Taking another look at the final entry of the Skywalker Saga with the assistance of the novelisation, art of book and visual encyclopedia
For those who wish to dig a little deeper, the tie-in books for any Star Wars film are wonderful resources that peel back the layers of the richly detailed, lived-in universe. It is also fair to say that The Rise of Skywalker’s novelisation, art of book and visual dictionary had more heavy-lifting to do than for previous cinematic instalments. This then benefits the books – making them more necessary than ever – but what does it mean for the film itself? Having consumed these more-than-ancillary materials over the course of 2020, it felt natural to revisit the film a year after it hit cinemas.
Midnight Movie
I had mixed feelings when I left The Rise of Skywalker midnight screening. Star Wars is something that I get swept up in and find it easy to be forgiving of. Yet for a film that asserted itself as not only the conclusion of the Sequel Trilogy, but as the end point of the entire Skywalker Saga, I didn’t experience the expected abandon and the old critical thinking kept barging in. Certain narrative decisions felt off, it seemed not only disconnected from the previous film (The Last Jedi) but also didn’t follow through on the mystery box premise of The Force Awakens and, problematic for a finale, vital story information appeared to be absent. This had the curious effect of making me wonder if writer-director JJ Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio were entirely convinced by the story they were telling. Having said that, I was conflicted that I didn’t love it more, rather than actively disliking it in the first place (Star Wars and forgiveness right there). The next viewing was with my family and that helped me turn a corner. My innate love of Star Wars kicked in and I accepted the film on its own terms, finding pleasure in it for what it was. The key phrase here might be “on its own terms” because it was difficult not to find fault with it as part of a trilogy. Perhaps I chose to ignore the warning signs of The Last Jedi and the ways it broke away from The Force Awakens, but with The Rise of Skywalker the structural problems of the Sequel Trilogy became all too obvious. Namely, that there was no structure. There hadn’t been a plan all along (although Michael Arndt was reportedly working on a three-film arc before it was deemed that he was taking too long) and it showed.
What happened next for me was The Mandalorian and the final season of The Clone Wars, both of which delivered Star Wars at its best. (My own timeline isn’t faulty here, because although The Mandalorian aired on Disney+ prior to The Rise of Skywalker in America, it didn’t launch over here until March.) Seeing what was still possible from Star Wars – what I had actually been looking for – did the Sequel Trilogy no favours in my mind. It receded as those other works rose in my estimation. Respect to Dave Filoni (The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Mandalorian) and Jon Favreau (The Mandalorian) for not only understanding Star Wars, but for being able to translate that understanding into worlds of possibility on screen. They draw from Star Wars’ roots (most notably the western and Kurosawa’s samurai pictures on The Mandalorian), while deepening the lore and offering fresh perspectives. Abrams on the other hand mainly draws from Star Wars itself.
In-Universe Explanations
JJ Abrams’ version of Star Wars has been constructed from an external appreciation of the franchise, rather than from inside the story. Think about Han Solo being reunited with the Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens – surely a fist-pumping cinematic moment if ever there was one. But the story point of Han separated from the Falcon is ultimately there to represent the audience being separated from the Star Wars they loved as kids. It’s a rush of nostalgia, designed as much for the trailer as for the film, and as such is fleeting. Or consider The First Order, a rather nebulous threat because they are a stand-in for the Empire rather than their own entity. It appears that Abrams needed stormtroopers for his revision of the Original Trilogy and the First Order was the apparent answer. At least Starkiller Base has a reasonable in-universe reason for existing. It’s a bigger, badder Death Star but follows the idea that humanity is always developing more powerful weapons of mass destruction. Yet in story terms it cannot help but feel rather redundant. Sure, Return of the Jedi featured a second Death Star, but that successfully functions as cyclical storytelling within the Original Trilogy. With this approach, some pieces of the Sequel Trilogy are therefore left for the tie-in materials to pick up. Pablo Hidalgo (Lucasfilm senior creative executive) appears to treat this as a creative opportunity, combining his deep knowledge of Star Wars with a real sense of fun, as evidenced in his Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary. Here he takes imaginative leaps – that remain grounded in Star Wars – and laces them with subtle humour to craft in-universe explanations. There’s a particular instance where he addresses what is a JJ Abrams storytelling motif (equivalent to a moment in his 2009 Star Trek picture), where the heroes witness the destruction of the Hosnian system from the surface of a distant planet in The Force Awakens:
“The firing of the Starkiller weapon is specifically engineered – through spacetime-bending quintessence physics – to be seen across the galaxy as a horrifying example of the First Order’s might. It is meant to encourage surrender with a single shot.”
