The Rise of Skywalker is dividing critics and fans, some of whom love it for ending the 42-year-old Skywalker Saga in epic fashion, and some of whom feel it was overloaded with plot and doesn’t follow through on some of the innovations introduced in The Last Jedi.
That debate will probably be playing out for a while, as the movie rakes in cash around the world. Meanwhile, screenwriter Chris Terrio — who wrote the movie alongside director J.J. Abrams — is giving insight into some of the decisions made for the movie.
Caution: There are SPOILERS below.
Easily the biggest twist comes right at the beginning, when we learn that Emperor Palpatine, last seen getting tossed down a shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi, is alive, and has been orchestrating events from behind the scenes for the last two movies.
So here’s the million-dollar question: was it always the plan to bring Palpatine back, or was this an idea Terrio and Abrams came up with when they sat down to write? While Terrio wouldn’t give a firm answer, going by what he told Awards Daily, it sounds like the latter. “Well, I can’t speak to [Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy’s] overall intent,” Terrio said. “That was certainly discussed and was discussed before I ever came on. Kathy had this overall vision that we had to be telling the same story for nine episodes. Although from the sleight of hand of Episode VII and Episode VIII, you wouldn’t necessarily know immediately that we were telling the same story. She thought it would be a very strong end for the ninth movie.”
"This fits well with J.J. because he loves magic tricks. He will often talk in metaphors and magic tricks, and so in Episode VII and Episode VIII, you think you’re watching one thing but Episode IX tells you to watch more closely – you were actually watching something else. When you rewatch the earlier films, things start to make additional sense. Ren and his devotion to the idea of his grandfather. The voice that he’s always heard in his head. The certain similarities between Snoke and Palpatine. The intention was that, by the time you get to Episode IX, you realize there were real reasons this is all happening. It all shows how this story is being fought cyclically through the series."
I think Terrio also tips his hand a little when talking about how he and Abrams conceived of Kylo Ren’s redemption arc. “We knew that Rey and Ren were utterly key to this trilogy, but we also felt that there was no way that we were going to not find a path to redemption for Kylo Ren, the son of Han and Leia,” he said. “We felt that right from the beginning, when J.J. established Kylo Ren in Episode VII, there was a war going on inside him and that he had been corrupted by something bigger than himself and had made bad choices along the way. J.J. and I felt we needed to find a way in which he could be redeemed, and that gets tricky at the end of Episode VIII because Snoke is gone. The biggest bad guy in the galaxy at that moment seemingly is Kylo Ren.”
"There needed to be an antagonist that the good guys could be fighting, and that’s when we really tried to laser in on who had been the great source of evil behind all of this for so long. That’s when we really started aggressively pursuing this idea that there is old evil that didn’t die. The source of the evil in the galaxy is this dark spirit waiting for its revenge and biding its time. The entity known as Palpatine in this version – his body died in Return of the Jedi – is patient and has been waiting. He dug his fox hole and has been waiting for his chance to re-establish his total domination."
Okay, so it sounds to me like the pair wanted to redeem Kylo Ren, but didn’t think they could do that if he was the main bad guy, which is how things stood at the end of The Last Jedi after he killed Snoke and became the Supreme Leader of the First Order. So to get to Kylo’s redemption, they had to find a huge villain against whom Kylo and Rey could team up, and Palpatine fit the bill.
Of course, bringing in Palpatine this late in the game required a lot of exposition, which resulting a pretty plot-heavy first half of the movie, as we get up to speed on how and why Palpatine is back, and where to find him. “One of the challenges that we had at the beginning of this, and it’s good to have a challenge like this for a third part, was how to kind of reset the board a little bit at the beginning, so that we could reorient ourselves in the galaxy and really understand what has been at play in the galaxy all this time,” Terrio told IndieWire. “The first scene of Kylo Ren and Palpatine meeting really had to be a scene about questions, which is the fact there’s this new fleet. But it also had to be about answers, which is to finally tell you what we’ve been watching for these other two movies, and the fact that Snoke may have died in ‘The Last Jedi,’ but there still is this man behind the curtain, this malevolence in the galaxy.”
