea themselves. They’re all on the beautifully coarse hills of a planet that looks like the Chilterns, which is where the Death Star apparently beached itself some time after events on the Forest moon.
Naomi Ackie’s female counterpart to Finn, Jannah, gets her character-insight scene here, giving us a thoroughly implausible depiction of the dynamics of mutiny. It apparently occurs as a sort of shared rapture that spontaneously occurs when the cause is good and true, rather than being something which requires any kind of organisation or planning. “We laid our weapons down” Ackie proudly announces. She doesn’t expand on what happened next, so we’re forced to assume that the First Order went “Oh, fiddlesticks” and took their Star Destroyer home.
Is this a good time to talk about how diverse the First Order is? It’s really diverse. In fact that diversity is one of the defining characteristics of the First Order versus Palpatine’s Galactic Empire, which was all white British guys doing received pronunciation. First and foremost we can assume that Disney really wanted both Resistance and First Order to be viable play-styles at their defunct LARP hotel, and not in a way that involved slurs. That much is apparent in the overall construction of the First Order: that it’s really designed around supporting viable theme park attractions. We already know Jedi are trained as younglings, but now we have a corresponding path for plucky kids to be ‘selected’ by the First Order, get to try out a plastic helmet and a space laser while interacting with a mean space-Sergeant, then participate in a spontaneous escape back to their parents and the next ride.
There’s also the even more cynical angle, which is that by making both the Resistance and the First Order the epitome of late-2010s Hollywood diverse, we shunt the series one notch further away from the feared and hated ‘politics’. Does making your villains less racist make it easier to sell your film to racists?
Really can’t overstate how much I laughed at Rey suddenly being on a boat.