The camera spins around the two figures as they stand for an awkward amount of time staring at each other, epic music swelling in the background. Take the lightsabers: In the last shot of Abrams’ The Force Awakens, Rey presents Luke with his old lightsaber. The tension between the two filmmakers pervades every directorial devision. It feels as if Abrams read every critical tweet in Johnson’s mentions from the last two years and answered each one, scene by scene. The Rise of Skywalker is not just a thematic refutation of what came before. If Johnson begged the franchise to let the past go, Abrams counters with a movie so obsessed with history that it literally resurrects every important character from the original George Lucas trilogy, as Force Ghosts, memories or, in the case of Palpatine, some sort of Force zombie. What is somewhat surprising, however, is that Abrams seems to have capitulated to that contingent of fans with The Rise of Skywalker. So it’s not all that surprising that a film in which an iconic male hero reveals himself to be a rather cynical grump and a new female hero rises to become even more powerful than the men who came before, would rankle a loud subset of fans. Another set of fans tried to tank the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Marvel’s first female superhero movie, Captain Marvel, before it was released - forcing the site to change how fans review films. Leslie Jones faced a starkly similar experience when she took a role in an all-female Ghostbusters reboot. (There are, of course, legitimate critiques of the movie not rooted in sexism or racism, but as with all things on the Iinternet the bigots tend to find a way to be the loudest.) The harassment targeted at Johnson and several of the cast members - most notably Kelly Marie Tran, who was driven from social media by racist and sexist trolls unhappy with the film - manifested in a campaign to “remake” The Last Jedi. And yet it proved rather unpopular with a small but loud contingent of fans who have put quite a bit of time and energy into their worship of what came before, namely Luke Skywalker.
Johnson’s thesis offered a way forward for films too often bogged down by their predecessors. Kill it, if you have to.” Only then could the new cast step outside the original trio’s shadows and create something fresh. Hero Luke Skywalker and villain Kylo Ren don’t agree on much, but in that movie they kept repeating the same sentiment over and over again. If Rey’s parents were nobodies, as Johnson tried to establish in that film, that meant that not just Skywalkers and Palpatines could be the heroes and villains of these stories: Anyone could be a Jedi (including the enslaved kid with the broom featured in the last shot of Johnson’s film.) Shaking off the dust of past movies allowed for new kinds of character arcs and stories, and a path for Rey that didn’t fall in step exactly with Luke’s before her.