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Monday, December 30, 2019

Star Wars Writer Says Rise of Skywalker Does Not Undo The Last Jedi - Vanity Fair

Who could have predicted that a new Star Wars movie would be controversial? Following The Rise of Skywalker’s debut earlier this month, certain segments of the discussion surrounding the film have focused on perceived breaks it made with the Skywalker saga’s previous installment, The Last Jedi. But screenwriter Chris Terrio, who wrote Rise of Skywalker, insists that he and Abrams were not trying to reverse director Rian Johnson’s work on the previous film. Critics who believe this to be the case, he said, are “missing the point.”

Speaking with the Wrap, Terrio said there’s no rivalry between Abrams and Johnson. Instead, writing Rise of Skywalker involved “taking the ideas that came from [The Last Jedi] and trying to complicate them and develop them and to have some new surprises.” The films, he said, are “in dialogue” with each other.

The Rise of Skywalker does include several reveals that seem to pivot away from what Johnson sought to achieve with The Last Jedi. Rey’s parentage is the starkest example. In the previous film, Daisy Ridley's protagonist was said to have unremarkable origins—but in Rise of Skywalker, director J.J. Abrams made her a Palpatine. That move, Terrio said, “doesn’t detract at all from the democratization of the Force.” After all, the film also indicates that John Boyega’s Finn and others without famous relatives are also Force sensitive. Instead, Terrio said, making Rey the granddaughter of the biggest villain in the franchise only deepens her story.

“This idea that the royalty of the Dark Side was put in a basket and floated down the river, to then grow up in the most improbable of circumstances and then finally to be offered the throne, felt extremely strong to us,” he said, adding later, “We thought that was a more dramatically interesting predicament...not only that everything is resolved and that Rey is at peace with her past, but that she has even worse information than [in The Last Jedi.] So I think it’s a development of dramatic ideas, and it’s not a rejection. And I think that when critics try to act as though our film is some sort of spat between two directors, they’re not understanding how writers think.”

Part of the reason Rise of Skywalker’s tweaks on the Last Jedi story have faced such scrutiny might be the comments Abrams made during a New York Times interview during promotion for the film. During that interview, Abrams praised The Last Jedi for being “full of surprises and subversion and all sorts of bold choices”—but added that “it’s a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don’t think that people go to Star Wars to be told, ‘This doesn’t matter.’” That said, Abrams also made sure to say that the franchise needed a film like Johnson’s to stay in balance. The Rise of Skywalker, he said, “needed a pendulum swing in one direction in order to swing in the other.”

And Abrams, too, has rejected the notion that his film seeks to undo the work of its predecessor; at a post-screening Q&A earlier this month, he noted that Johnson even consulted on the production’s story. “We had conversations with Rian at the beginning,” he said. “It’s been nothing but collaborative.” In making the film, he said, “We knew starting this that any decision we made—a design decision, a musical decision, a narrative decision—would please someone and infuriate someone else. And they’re all right.”

Read Vanity Fair’s own discussion with Terrio and Abrams about the filmmaking decisions that went into the late Carrie Fisher’s final screen appearance, here.

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Star Wars Writer Says Rise of Skywalker Does Not Undo The Last Jedi - Vanity Fair
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