We are less than one month away from the upcoming saga-ending film “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” And as you might expect by now, given the money-printing machine that is Disney, the marketing for the flick has kicked into overdrive, with everyone associated with the film making the rounds and hinting at what we can expect in the upcoming space epic.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, JJ Abrams, the director of ‘Rise,’ talks about the scale of the new film, as well as the fans’ biggest question — will he completely undo everything that Rian Johnson did in ‘The Last Jedi?’
“‘Rise of Skywalker’ is] a far larger movie in terms of scale,” said the filmmaker comparing ‘Rise of Skywalker’ to his 2015 film ‘The Force Awakens.’ “Narratively, there’s much more going on everywhere I look — visual effects, more moving pieces. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever been involved in. By a lot.”
No matter the scale of ‘Rise’ or how it differs from ‘Force Awakens,’ the real question on every “Star Wars” fan’s mind is how Abrams will adopt (or ignore) elements of Rian Johnson’s 2017 film ‘The Last Jedi.’ That film has grown infamous in the eyes of fans, with Johnson taking huge risks and presenting a story that feels very different than what was done before by Abrams.
“When I read his first draft, it made me laugh because I saw that was his take and his voice,” said Abrams. “I got to watch cuts of the movie as he was working on it, as an audience member. And I appreciated the choices he made as a filmmaker that would probably be very different from the choices that I would have made. Just as he would have made different choices if he had made ‘Episode VII.’”
Abrams specifically mentioned “how dark Luke was” and the “subversion” found in Johnson’s film as surprising to him. That being said, there’s nothing that Johnson did in ‘The Last Jedi’ that is completely derailing the “inevitability” that Abrams saw when crafting the finale of the Skywalker Saga.
“I had a real sense with [‘Force Awakens’ co-screenwriter] Larry Kasdan about where things would go, potentially,” said Abrams. “And I think that, when I read Rian’s script, what I felt was that with everything that happens in that movie, and quite a lot does, nothing sort of obviated a sense of inevitability where I thought the story could go.”
Where the story goes, exactly, is still a mystery. We’ll find out for sure when “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” arrives in theaters on December 20.