The Character Problems of Rise of Skywalker (1/2)
- Glendon Frank
- Jan 24, 2020
- 24 min read
Updated: Jan 31, 2020
I think it’s long past time I talked about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
It’s weird to think that five years ago, the Sequel Trilogy didn’t really mean anything. We didn’t have any idea what kind of characters or stories we would get. I remember seeing early images of a ‘Jedi Hunter’ figure, who would eventually become the tortured soul of Kylo Ren. I remember first seeing some of the early names and thinking ‘that’s what we’re going with?’ I recall seeing J.J. Abrams listed as the initial director and saying ‘yeah, that could work.’ And, like most people, I remember that first teaser. That teaser with Andy Serkis’ ominous dialogue and these new characters that no one had ever seen, and that lightsaber broadsword design. Seeing the Millennium Falcon in crisp new footage. Over the past five years, we’ve gotten just as many movies, and the reactions have been divisive, at best. But I’ve been pleased to get all this new content. While I haven’t absolutely loved everything I’ve seen, I’ve at least enjoyed the majority of it. There’s been a whole new wave of ‘Star Wars,’ and a whole expansion as to what this weird franchise even means.
If nothing else, this new era gave us The Last Jedi, a movie that has grown to be one of my favourite pieces of Star Wars media ever. I say this as someone who practically was raised on Star Wars, who grew up on the Expanded Universe and ever obscure piece of the franchise. The Last Jedi was a breath of fresh air, a movie that legitimately had themes and messages, and legitimately sought to challenge its characters. It was the first Star Wars movie in a long time that felt like it had a real soul, a real identity. It built powerfully off of the strong set up of The Force Awakens and opened the door for what could be a wild conclusion. I say all of this in order to frame what’s going to come next. Because I did not love Rise of Skywalker on nearly the same level. I genuinely wanted Rise of Skywalker to be excellent – as much as I love The Last Jedi, I recognize there are still those who are uncertain about it, and I was hoping this final movie would be able to rally everyone together. In order to do that, you need to celebrate and elaborate on the strengths of all that came before. But that’s not what Rise of Skywalker did. In a lot of ways, Rise of Skywalker made out to address in point form all the criticisms nitpickers had with The Last Jedi, while also introducing a brand new plotline that didn’t get the development it needed to work. New characters are introduced to fill roles that already exist, new villains are introduced that absurdly raise the stakes, and old characters are just kind of chained to obligation and old patterns. Rise of Skywalker has a lot of potential, but every single element of it feels weak and half-baked. Someone recently encouraged me to ‘look at the good!’ in this movie, but I legitimately can’t see very much good there. If Rise of Skywalker was a crowd-pleasing ending with some emotive high points of character like Return of the Jedi, I would have been fine with it. But Rise of Skywalker is a kind of insidious movie, in that it seems to go out of its way to invalidate or reverse every major character arc. I don’t want to put all the blame on director J.J. Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio (of Batman v Superman and Justice League fame), as I’m sure there was a lot of studio pull and interference in this movie. But the more I watch their interviews and the more I study this movie, it’s clear that someone along the line fundamentally misunderstood these characters and their direction as established in the last two movies. Rise of Skywalker is not only a bad sequel to The Last Jedi, it also feels like a bad continuation of The Force Awakens.