Read spacetime-bending quintessence physics as suspension of disbelief.
The Oracle
There are intriguing characters in the Sequel Trilogy, yet their arcs are often strangely truncated. Perhaps the passage of time is simply too compressed over these three films, whereas employing significant gaps between instalments – where character development could have taken place off screen – would’ve been a very Star Wars thing to do. Ben Solo / Kylo Ren at least does get a character arc, albeit with limited screen time in The Rise of Skywalker once he turns back to the light. His ultimate demise feels manufactured rather than inevitable however, for his story must line up with Vader’s rather than take its own path. It would have been interesting to have him seek redemption over time (although Star Wars isn’t the Buffyverse and Kylo isn’t Angel), but this may have necessitated further screentime to explore, perhaps as a television show. Having said that, Hidalgo supposedly pitched an ending for Episode IX (when The Force Awakens was being developed) where Ben Solo would take Luke Skywalker’s place on Ahch-To. In this scenario audiences would have understood that Ben had chosen a redemptive path. Redemption wasn’t the order of the day though.
According to Phil Szostak’s The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren was to encounter a creature known as The Oracle in a swamp on Mustafar at the beginning of the film. Or indeed as the novelisation describes, actually two creatures in symbiosis, with a spider-like being now called the Eye of Webbish Bog residing on top of a giant “hairless creature sheening with wetness”. The Eye was tasked by Lord Vader (who lived on Mustafar, the scene of his defeat by Obi-Wan Kenobi) with guarding his Sith Wayfinder. The Eye tells Kylo that it cannot “be swayed by a trick of the Force”. This is Star Wars at its weirdest, but is hardly an isolated incident and it seems a shame that it was cut. The animated shows have successfully explored the stranger manifestations of the Force, and Bendu from Rebels springs to mind as an equivalent Force being. The Clone Wars and Rebels are indeed rich in Star Wars lore, whereas The Rise of Skywalker seems intent on stripping it back. The Force Awakens teases some lore, but Abrams seems uninterested in following through. Although Lucas employed MacGuffins throughout the Indiana Jones series, that isn’t how he approached Star Wars, although it would seem that is how Abrams interpreted it. Creature and droid effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan describes a moment from The Rise of the Skywalker in the art of book that features “very simple little creatures that play to that throwaway Star Wars moment – starting with something, then away you go.” It is arguably these throwaway moments that Abrams focuses on rather than the lore, which makes his Star Wars works more surface-driven than that of George Lucas or indeed Dave Filoni.
Imperfect Transfer
Sidelining the lore is one thing, but removing vital narrative information is quite another. The greatest sin of The Rise of Skywalker also relates to its most controversial aspect: the return of Palpatine. Bringing the Emperor back from the dead dismisses the narrative arc of episodes I-VI, undoing the significance of Vader’s turn from the dark side. Even if we accept this narrative u-turn, it remains fair to say that the seeds should at least have been planted in The Force Awakens. As it stands, Palpatine’s return is unheralded until the opening crawl of The Rise of Skywalker. Unfortunately the problems don’t stop there, for the filmmakers fail to provide sufficient explanation for how he has come back from the dead. It’s a major plot point for the entire Skywalker Saga, yet is treated as a throwaway Star Wars moment. Fortunately the novelisation fares much better in this regard, filling in the gaps that were obviously missing in the film. Rae Carson’s engaging novelisation is billed as an “expanded edition”, and rightly so. However in past Star Wars novelisations the expanded material has been nice-to-know rather than need-to-know.
