<em>Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker </em>Might Spark an Old Fight
Luke Skywalker is dead. Rey’s parents are “nobody.” Yet Star Wars: Episode IX will be subtitled The Rise of Skywalker. What Skywalker is rising? From where to where? The name is a provocation—one very much in line with the director J. J. Abrams’s love of teasing audiences like a magician. He promises huge, reality-shifting twists. Behind the curtain often lies something familiar.
The teaser that debuted at Friday’s Celebration in Chicago is even less informative than previous teasers for Disney’s revamped saga, which is saying something. It opens with Rey, the biomes: a desert. “We’ve passed on all we know,” Luke Skywalker, or his ghost, says in voice-over. “A thousand generations live in you now. But this is your fight.” Out of the distance comes a souped-up TIE fighter. As Rey hurls herself over it, lightsaber in hand, ’s bullet time appears to come to the Galaxy Far, Far Away. It’s a statement piece of an opening—a reassertion that is, first, a nifty, visceral hybrid of Westerns, sci-fi, kung-fu flicks, and myth.