Enter me. Partly to ease my own soul and partly to leave my thoughts conclusively in writing, I wanted to find a way to assemble my many thoughts on this movie. In my hubris, I thought I could write a nice, focused critique of Rise of Skywalker if I focused solely on the characters. I could examine their arcs on the previous movies, and how this movie concludes them, and let the text speak for itself. Simple, right? Almost twenty thousand words later proved otherwise, including a full page on D-0, the Droid Who Doesn’t Do Anything. Because the more I look at this movie, the more I believe it to be utterly and fundamentally broken at its core. While I could post full dissertations on each and every character – and believe me, I’ve written them – I doubt anyone wants to read through all of that, and I didn’t even really enjoy writing it all. Like, I didn’t love my Joker article, but I pushed through it and put it out relatively quickly because I believed (and still believe, mind) that it was a borderline destructive movie, and that people needed to give it a second thought before putting money towards it. In contrast, Rise of Skywalker isn’t offensive by any means. Like, it certainly makes choices that are problematic in hindsight, but It’s not like its thesis statement is ‘the mentally ill ought to violently react to perceived social rejection.’ Rise of Skywalker doesn’t really have a thesis statement, and that’s kind of the problem. I don’t hate it as a movie – if people enjoyed it, that’s fine. It’s just a very poor story and a poorer continuation of the strong ideas that were established in the past two movies.
This is all to say, what follows is my abbreviated discussion of the characters in The Rise of Skywalker. If some perverse soul really wants the full document, I can make that available to them. My initial structure was to work from the least important characters to the major players, and I think I’ll keep something of that structure while separating people in more defined groups. After, there are some clear patterns and themes with these characters – like, Jannah and Zorii Bliss serve almost the exact same role, just for Finn and Poe, respectively. Hopefully, this satisfies people as well as myself. In all honesty, I’ve mostly just become very numb to Rise of Skywalker, and I think that’s about as much of review as one may need. Luckily, there’s always Cats (2019) to give joy to my soul.
Without further ado, here goes nothing. Obviously, spoilers abound.
The New Characters
Okay, so let’s talk about the insane amount of new characters that exist in Rise of Skywalker. Just about every one of the ‘sequel’ Star Wars movies introduces new characters, but it’s usually one or two key cast members. Empire Strikes Back adds in Lando and Yoda, and both are given central roles in the plot. Boba Fett and Admiral Piett fill out the villainous cast, as does the enigmatic Emperor. Return of the Jedi mostly works with the cast that’s established but does introduce Jabba the Hutt for the first time (because he wasn’t in the first cut of A New Hope and certainly wouldn’t belong there), as well as Wicket. Similarly, Attack of the Clones introduces Count Dooku and Jango Fett, prime movers in the plotline. There are also a lot of other moving parts in Attack of the Clones because of the crime detective nature of Obi-Wan’s side plot, but the characters introduced in that plot mostly stay in their locations and have stock characteristics while they give exposition. I don’t love this, but at the same time, none of these characters really draw attention to themselves and are mostly plot devices to move events forward. They have clear functions, and no one else really exists to fulfill those functions. The Phantom Menace doesn’t really introduce anyone who could be in Dexter Jettster’s place. Even still, characters like Watto and Shmi are brought back in a reasonable fashion when necessary. Then, in Revenge of the Sith, we mostly stick to the established characters, again only really introducing a minor villain in General Grevious (only realizing this now, but wow do the Prequels introduce a lot of villains as they go). The Last Jedi’s additional cast is also fairly sparse. Not counting Snoke, the only new characters who really get focus are Rose Tico, Amelyn Holdo, and DJ, all of which play central roles in the movie’s plot and the central character arcs. All of these characters, but especially Rose, embody key voices and themes in The Last Jedi.
