Feast your eyes on new photos from The Rise of Skywalker!

We’re creeping ever closer to the release of Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. The movie will see the resurgent Resistance engage the First Order in one final battle, as Rey and her friends take on Kylo Ren and his army. Oh yeah, and Palpatine is back, although we don’t know how or why. It’s gonna be wild.

Entertainment Weekly has released a bunch of new photos from Rise, as well as collector’s edition covers and exclusive interviews with the cast and crew. There’s a lot to unpack, so let’s hit the highlights!

First up, director J.J. Abrams describes the differences between The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. “We had more reshoots on Episode VII than this one,” he said. “We had more story adjustments on VII than this one. We didn’t know if these characters would work, if the actors would be able to carry a Star Wars movie.”

"There were a lot of things we didn’t know. On this, we knew who and what worked, and everyone is doing the best work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But the ambition of this movie is far greater than Force Awakens. What we set out to do was far more challenging. Everything is exponentially larger on this."

Obviously, we won’t know the full extent of what Abrams is talking about until Rise is in theaters, although there have been plenty of trailers and promos, with new ones popping up all the time. This one went up on the StarWarsMovies Instagram page today:

Still Abrams emphasizes that we haven’t seen anything yet. “The [trailers] that have come out are scratching the surface of what the movie is.”

Meanwhile, Daisy Ridley says that her character — Rey — has grown stronger in the Force since the end of The Last Jedi. (Episode IX is set about a year after the end of XIII.) “I have skills that have developed, but ‘confident’ isn’t a word I’d use to describe it,” Ridley said. “She’s definitely more in control of everything and can do new fun stuff, but she’s vulnerable and a little insecure about at all.”

Ridley also teases some upcoming plotlines for Rey, including the continuation of the ever-curious “Who are Rey’s parents?” question. “The parents thing is not satisfied — for her and for the audience,” she said. “That’s something she’s still trying to figure out — where does she come from.”

But didn’t we get answer to this question in The Last Jedi when Kylo Ren told Rey that her parents were nobodies who sold her for drinking money? “It’s not that she doesn’t believe it,” Ridley said carefully, “but she feels there’s more to the story. And she needs to figure out what’s come before so she can figure out what to do next…”

"New shot of Kylo Ren from The Rise of Skywalker from StarWarsLeaks"

Speaking of Kylo Ren, he’s gone through some changes too. Star Adam Driver says the scene where Ren killed Supreme Leader Snoke in The Last Jedi was “kind of a birth moment for him.”

"He had all of these pseudo father figures that he had to either live up to or literally kill to become his own person for the first time."

Kylo Ren and Rey have had an interesting relationship since the beginning, ever since he tried to use the Force to pull the location of Luke Skywalker’s hiding spot from her mind in The Force Awakens. Things got even more complicated after their shirtless mind-meld session in The Last Jedi. Are they enemies? Friends? Partners? The jury is still out.

Abrams sees the pair as “two sides of the same coin,” saying that “even when they’re not together they still haunt each other in a way — they know they are each other’s unresolved business.”

Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) will get deeper, more involved story-arcs in The Rise of Skywalker, which is exactly what each actor wanted for their character. Boyega was looking forward to being something more than the “comedic goofy dude who never gets stuff done.”

"I definitely wanted more after Episode VIII. [Rise of Skywalker] makes Finn’s Episode VIII arc make more sense. We got to bring out a side of Finn we haven’t seen."

Part of that new side may come courtesy of the actors himself. According to Boyega, Abrams encouraged them to improvise dialogue on the set, which will hopefully make for some fun moments. “J.J. came back with a new energy and new vibe,” Boegya said. “He wanted dialogue to be messy and natural, and that got all of us really excited.”

The new characters aren’t the only ones in the spotlight. Legacy characters like C-3PO will play big roles, too. In fact, star Anthony Daniels — who has played the nervous droid since A New Hope back in 1977 — made it sound like Episode IX could be the character’s finest hour. “In previous recent movies Threepio has just been kind of window dressing, something on the mantlepiece, you polish it and dust it o when guests are coming,” he said. “J.J. and Chris came up with this aspect of Threepio we had not seen before that’s remarkably clever. They go down deep into ancient Star Wars and came up with something refreshingly new.”

And then, of course, there’s General Leia, who returns even though Carrie Fisher passed in 2016. “Saying Leia had passed away, or that she was off somewhere else, felt like a cheat,” Abrams said. “Then I remembered we had these scenes that we hadn’t used from Episode VII. It was like finding this impossible answer to this impossible question. Suddenly we had classic Carrie in these amazing moments. So when you see in the movie, it’s her, she’s there. It’s not like there’s some crazy digital trickery. She’s just in the movie.”

Standbys like Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) will be returning, as well. And of course, there are always Stormtroopers (and in the photo below, Snowtroopers as well):

Why do the bad guys wear all the capes? Lando excluded, of course.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters on December 20.

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