Does “Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker” work to intentionally undo everything in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi?” As many have noted, there’s an alarming number of examples of how J.J. Abrams’ film seemingly tries to tear down everything established in Rian Johnson’s predecessor.
Academy Award-winning writer and ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ screenwriter Chris Terrio (“Argo”) has been making the rounds basically defending a lot of those decisions, and honestly, he makes a lot of good points about lineage, reclamation and things of that nature.
But he’s already walking about the reason why the character Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), introduced in ‘The Last Jedi,’ is so sidelined and largely absent in the film.
In an interview just a day or two old now, Terrio said Tran’s Rose was in the movie a lot more, but because of the lack of quality “photorealism” in certain scenes with General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher)—digitally inserted into the movie via old performance footage shot during ‘The Force Awakens’— those scenes had to be cut, thus reducing Rose’s role (who is stuck on the rebel base with Leia during the entire film).
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Now, Terrio is reversing course a little bit, but his walk back on the comments seems intended to apologize and not offend the artists at ILM, rather than assuage fans’ feelings or Trans for that matter.
Here’s what he said to Vulture:
“I badly misspoke if in an earlier statement I implied that any cut scenes between Rose and Leia were the fault of our VFX team and the wizards at ILM,” Terrio said. “In that earlier interview, I was referring to a specific scene in which Leia’s emotional state in Episode VII did not seem to match the scene we wrote for use in Episode IX, and so it was cut at the script stage before the VFX work was done. If we had chosen to use the scene, ILM would have made it look perfect. They always do. ILM performed actual miracles at every stage of the creative process in Episode IX. I remain in awe of their work.”
Well, there you go, I guess. Rose Tico, killed at the script stage of ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ because some of the footage they wanted to incorporate from ‘The Force Awakens’ didn’t quite work. As many point out, Terrio’s reasoning, don’t excuse the decision to exclude Rose from the main action, but that does, seem to be fair, seem more like a storytelling decision—too many characters is arguably just too many stories to serve in a big finale like this— rather than malicious intent. ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ is in theaters now and has grossed $725 million after nine days in theaters.
https://twitter.com/bdgrabinski/status/1211802131289669632?s=21