Rise of Skywalker, however, introduces many characters, most of which hang around for major sections of the movie. Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith are both sparse in new characters, preferring to stick to the established drama of the core cast. But Rise of Skywalker practically adds an entirely new cast, and none of them really feel like they belong. Take Jannah and Zorii: both these characters are just sort of attached to an existing character, without really having a notable purpose or personality to themselves. Zorii is especially weird because she introduces and then pays off a problem (‘how do we get off Kijimi without a First Order bade?’); if you were to cut her scenes wholesale, that plot point would simply not exist, and nothing would really be lost. Moreover, a lot of these characters feel superfluous. Beaumont Kin, for example, absolutely serves no purpose in this movie. If you don’t remember anyone named Beaumont Kin, that’s because you just remembered him as ‘Dominic Monaghan in a Star Wars movie.’ Kin is just sort of a new Resistance soldier, who is a little cocky and grating. Apparently expanded lore says he’s a translator, but that’s what C-3P0 is for? What’s worse, he just sort of feels like a replacement for Rose. Almost all of his dialogue could be given to Rose, a character we’re already familiar with. But people didn’t like Rose, for some reason. I actually don’t understand why. There was certainly a vocal minority who sent vitriol to her actress, Kelly Marie Tran, that was decidedly racist and sexist in nature, to the point that she publicly abandoned social media. It just feels very striking to me; Rose is practically absent in this movie. For such a major part of the previous movie, she doesn’t do anything, and could easily be removed entirely from the final cut. She is replaced instead by people like Beaumont Kin. Even Babu Frik feels to some extent like a Rose replacement – like, Babu Frik is fine, but his main job is ‘mechanic’ and that’s what Rose was introduced as. Speaking of Babu Frik, the movie puts a weird amount of importance into what could have been a fun one-off character; somehow, he tells Jannah that the Resistance is coming to her planet? And then he shows up in the final battle? Babu Frik is weird. People will write essays about Babu Frik.
But let’s talk a little more about Zorii and Jannah. One central problem with the characterization in this movie is that it seems to hold a philosophy that ‘lore = development.’ This idea actually goes beyond the characters, but that’s what I’m centrally focused on. Jannah and Zorii are both emblematic of this, especially Zorii. I really want to like both of these characters, but they really aren’t given anything of substance. Moreover, as noted, they both just entirely exist in the realm of other characters. So, Zorii. She primarily exists to ‘expand’ Poe’s character – suddenly, he’s an ex-spice runner! I’ll discuss later when talking about Poe directly why that doesn’t really make any sense, but in regards to Zorii, all she really does is hand us Dameron’s background and leave. Her existence never genuinely challenges Poe, and never causes him to grow. She entirely exists to ‘develop’ Poe, but she doesn’t even do that, beyond adding lore. The one other thing she does do is open the theme that ‘people will fight if you lead them,’ which is a neat motif but is paid off off-screen. Moreover, its introduction here feels weird; Poe is worried that the Resistance is alone, because nobody came for them at Crait. But… Luke came. Luke came and his sacrifice was shown to ignite a spark of hope throughout the galaxy. That was the big hook at the end of The Last Jedi, but Luke’s sacrifice is never mentioned in this movie. As such, Zorii’s place in the plot feels really stilted.
That said, Jannah’s presence is arguably more jarring. While Jannah at least has an intriguing background, being an ex-stormtrooper like Finn, nothing is done with that. I’ll talk about this more with Finn, but the fact that this movie stresses the humanity of the stormtroopers, and then goes right back to gleefully mowing them down, feels very stilted. What’s worse is the implication that the moral decisions of Jannah and Finn to stop fighting are just led by the Force, and not actual choices made by their own agency. Robbing characters of their defining decisions is just… poor writing. Jannah’s presence also feels weirdly like more Rose replacement. I think both characters can and should exist, but it seems odd that The Last Jedi clearly established that Rose had romantic feelings for Finn, and then those feelings are never discussed in this movie. Neither are Finn’s implied feelings for Rey. Instead, Finn spends a significant amount of time with this new female character, as if they’re interchangeable. Moreover, the presence of Jannah and Zorii means that Finn and Poe spend sparingly little time together. I’m not going to say that Finn and Poe needed to be paired up romantically (though it’s no secret that Oscar Isaac was in favor of it, as well as significant portions of the audience), but it’s undeniable that their actors share a lot of chemistry, and downplaying that natural friendship is an odd choice. Instead, they’re both paired up with new female characters, as if to emphasize their heterosexuality. That’s kind of all that Jannah and Zorii do, and that feels wrong because there’s a lot of potential in both characters. But the movie never lets them have any.
