We’re roughly five months out from the theatrical debut of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last movie in the Skywalker saga. J.J. Abrams has returned to direct the final film of the trilogy he began with The Force Awakens in 2015 and will hopefully reenergize a fanbase that was divided by 2017’s The Last Jedi. Just how will he do that? Well, if a recent soundbite from super-fan/nerd icon Kevin Smith is any indication, the final scene holds the answer.
Speaking with IGN at last week’s San Diego Comic-Con, Smith described his visit to Pinewood Studios: “I went to London at one point and visited the set,” he said. “And there was this scuttlebutt about this set there at Pinewood, a big set that they were like ‘you have to see this. When you see it, it will melt your mind.'”
Kevin Smith talks about the last shot of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: crew members said seeing it would "melt your mind." #SDCC2019 pic.twitter.com/BtJ4E06hu9
— IGN (@IGN) July 20, 2019
Smith asked J.J. Abrams about the set, but the director warned him off. “You don’t want this spoiled,” he told him. “You want to be in the theater when this happens.”
Consider me hyped.
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Speaking of the final shot of Episode IX, Daisy Ridley (Rey) told People TV’s Couch Surfing podcast that she “was the last person to wrap” during filming. “It was my final shot and I’m just crying in the shot,” she said. “It was incredibly dramatic.”
"I hugged a number of people and then got in the car and looked out the window like I was in a music video: tears rolling down my face, hand to the window, thinking about days gone past."
Ridley caught her big break with The Force Awakens, so I can only imagine how hard it was to say goodbye to something that made such a huge impact in her life. For The Rise of Skywalker, Ridley went through some extreme lightsaber training, and told Wired it will “have perhaps one of the most epic fights in Star Wars.”
“The interesting thing about this film is that we concentrate more on the fact that are light,” Ridley said. “Because the lightsabers were so heavy, as Eunice said, who is our new stunt coordinator, that it was more like broadsword fighting, which isn’t technically what it’s supposed to be because lightsabers are supposed to be light, by nature.”
It sounds like Ridley and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren) will finally get a chance to face each other in a real lightsaber battle. Sure, they briefly faced off in The Force Awakens, but Rey had just come into her Force powers and she might have lost if Kylo wasn’t already wounded. In The Last Jedi, they teamed up to face Snoke’s Praetorian Guard before Kylo and Luke had their duel…which wasn’t really a duel for reasons you’ll know if you watched the movie. So yeah, I’d say we’re due for an “epic” lightsaber battle.
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