Part 27 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
An extremely brief sliver of movie here, where the cast collectively do a handbrake turn from what was going on at the start of the movie (Boolio, Jedi training) into what will be going on shortly in the film (sand planets, Sith Wayfinders) while delicately navigating how thin the motivation is here – a long time ago Luke was looking for someone somewhere, but stopped – and the need for Leia to somehow engage in the planning of this despite all the issues with Leia’s involvement in any scene that requires her to do more than sagely nod.
Daisy Ridley is working hard to inject energy, energy, energy into this but it just isn’t coming. Of all things, it’s a bit of a riff on Indiana Jones, with the dramatic slamming open of books and need to get on a plane to a remote location now and fast to find a forgotten artifact – but of course Indiana Jones is setting off to places that are exotic in real life. Rey is already an alien, presently on an alien planet. In fact, by travelling to a sand planet she’s actually returning to the exact kind of place we know she grew up in – and that’s before you get to the bait and switch where sandy Pasaana is so un-forbidden and un-forbidding that Lando is already there, hanging out on a bus.
Similarly with the ancient Jedi texts and the Sith Wayfinder (and by extension the Sith dagger that leads you to the Sith Wayfinder): this is Star Wars. Every item here is already from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. It’s not clear as a viewer what the meaning of something being ancient is in this context, what we’re meant to take away from it. The Republic stood for a thousand generations we were told, giving a notion of stability with an undertone of stagnation. That’s the setting of Star Wars: there’s the Republic (before) and the Empire (now).
The sequel movies never managed to establish much of a distinction between the Empire and the First Order as settings; while the First Order was nominally at war with the New Republic nothing ever happened in that setting – it’s all the Resistance, which is effectively the same as the Rebellion. It’s the flip side of the Old Republic and High Republic settings both collapsing without too much trouble into the tropes of the prequels: to make something that was decidedly not Republic or Empire you’d have to go so far that what you were making might not read as Star Wars, and that’s scary if you’ve just paid billions of dollars for the right to make Star Wars.
And without wishing to press the point too hard, the need to go back to Leia is stretched to the breaking point here. Every technique is brought out to try and make her function in these fast-paced dialogues: pregnant silences, vague aphorisms, Maz Kanata reading her lines instead. It’s awful. End it now.