Alright. That is all greatly more succinct. Now let’s see if I can talk about D-0 without eating a page.
I really don’t care about D-0. Like, obviously I have a lot of opinions on him as a character, but D-0 doesn’t elicit any sort of emotion from me. I suppose he’s cute, but I don’t really care. I get the sense that the movie doesn’t either. I don’t think D-0 appeared in any trailers. He was put in merch, but a lot of my friends didn’t know who he was before the movie came out, unlike BB-8. Moreover, all that merch has D-0 speaking in cute beeps like R2-D2, but the movie has JJ Abrams’ voicing him. He’s a part of Ochie’s ship but doesn’t appear until long after the crew has taken off with it. His one singular role in the plot is to give the coordinates to Exegol, but that is immediately invalidated by Rey spitting off the coordinates from her X-Wing. D-0 is entirely worthless in this movie and it confuses me. His being voiced seems important – the only other major voiced droid in the movies in C-3P0. The dialogue that he has codes him as a sort of abuse victim, but that doesn’t really go anywhere. We get to see Rey being kind to him, but she does this in the middle of what’s supposed to be the ‘darkest’ point of her character arc. I’ve seen some people suggest he is an allusion to Kylo, but it doesn’t really make sense, and, again, doesn’t go anywhere. D-0, like a lot of this supporting cast, doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t contribute anything. Attack of the Clones introduces a lot of characters, but they all have clear purposes and personalities. No one introduced in Rise of Skywalker really does – except maybe Babu Frik, but even then, the plot keeps dragging him back in for weird reasons. D-0 feels very representative of all of that. He seems like someone who maybe had a bigger role, but was severely cut down, and had to be voiced last-minute in order to give him any sense of presence. I don’t particularly hate any of the new characters (except maybe Beaumont Kin) but none of them are given a place in this movie. They’re all just weird padding in a very stuffed film.
The Villainous Minor Characters
I.E., all of the villains except Kylo because I want to talk about him individually.
Star Wars generally has very solid villains. It gave us Darth Vader, one of the most singularly recognized villains of all pop-culture, and I would say that the Emperor isn’t that far behind. These two villains are pretty representative of the majority of Star Wars villains, either being complex, Shakespearean figures, or at least bombastic wellsprings of evil. This pattern even follows into the Prequels – I’m not going to pretend that Count Dooku or General Grievous are particularly complex characters, but they’re at least fun to watch. I think it says a great deal, then, about Rise of Skywalker that all of the villains are irredeemably boring. The Knights of Ren are boring, General Pryde is boring – even the Emperor is boring in this movie! I had an entire section of the last draft dissecting the Emperor (who I refuse to call ‘Sheev’ and will only sparingly call ‘Palpatine’) and I’ll try my best to limit my discussion of him, but he’s really where the problems start. The Emperor is kind of the prime mover of this movie, in that everything revolves around him but he’s really nothing more than a plot device. There are a few ‘plot device’ characters in this movie. And I feel I must be clear, I’m not strictly against the idea of the Emperor being a presence in this final movie. There’s some nice resonance with that idea. But to have him as a physical presence who is just back from the dead with no explanation is absolutely bonkers.
Even worse, such a bold reveal isn’t handled within the movie, it’s just announced in the opening crawl. There’s this weird sense that someone behind the scenes said, ‘well, we revealed him in the trailers, so we don’t need to do that in the movie,’ which is just a bad way to make a movie. This is a point I’ll come back to, but a lot of this movie feels experiential, not in the sense of my 1917 review where the movie situates you in the experience of the characters, rather, in the sense that this movie relies on being a first-time experience for the audience. It doesn’t hold up to repeated viewings, because it doesn’t conceive that someone would watch it a second time, nevermind watching it after the theatre release. But, that’s beside the point. The Emperor is suddenly physically alive again and directly involved in the plot. With him is a huge colosseum of acolytes, an army of red stormtroopers that conspicuously use the same designs as the First Order stormtroopers, and a giant fleet of Star Destroyers equipped with Death Star cannons (a reveal that genuinely made me laugh out loud in the theatre). None of this is explained or really even handwaved. Palpatine has just been building the largest army ever constructed and no one has noticed. I don’t think every detail of a movie needs to be spelled out, but this seems like a glaring oversimplification.