In fact, there was so much plot that Awards Daily wondered if Terrio and Abrams ever discussed splitting this movie up into two parts. “I wish we could have done that,” Terrio said. “There is a lot of plot in the movie, and as a writer, you always want scenes to let the plot breathe more. If there were a way of doing it, splitting it would have been my dream.”
"We could have written these characters forever. There was so much backstory that had to be left by the wayside. I wish that we could have that, but George always said it was nine movies. That was the natural size of the saga, and so, other than a few initial discussions, we never really advanced that conversation. Of course, as a writer, it breaks your heart to leave stuff on the table that you think would have given the story more depth and nuance and to give the characters more to do. Speaking for myself and not on the part of the studio, I do wish there could have been a “Part 1” and a “Part 2.”"
One character who got a little lost in the plot dump was Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), who didn’t have much screentime after having a bigger role in The Last Jedi. Terrio chocks that up to the production having to grapple with the death of Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), who passed away before getting to film many new scenes for the movie. What you do see is mostly recycled footage from the first two films, plus some clever use of body doubles and special effects.
"One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to. We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together. As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes unfortunately fell out of the film. The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose. We adore the character, and we adore Kelly – so much so that we anchored her with our favorite person in this galaxy, General Leia."
Something else Terrio and Abrams changed from The Last Jedi was the nature of Rey’s parents. In Episode VIII, they’re revealed to be “nobodies,” just junk traders who sold Rey off for drug money. In Rise, we learn that that’s…kind of true, but that there was more to it. Rey is, in fact, Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter, and her parents sold her so her grandpa wouldn’t find her.
Rey (Daisy Ridley) in STAR WARS: EPISODE IX
Again, Terrio wouldn’t say if that plot development was always in place, but he does talk about how he and Abrams approached it. “J.J. always had an idea in his head of where he wanted us to emotionally leave the trilogy, and I think he wanted Rey to have to contend with the very worst things about herself that we could imagine,” Terrio said. “When Rey was wondering what her place in all this was — and she articulated that in ‘Episode 8’ — but she wondered it in ‘Episode 7,’ too. J.J. always felt that she should get the worst possible news. In a way, the worst possible news for the Rey of ‘Episode 8’ is that she is just a child of junk traders, which is true. That’s not contradicted by what you learn in this film, but that she’s the descendant of someone who represents the opposite of all that the Skywalkers represent.”
"Rey has finally found a home with Leia and with the Resistance. She’s finally found a family, and what she discovers in the course of the movie, she thinks is going to displace her from the one family that she’s ever known, because how could they ever…? How could Leia, who represents the Republic and all that’s good in the galaxy, how could Leia possibly take her in as a kind of a daughter, how could she take in the granddaughter of her greatest enemy and the greatest enemy of her family? I think Luke has the answer to that, which is that both Luke and Leia saw her heart and her spirit and said, in spite of midichlorians, that there are things that are stronger than blood."
Of course, Rey eventually does choose her better nature and sides with the Rebels, and even declares herself to be “Rey Skywalker” at the end of the movie. “retty early on, we discovered that we wanted her to say that,” Terrio said. “It was shortly after we had decided that we wanted to really embrace this idea that Rey had come from the darkest lineage imaginable, but in the course of the movie, a Palpatine becomes a Skywalker. That for us felt like the fitting end, because at the beginning of the trilogy, there’s a Skywalker who’s essentially being corrupted again like Anakin was, to become more like Palpatine. In the end, we thought that the final victory of the Light and the final act of self-affirmation for Rey was to declare that despite her blood she is a Skywalker. At that moment, the Skywalkers truly win the family saga.”
Will they keep winning? Disney is taking a break from Star Wars movies for a while, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this galaxy back up on the big screen before too long.
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