I’m wary of rewriting someone else’s story in my head, but The Rise of Skywalker almost forces me to do so. Perhaps Abrams could have gone down the route that Peter Jackson took for the opening of The Two Towers, where he cuts back to Gandalf’s fall at Moria and proceeds to show the wizard’s battle with the Balrog, albeit in the slightly rug-pulling context of a dream. The Rise of Skywalker might then have opened with Vader turning on his Sith master, replaying the scene from Return of the Jedi from another perspective. This time the audience would follow Palpatine as he tumbles down the shaft. The novelisation at least indicates that Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had been planning for Vader’s betrayal:
“Sidious, sensing the flickering light in his apprentice, had been ready for years. So the falling, dying Emperor called on all the dark power of the Force to thrust his consciousness far, far away, to a secret place he had been preparing. His body was dead, an empty vessel, long before it found the bottom of the shaft, and his mind jolted to new awareness in a new body – a painful one, a temporary one.”
But the “transfer was imperfect, and the cloned body wasn’t enough.” The film does not make any of this explicit, to its detriment. Perhaps Abrams and Terrio thought this would require too much exposition, but surely it wasn’t something beyond the abilities of a seasoned screenwriter. Consider the opening of Pixar’s Up, which is able to successfully convey the passage of time with great emotional depth. Thus the audience could have spent time with Palpatine in his clone body down through the years until Kylo Ren shows up. The book leaves this explanation until late on, but that works because readers, having presumably seen the film, already know about the return of Palpatine and have accepted it as fact. But the film would have greatly benefited from that connective tissue up front, beginning the story with certainty rather than confusion and making links to previous instalments explicit. As it is, The Rise of Skywalker has an uphill battle convincing the audience of its connection to the preceding episodes of its own trilogy, let alone Lucas’s prequels and originals.
The New Grounded in the Old
Co-production designer Rick Carter admits that the conclusion to Return of the Jedi “was so fulfilling and satisfying” (The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) and that The Rise of Skywalker therefore faced serious challenges trying to capture “lightning in a bottle again”. “Wrapping up both a trilogy and three trilogies is incredibly ambitious,” he continues, “but ambitious for the right reasons.” That last point is arguable, to put it mildly. The film tries hard to manufacture the sense that it is wrapping up the entire Skywalker saga, even employing a repeated motif where characters tell each other how high the stakes are. A more cohesive story across the Sequel Trilogy would have meant this wasn’t necessary or at least given the dialogue more meaning when it was delivered. “The most-criticized thing about the new trilogy is that it’s too derivative or too backward-looking,” says Terrio, who was, to be fair, only brought in to co-write the final instalment. “But what if you double down on that? It’s not backward-looking; it’s all the same story. The next generation is still dealing with the war of their parents’ generation and, in fact, Rey and Kylo Ren are still fighting their parents’ war.” This at least sheds some light on the screenwriters’ line of thinking about bringing Palpatine back.
Nevertheless, it ultimately doesn’t meet the rules established by George Lucas, as discussed by Lucasfilm creative director Doug Chiang in his foreword. Chiang began working with Lucas in 1995 and understood that they were all playing in Lucas’s sandbox (“he set the rules and marked the boundaries”). Creatives at Lucasfilm were encouraged to explore the grey area between what was and wasn’t Star Wars – Lucas didn’t want them to play it safe, but rather to be bold. “He insisted that the new be grounded in the old, just as fantasy has to be grounded in reality”. It’s a requirement that the animated shows and The Mandalorian meet with relish, forging new paths while remaining the very definition of Star Wars. The Rise of Skywalker is perhaps too grounded in the old and as a result loses sight of exploring the new.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker novelisation by Rae Carson is published by Del Rey in paperback
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary by Pablo Hidalgo is published by DK
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