My main issue with this premise is that it seems like an absurd, unnecessary raising of stakes. The Last Jedi ends with the Resistance totally dwarfed by the First Order, but this movie opens by widening that gulf a hundredfold. I’ve heard some people say ‘well The Last Jedi didn’t end with a real villain, so something needed to be done,’ but even if that were true, this is an absurd exaggeration of that critique. The Last Jedi ends with Kylo Ren as the tortured, self-doubting, fresh Supreme Leader, with a cadre of people under him who hate his leadership, including the humiliated Armitage Hux. That’s a really fascinating angle, but Rise of Skywalker tries to diminish it as much as possible. Kylo’s self-doubt is limited, covered up by his new tension with the domineering Emperor. Hux’s previous humiliation is seen as an embarrassing character trait and not a potential source of conflict, so Hux is almost entirely replaced by General Enric Pryde, a puppet of the Emperor. Pryde is also a weird character because rather than just being a new First Order officer (which would have been fine, a la Kannady in the previous film), the movie is clear that, like, he’s served the Emperor in previous movies? So, he’s, what, immortal? Or a clone? It’s never explained beyond that, he’s just a Tarkin expy because Hux wasn’t threatening enough, I guess. This comes out of a whole slew of Sequel trilogy criticisms where the villains need to be ‘threatening’ to function, which baffles me. Kylo Ren is a fascinating villain, and his inner turmoil makes him a danger to anyone around him, but there are those who say ‘well, he has good in him, so he’s not very threatening.’ I just don’t get it, and it leads to a case like Rise of Skywalker, where we now have an entirely new cast of villains, and none of them work. The overbearing presence of Palpatine and Pryde and all the Star Destroyers is this massive weight on the movie. The Resistance against the First Order is an improbable fight, but the Resistance against the Emperor and his fleet is an impossible one. There’s no conceptual way to win, and so the movie is going to stretch the plot even more to make that final fight work.
I have solutions for that, but first I’m going to return to the Emperor and his wider plan. It’s dumb. It is very, very dumb. Palpatine’s plan is possibly the ultimate example of this ‘experiential’ storytelling because his plan changes like five times and it is never coherent. First, we are told that Palpatine has been pulling the strings of everything that’s happened so far. Snoke, the First Order, all of it. But to what end? He already has this giant fleet, he could have invaded the galaxy by himself. Why does he need these puppets? For that matter, why does he grow multiple Snokes? Moreover, it’s implied that Palpatine is behind all of Snoke’s actions, but Palpatine is blatantly unaware of Rey and Kylo’s Force Connection. Now, I don’t believe that Snoke connected them, but Snoke says he connected them and the movies never contradict this – so why is Palpatine so shocked at the end of the movie that they are a dyad? But it’s worse than that. The Emperor starts by ordering Kylo to kill Rey. Once Rey is dead, Palpatine will give Kylo the fleet. Kylo obfuscates and plans to bring Rey with him to kill the Emperor. When Kylo fails to kill Rey, the Emperor repeats the order – he’s not messing around. We learn that Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter (which we will get to…) and that Palpatine has killed her parents and wants to kill her as well. Except, once Rey gets to Exegol to strike down the Emperor, the entire table flips. Now, the Emperor wants her to kill him because she is his granddaughter and he wants his lineage to continue. Forgetting that dynasties have never been a motivation for Palpatine and that he’s only been concerned with consolidating his own power, this is a wild departure from what was already established in this movie. But then it changes again! Because apparently, he is possessed by ‘all the Sith’ and they will pass down to whoever kills him? At this point, the plot has devolved into pure fanfiction because this has never been established and also doesn’t make any sense with how the Sith have been personified. The Sith are greedy and selfish, not some great unified collective. What’s worse is this is somehow tempting to Rey? She acts as if there’s no other choice, and agrees to participate in Palpatine’s ritual, kill him, and be possessed. But the plan changes again! Because then redeemed Ben Solo shows up and the Emperor says ‘oh, a dyad?’ and just sucks up their power, which restores him? He yells ‘the power of two shall restore the one true Emperor!’ like this is a sensible piece of lore and a logical turn of the plot that we’ve forgotten about until now. Everything with Palpatine just functions on new nonsense; nothing is established, things just keep twisting to be exciting. None of it holds up on rewatch.
