Part 12 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
The randomiser format serves up a number of most serendipitous moments but this one might be the best, placing the utterly incoherent section of Scene 11 with Finn and Jannah where the “just a feeling” motif is introduced immediately before this scene which pays it off: Faced with a highly telegraphed Resistance attack on the sole point of interest at ground level on Exegol, the First Order quickly decides to use a different radio tower. At which point Finn serenely announces that the force has told him where the plot needs them to go – ‘just a feeling.’
We then do the rightly maligned cavalry charge on the upper surface of a Star Destroyer. Aware that I’m putting my tactical realism hat on, but this theoretically striking visual concept has one or two practical issues:
- The utility value of landing people on the hull of a spaceship, even one in atmosphere, seems pretty low.
- There are Stormtroopers (in a very fetching red) landing on the surface of the ship to meet the Resistance charge within seconds, meaning any element of surprise evaporates.
- The horses are primarily used for mobility – the cavalry charge never smashes a line of Stormtroopers or anything, and the Resistance members all engage at range so it’s unclear what the advantage of closing that distance on horseback was vs just landing there in the first place.
- There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a Star Destroyer has to remain upright to enable fighting on the upper surface with relation to the ground. In fact, free three-dimensional movement is a defining feature of a spacecraft.
- The horses are used because speeders would be ‘jammed’, something we have never seen happen.
- They brought BB-8 along, who sucks.
Rise of Skywalker has lots of big-image filmmaking, and to be fair lots of it works. The horses kinda don’t, but alongside them we do get Rey encountering the Sith throne for the first time, with the reveal shots for the associated Sith hordes and Palpatine’s collection of strobing light fixtures. It’s a very cool visual, like something out of an maximalist anime adaptation of Return of the Jedi.
Thankfully the “It’s not a navy!” guy gets a second line after all: “They’ve landed a troop carrier”. Congratulations to Geff Francis who played the Porter in The Singing Detective, more than enough acting credit to save him from any embarassment that Rise of Skywalker could possibly bring.