Part 18 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
The first problem is that it’s all backwards, and in such a way that not even the randomiser can save it. In any order, this is backwards. It should go like this: the opening crawl states that dark rumours suggest evil is brewing somewhere far afield. The New Republic has reports that Palpatine has returned. They refuse to believe them, wanting to focus on the very real threat from the First Order instead. This is a breaking point with Leia’s Oscar Isaac’s Resistance, who want to pursue the lead however outlandish because it came from their good friend Boolio who lost his life delivering it. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren is on a quest of his own seeking out Vader’s something-or-other. Instead he finds – shock reveal – Palpatine lives! As we, the audience, find out so too do the Resistance, hearing Palpatine’s message to the galaxy broadcast across the stars and discovering that he’s throwing his weight behind the First Order. Now he’s everyone’s problem!
Let me be clear that I’m not proposing this as a better version of the film. It’s heavily clichéd and it doesn’t really change the content of the scenes, only the plot dressing. It’s a pretty boring bit of A to B writing. I’m only putting it out to contrast with what did happen, which is totally bonkers: the big Palpatine reveal happens six calendar days before the movie is released, during a tie-in Fortnite event. He gives his message to the galaxy then and there. The opening crawl of the movie then reminds us of this, followed by a whirlwind sequence where Kylo Ren has set out to kill him but on contact they immediately form an alliance. Finally the Resistance risk life and limb to hear from their spy Boolio (an avid Fortnite player) who can tell them… exactly what we already know. That’s how the protagonists find out, at a minimum six days later than the viewer, that somehow Palpatine returned.
Thats what makes this such a weird, uncanny scene. It would be one thing for it to be a boring bit of functional work connecting the Boolio sequence to the trip to the sand planet, the movie is full of those and they’re all much of a muchness. It’s that nothing in the film suggests that Palpatine’s return is an unknown quantity – everyone knows about it! Kylo knows, Richard E. Grant knows, Luke knows, the Knights of Ren know. And everyone in the Resistance kind of seems to know too. Oscar Isaac’s resigned sigh of the title line is well known, but just as odd is Merry Brandybuck’s rattled-off follow up: “Dark science, cloning, secrets only the Sith knew.” Aside from sounding like it’s the notes for writing the dialogue rather than the intended dialogue itself, it makes Palpatines’s return sound so inevitable that it cannot have been a surprise. And it wasn’t.
You have to wonder when this sequence was shot, and maybe specifically how the Fortnite event played into it – because multimedia events being what they are, there was always the possibility that the Fortnite event fell through and no-one got to see the message to the universe. Maybe they would have crudely prepended it to the movie as a cold open, or maybe they would have just thrown it on YouTube. Until someone writes a tell-all book, it’s difficult to speculate.
Taken straight, what does this tell us about the Resistance: that they’re the last to know. That their enemies are streets ahead of them, their allies don’t care to keep them informed, and they’re constantly resigned to the worst outcome however outlandish. It’s not got much of that hope they’re always going on about. Everyone sounds so tired. It’s much easier in fact to imagine that this is the result of a gruelling shooting schedule than it is to think that the scene was meant to come out like this, and even though this cast are often paddling upstream with these exposition scenes not all of them come out like this.
Either way, it’s not surprising that this is widely considered to be the nadir of the film. It’s just surprising that this happened at all.