In previous movies, the Emperor has always been a sly, deceptive chess master. He functions in the Prequels by manipulating the Jedi’s arrogance and pride. His temptations in Return of the Jedi are not compelling because ‘if you kill me you shall become all the Sith!’ The word ‘Sith’ wasn’t even part of the vocabulary in the Original Trilogy, and I’m kind of baffled that it’s flaunted so easily in this movie. The Emperor works in Return of the Jedi because he is poking at Luke’s central flaws. Luke always rushes in to do the right thing, to his own detriment – he leaps into helping his friends in Empire Strikes Back, and finds himself prey to the emotions of the Dark Side. In the final movie, the problem is clear: kill the Emperor, save Darth Vader, and end the war. But to do so is to give into hate; to kill the Emperor is to fall to the Dark Side. That’s the tension, because Jedi aren’t violent, but the problem seems to require violence. The solution, surprisingly, is love – Anakin Skywalker steps in out of love of his son to stop the Emperor. It upends the entire struggle. Luke doesn’t have to resort to violence at all. It’s perfect. These themes are emphasized further in The Last Jedi, which continually praises pacifistic solutions to violence, especially in Luke’s projection before Kylo Ren. But Rise of Skywalker’s climax misses all of that. The Emperor tempts Rey with… power? With being a slave to the Sith? And she agrees, up until Ben’s interruption. The temptation makes no sense, and the solution is worse. Rey just stands up, with the power of the Jedi behind her (which is weird, given the previous movie) and then… kills the Emperor. And it’s fine. An argument can be made that Palpatine kills himself via his lightning, but it still misses the entire moral conundrum. The way the Emperor dies puts us right back into the cycle of violence. The only way to stop violence is further violence, apparently, even though the past several movies have demonstrated why that doesn’t work. Jedi use the Force for defense, not attack – that’s the path of the Dark Side… until it’s not. Pacifism matters, until it doesn’t. Rise of Skywalker isn’t just a weak story, it’s also morally opposed to the philosophy of the story that has come before.
The insistence of introducing the Emperor and this whole new legion actually weakens what antagonists we did have. The Knights of Ren are finally shown in this movie, after much teasing. Rian Johnson had reportedly considered using them in the throne fight of The Last Jedi, but felt that Kylo probably had some emotional connection to the knights, and it would be unfair to have him just cut them down. But rather than develop the Knights of Ren, Abrams just… has redeemed Ben mercilessly cut them down. That’s all they really offer in the movie. They could have been Kylo’s fresh muscle instead of introducing an entire new fleet, but instead they’re pushed to the background. So, too, is Armitage Hux. His tension with Kylo Ren was teased in The Last Jedi as being a major plot point, pointing to a possible division in the First Order. To its credit, Rise of Skywalker opens a neat possibility by making Hux a traitor, which doesn’t really make sense for his character as a home-grown true believer in the Order, but sure, that can be interesting. But the moment we find out Hux is a traitor, he is killed off by Pryde, who wholly replaces him. Kylo doesn’t even find out, and Hux’s whole motivation is his hatred of Kylo. The tensions with Hux, Kylo’s conflicted ties to the Knights of Ren and to Rey – these could have been major plot elements of this movie, and they could have been done without dramatically raising the stakes. I’m fine with the Emperor’s inclusion, but feature him as a sort of Hannibal Lecter figure, a Sith ghost tied to the Death Star and manipulating events with honeyed words without getting directly involved. But he doesn’t need to be alive, or be the main villain. This movie’s obsession with wildly expanding the scope hurts its overall flow and narrative. It spends so much time explaining the new elements that it can’t actually develop them.
