Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker editor says The Last Jedi “undid” the trilogy

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was the most controversial film in the franchise’s history…until The Rise of Skywalker came a couple years later, anyway. At issue were the hard pivots from movie to movie. With The Force Awakens, director J.J. Abrams made a film that leaned heavily on Star Wars nostalgia and legacy characters, and seemed to be setting up lead character Rey (Daisy Ridley) to be part of that legacy. Then Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi  took the story in new directions, revealed that Rey was “no one” of great importance, and changed the tone. And then Abrams came back to helm The Rise of Skywalker, revealed that Rey was in fact someone with a storied past (she’s Palpatine’s clone’s granddaughter, it turns out), and reset the tone again.

It was a lot.

Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon worked as editors on The Force Awakens, with Brandon returning to edit The Rise of Skywalker as well. Speaking on the Light the Fuse podcast, they had some choice words for Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. “It’s very strange to have the second film so consciously undo the storytelling of the first one,” Markey said. “I’m sorry that’s what it felt like.”

I think The Last Jedi is the best film of the prequel trilogy, a cinematic beauty that took big risks. It was radically different from The Force Awakens, though, and really from any Star Wars film before it, what with Grumpy Old Man Luke hiding away in a remote part of the galaxy, Rey and Kylo Ren Force-skyping, pink-haired commanders sacrificing themselves to save the Resistance, and much more. And it’s been argued that Abrams made this problem worse still by not rolling with those punches. Instead, he undid some of the changes The Last Jedi made to the story and gave fans whiplash again, but Markey disputes that reading. “I don’t even feel that’s true about the third film,” she said. “It took where the second film ended and just tried to tell a story. I didn’t feel like it was consciously—it just didn’t feel that way to me.”

The real issue, viewed from some ways out, is that there wasn’t a singular vision behind the whole trilogy, which left it vulnerable to jarring shifts this way and that. In the end, the trilogy produced some wonderful moments, with The Last Jedi having some of the best, but the whole thing doesn’t hold together as well as it could have.

We’ll be waiting a while to see a new Star Wars movie. In the meantime, can I interest you in a book?

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h/t Cinemablend