Part 17 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
“This weapon is your life!”
Obi-wan Kenobi (Attack of the Clones)
“This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)
“Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”
Obi-wan Kenobi (A New Hope)
“Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”
Sheev Palpatine (Return of the Jedi)
“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
Luke Skywalker (Return of the Jedi)
“A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect.”
Luke Skywalker (Rise of Skywalker)
“You want to kill me. That is what I want. Kill me, and my spirit will pass into you. As all the Sith live in me you will be Empress. We will be one.”
Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)
“The ritual begins! She will strike me down and pledge herself as a Sith! She will draw her weapon, she will come to me, she will take her revenge… and with a stroke of her saber the Sith are reborn! The Jedi are dead!”
Sheev Palpatine (Rise of Skywalker)
Sadly Old Sheev never considered – what if two lightsabers?
It feels like a churlish complaint given how utterly shameless the film is about this, but it’s impossible to escape from: Palpatine wants Rey to strike him down (just like Luke didn’t.) After some to-ing and fro-ing and a big column of lightning, ultimately: she does. Does that mean he won? There’s not even the hint of a notion here to suggest why this method of exploding the old man is preferable to any other. Rey just cracks out second lightsaber and lets him have it.
Aside from absolutely anything else, this feels like a chronically insubstantial way to see off a villain who not only started the film by having escaped his certain fate from Return of the Jedi but also just described how doing this will mean he wins. Palpatine’s second return isn’t so much an option as a necessity. Hunting down the Emperor’s clones must be the entire purpose of the New Republic once they find out what happened here. Begun, the clone wars have!
Felt a bit sad at the obliteration of the hooded Sith masses, given we never saw them do anything more than chant and operate the big machine that makes Snokes. Give me their story! Anyway, after the wax chancellor has been melted down in a VFX extravaganza we get the contemporaneous destruction of the Sith fleet, and shed a tear for Richard E. Grant who never saw or spoke to a single member of the Resistance prior to being blown out of his front window by them. Also, Lando’s here! And Kylo Ren emerges wordlessly from a pit.
Lando count: 6