The Heroic Minor Characters Alright, this is good. This isn't the monstrosity we had on our hands in the last draft.
The biggest thing that stands out to me with this cast is a weird sense of obligation. Things only happen because the audience, or the creators, feel like they need to happen, not because they make sense for the characters. That’s why Chewie is given his medal from A New Hope, despite Chewie getting a medal not being relevant to this movie, or his character. It’s why Leia is stuffed into the movie, despite every scene of hers being so obviously stitched together (why didn’t they just fully recreate her like Tarkin? Going halfway somehow felt more disrespectful). It’s why Chewie isn’t killed off even when it’s teased and would be a more interesting character choice. You can bet they haven't done anything else interesting with Chewbacca in these movies. It’s why C-3P0 gets his memories back, despite that sacrifice sort of being played as a big deal. I have a whole rant about how Threepio is offered interesting character development, and it’s consistently squandered, but mostly it comes down to this weird obligation to status quo. The undoing of both Chewie’s death and Threepio’s sacrifice falls squarely in that ‘experiential’ mode of storytelling, where the moment is all that matters. This sense of obligation is also why Lando is in this movie, despite having nothing to do. We expect Lando to be present, and thus Lando is obligated to appear. Han, Luke, and Leia all felt naturally evolved in the Sequel Trilogy, and either had complex and interesting character challenges, or at least felt properly developed. Lando gets none of that, he just sort of appears and then is written out of the movie until he comes back. Which itself is weird because Lando’s role is to unite the galaxy, which seems like it should be a central plotline and not an unseen B-plot. Like I mentioned with Zorii, Rise of Skywalker wants to build this whole idea of ‘people will fight if we lead them’ plot, but it never really leans into it. Reuniting hope in the galaxy could have been the central story here, but the movie never cares about it, and it’s just pushed to the back. Lando doesn’t even have any real motivation to go recruit the galaxy, and neither does Chewie. Neither of them are really tied to the Resistance in a truly meaningful way.
Let’s talk about Rose Tico. Rose is one of the central characters in The Last Jedi, and exhibits the central themes of the movie. She is the true believer of the Resistance, and over the course of the movie, she helps convince Finn to be more than who he is. Finn starts the movie as someone unconcerned with the war, just primarily concerned with saving his friends. But Rose shows him the cost of war, and the necessity of picking a side. She’s able to do that because she believes in the Resistance and the spark of hope more than almost anyone else in the franchise, except maybe Leia. Rose is a central figure of The Last Jedi, and the fact that she does nothing important in Rise of Skywalker seems jarring. It’s jarring considering Kelly Marie Tran’s harassment, and everything surrounding that. It’s jarring because even if a major character is disliked, the solution isn’t to abandon them entirely – it’s to redeem them in the eyes of the audience and do something with them. Star Wars canon gives us Ashoka Tano, a character in The Clone Wars series who starts off as whiny and irritating, but grows to be a strong, endearing individual. Yeah, Dominic Monoghan and Jannah feel like replacements for Rose, but more than anything else, Rose ought to have Lando’s role. I love having Lando in this movie, but if there’s any characters in canon who should be recruiting people in the Resistance, it ought to be Leia and Rose. If you really want to limit Leia’s screentime, this would easily allow that. More than that, though, Rose just makes sense to go recruit people, and to inspire hope again.
