Obviously this article contains ENORMOUS spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Please stop reading if you haven’t seen it yet. Stop now. Now! This is your last warning.
There’s a new Star Wars in theaters, and everyone knows what that means: it’s time to argue, get mad, and over-dissect every and everything about the adventures of a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is finally out in the world, and fans everywhere are getting a taste of how the saga of Rey, Kylo Ren, Finn, Poe, and BB-8 reaches it’s conclusion. And while the merit of the story itself is certainly in the eye of the beholder (the movie is fairly objectively better than its 57% Rotten Tomatoes score currently indicates), J.J. Abrams’ story makes a number of deliberate choices throughout that are clearly meant to invalidate and change things that Rian Johnson did with the story in The Last Jedi.
These changes and retcons take place on a scale from petty moments and throwaway lines to major, universe-altering plot twists. Again, the movie is Star Wars: if you’re a fan of this world and these characters, you’ll enjoy it. But when the original trilogy had Empire Strikes Back serve as a game changer, Return of the Jedi didn’t try to undo the bold moves the former movie made; it embraced them, and rode that to an exciting finale. As Justin Chang suggests in his review for the Los Angeles Times, it’s clear that the trilogy here could’ve benefitted from a unified vision, because the cross-cancellations here are a lot for level-headed fans to bear.
Without further ado, some of the most clear ways that Rise of Skywalker changed and reacted to moments and plot points from The Last Jedi:
Supreme Leader Snoke
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One of the most important things that The Last Jedi does for the Kylo Ren character is allowing him the chance to kill his master, Supreme Leader Snoke. Where it really succeeds, though, is at the crossroads after: where Darth Vader turned back to the light after killing his master in Emperor Palpatine, Kylo Ren only wanted more power—he became Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, got angrier and angrier (yelling “Blow that piece of junk OUT OF THE SKY!” is one of the best moments in Star Wars history).
The bold move to kill Snoke amounts to basically nothing early on in Rise of Skywalker, as Kylo arrives on Exegol, a secret sith planet, and meets Palpatine (or some larger sith force calling itself Palpatine). He says “I killed Snoke, and I’ll kill you,” to which Palpatine lets him know that he created Snoke; we see several Snoke clones (?) floating in a tank of water. Snoke, essentially, just looks like a larger sith pawn piece in retrospect.
Kylo reassembling his helmet
Another big Last Jedi character moment came when Kylo Ren was insulted by Snoke as “just a child in a mask.” He smashes his mask into a million pieces at this point, a major character choice.
It was no secret that Kylo re-assembled his mask (thanks to the trailers and promotional materials for Rise of Skywalker) but it’s still a petty way to go back on what was basically just a simple character choice, choosing to show of Adam Driver’s incredibly emotive face and how strong he is at emoting both anger and frustration (check out Netflix’s Marriage Story as soon as possible!) rather that hiding behind a Vader-esque mask.
The ‘Holdo Maneuver’ reference
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Laura Dern played Vice Admiral Holdo in The Last Jedi, a loyal lieutenant to Leia who takes rank when she’s incapacitated. In a climactic and jaw-droppingly visceral scene, Holdo sacrifices herself and takes out an entire Star Destroyer by Kamikaze-ing her way through it; the audio drops out in the scene, and it’s a stunning moment.
In Rise of Skywalker, Dominic Monaghan (who played Charlie on Lost, which was produced by J.J. Abrams) shows up in a small role as a Resistance member. He asks when planning why they can’t plan more “Holdo Maneuver”-esque moves, to which Poe quickly shoots him down: that move is one in a million. (We should also add that ‘Holdo Maneuver’ is not an in-world reference; for some reason Monaghan’s character is using the same verbiage as internet fans). This is another way that’s rather petty, but finds Rise of Skywalker poo-pooing one of the more memorable moments of The Last Jedi.
Luke grabbing his lightsaber
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One of the more memorable moments in The Last Jedi comes when Luke, picking up right where the ending of The Force Awakens leaves off, takes the lightsaber that Rey gives him, and tosses it off a cliff, over his shoulder. In Rise of Skywalker, Rey is destroying her lightsaber and throwing it into the fiery wreckage of a ship, and Luke grabs the lightsaber and says the Jedi weapon “deserves more respect” than that.
Now, this is a weird one—Luke at the start of The Last Jedi is clearly supposed to be a defeated, crusty, old hermit. What’s happened in the last 30 years with Kylo, The First Order, and more has changed him, and by the end of the movie, he’s back. So his saying that the weapon deserves more respect could be seen as Luke being back! But it could also be seen as Abrams, once again, patently disregarding and attempting to dunk on and change a decision that Rian Johnson made.
Rose being sidelined
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Rose is one of the major characters introduced in The Last Jedi, and actress Kelly Marie Tran does a really nice job bringing another face into the story that’s not a major force power player like Rey or Kylo Ren, but just another presence that lets us know that there’s more going on in this world than the giant major power struggle. She’s also (along with Benicio Del Toro’s codebreaker) one of the only major characters introduced in The Last Jedi for the first time.
In Rise of Skywalker, Rose declines to join the group going on a mission at the beginning of the movie, instead saying that Leia needs her at the base. This results in Rose only having a handful of lines/moments in the movie, and seeing a greatly diminished role overall. There was no reason why she couldn’t have been written a larger role alongside the main gang—Finn, Poe, Rey, Chewie, BB-8—having their adventure.
Rey’s parents/family
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Look, we don’t know what was mapped out before this trilogy even began production and what was added along the way as a bonus. But as someone who really loved The Force Awakens, it always seemed clear to me that Rey was supposed to be someone more than she knew. From the way Han and Maz Kanata talk about her when she’s not around, to Kylo’s dramatic and angry “What girl?” line when he was in the midst of a temper tantrum.
In The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson either didn’t pick up on those bread crumbs that Abrams and company left in Force Awakens, or chose to willfully ignore them; instead, he chose to have Kylo tell Rey that her parents, indeed, were no one. “Your parents were nobodies who sold you for drinking money,” he tells her in a dramatic scene. “You come from nothing. You’re nothing.”
Rian Johnson’s reasoning for this always made sense: he made a list of all the possibilities, and the best idea he had behind her parents was the idea of “breaking out from the notion that the Force is this genetic thing that you have to be tied to somebody to have. It’s the ‘anybody can be president’ idea, which I liked introducing.” And in a story where everyone who’s super important seems to come from the same ‘royal’ bloodline, the idea that anyone can be the hero of the story could be a valuable theme to instill. There was, also, the possibility that Kylo Ren was lying to Rey—he’s the villain, after all.
But what Rise of Skywalker does isn’t consistent with the pattern set by either prior movie; it doesn’t follow the Force Awakens idea that even Kylo knows that Rey is someone of greater importance, nor does it follow The Last Jedi idea that she’s actually no one. In an early scene, Kylo Ren learns from Palpatine that Rey “isn’t who you think she is.” And indeed, she turns out to be Palpatine’s granddaughter; Rey’s parents chose to be no one to protect her, and their eventually being taken away was to be killed by his order.
The idea that Rey could come from Palpatine’s blood isn’t out of nowhere; her fighting style and pull toward the dark when training with Luke make sense. But it’s a story in Rise of Skywalker that doesn’t build on what was put forth in the way that, say Return of the Jedi does with Empire; instead it just builds itself up from just about nothing.