While we’re talking about Leia, we ought to bring back that theme of obligations. Because it hangs heavily over her character in this movie, and in all the worst ways. Now, I love Leia. From her introduction, she’s been this powerful female character, able to go toe-to-toe with the rest of the cast. But she’s never been given the development or complexity than anyone around her has received. She isn’t challenged like Han or Luke are in Empire Strikes Back, she’s just sort of a love object. Her roles in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi give her dignity and authority, but it still feels like a missed opportunity that her return doesn’t deepen her character to the level it does for her co-stars. But that disservice is nothing compared to what she’s given in Rise of Skywalker. With Carrie Fisher deceased, this movie tries to reverse-engineer a performance from her, and it is sad to watch. Scenes are obviously edited around her, and she spends entire ‘conversations’ just kind of nodding or giving vague answers. Leia is in this movie solely because the creators feel obligated to include her, even to the detriment of her own character. The one meaningful thing she does is participate in Ben’s redemption… I think. Her final scene is extraordinarily vague, to the point where I’ve heard a dozen interpretations as to what she’s actually doing. Putting… good energy in Kylo? Distracting him so Rey can stab him? It’s unclear. But the movie keeps dragging on her narrative, adding an entire prophecy plot retroactively. I don’t really want to talk about her prophecy because it’s a whole bag of worms, but suffice to say, it doesn’t really make sense, and doesn’t add to her character. It’s just more lore, not development. It tangentially involves Ben, but the fashion of that involvement is unclear, and the resolution is even more unclear. Since the whole thing is told posthumously, we don’t even get to see it affect her choices.
That should be most of what I, personally, have to say about Leia, but Abrams and Terrio keep adding fuel to the fire. In their interviews, they’ve talked about the decision to include the Force ghosts of Luke and Leia in the final scene. Again, this scene entirely feels obligatory – Rey buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers on Tatooine, a planet only the audience has any positive feelings towards. The fact that Luke and Leia are the only two who appear here seems odd; surely Ben should be present, if not the other Jedi. But Abrams and Terrio have said they intended to fix ‘the original sin’ of the franchise, which was separating Luke and Leia in Return of the Jedi. Which… doesn’t make any sense? It’s not like they had some inseparable gulf. I don’t know if they’re talking about the decision to make them siblings instead of romantic partners but… it’s a very weird outlook. After all, Luke and Leia were already reunited in a very tender scene in The Last Jedi. I don’t know what Abrams and Terrio think they’re fixing? Or why burying their lightsabers together accomplishes that? It’s just a very weird choice and kind of informs the sort of backward thinking that went into the character writing of this movie. They feel this weird obligation to fulfill old ‘sins’ that don’t even exist – and the onus to fulfill these sins is on Rey. She doesn’t make choices of her own, she simply resolves perceived holes in other characters’ arcs. But we’ll get there.
So, that is our entire supporting cast covered, including some heavy-hitters like the Emperor and Leia. I'll reiterate that this is an abbreviated discussion; I could go into further details on these characters, but I think that would begin to distract from the central points. What we see in this supporting cast is an unnecessary amount of additions that bloat the runtime more than they help it. The addition of newcomers necessarily detracts away from the focus our established cast can have. Moreover, much of what we do get from the established cast is just fueled by a sense of obligation to expectations and to the status quo. As a result, the story feels more experiential than structured, tossing back and forth without any real sense of direction. The villains are absurdly massive with ever-changing plans, and the heroes are scattered without receiving any significant development. The plot of Rise of Skywalker just sort of 'happens,' and its characters are pulled along with it.
I don't love what this movie does with its supporting cast, but a lot of this comes down to nitpicking. Sure, I think this movie would be a lot stronger by slimming down the cast size, but if the central characters had worked, I think I would have been fine with it. Alas, Rise of Skywalker totally fumbles every single central character arc. Find out how next week, with Part 2, where I'll follow Finn, Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, and Rey.
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