Worth the weight of the galaxy

JJ Abrams knew fans wanted a satisfying conclusion to the Star Wars saga. He also knew he couldn’t do it without Carrie Fisher.

General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) in The Rise of Skywalker.

When it came to the final film in the Star Wars series, writer-director JJ Abrams faced a multitude of decisions. One of them, sadly, was necessitated by the sudden death of Carrie Fisher in December 2016.

“Obviously, losing Carrie was shocking and heartbreaking,” Abrams says. And it also became clear, he adds, “in trying to figure out how to tell this last story of the Skywalker saga, that it was utterly impossible to do without her. We knew we didn’t want to use any kind of CG, and we would not consider recasting”.

In the revival that began with The Force Awakens and continued with The Last Jedi, Fisher had reprised her role as Princess Leia, and her presence was widely regarded as a poignant, essential aspect of the new iteration.

Looking at unused footage from The Force Awakens provided the answer, Abrams says.

“There were a handful of scenes that started to tell us that there was a way we could do something incredibly special. And if we did it right, that would allow her to be part of the story. We started to do some tests to see if it was possible, and it clearly was.

“Obviously we did it with the utmost respect for Carrie, and her family, and her character.”

When I talk to Abrams, he’s finetuning and adjusting the movie. “I’m still in the editing room,” he says, “and I’m working on scenes with her. And it’s even stranger to me now that she’s gone, because she’s so present in the film.”

Daisy Ridley is Rey and Adam Driver is Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise ofLuke Skywalker

As the co-writer and director responsible for the first and last films in the new trilogy, Abrams had a longstanding philosophy in place. He had learned how to approach the Star Wars universe well before he became creatively involved with it. The lesson came from none other than George Lucas.

“As a kid I learned from George Lucas that you make the best decision at the time,” says Abrams, who mentions Return of the Jedi (1983), which came out when he was a teenager. “I remember when Return of the Jedi was Revenge of the Jedi.” This wasn’t simply a working title: it appeared on a teaser trailer and advertising materials. “They made the Revenge of the Jedi poster. And I have that poster.”

Lucas changed the title, deciding that the notion of revenge was inappropriate for a Jedi knight. “And I remember as a kid thinking, ‘Oh, wow, he’s figuring this thing out as he goes, and that’s beautiful’,” Abrams says. “It was an encouraging thing to realise that you make the best plan that you can, and that even the greatest storytellers among us are going to have addendums and adjustments and tweaks.”

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker — to give it its full title — had already had its fair share of adjustments, beginning with a change of director in pre-production. Originally it was Colin Trevorrow, chosen to take over from Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed The Last Jedi. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Abrams had set a new trilogy in train, bringing back figures from the past, and introducing new characters, notably Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega). The film also gave us the death of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) at the hands of Kylo Ren, his son.

When Trevorrow was replaced, ostensibly over creative differences, Abrams returned. He has quite a directorial track record when it comes to relaunching franchises: he did it with the 2009 Star Trek movie, he did it with Mission: Impossible III and with The Force Awakens. Dan Golding, critic, academic and author of Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy, calls him a “legacy film auteur of sorts” who has “worked within the contemporary Hollywood system to produce a body of work concerned with history, nostalgia, and ­transferral”.

READ MORE: Touching tribute to Carrie Fisher | Watch Carrie Fisher’s original Star Wars audition video | How the Jedi got back in the fight

As the release date of the final movie approaches, speculation continues to grow about its content and, inevitably, its relationship with past films. The Star Wars release strategy involves a carefully managed promotional build-up of information and anticipation, as well as the odd piece of misdirection.

When it comes to finality, it’s worth remembering, Golding says, that this is the third time Star Wars has ended. When Return of the Jedi came out, Time magazine had a cover story that proclaimed “George Lucas & Friends Wrap It All Up”.

The prequel trilogy that finished with Revenge of the Sith also seemed to mark a conclusion. At the time there was no expectation of more.

There are some elements Golding expects to see in the final film. “I definitely feel Kylo Ren will do something helpful to Rey, I feel that’s a pretty safe prediction,” he says. He thinks, however, that a shot in a trailer that could be seen as an intimation that Rey has gone over to the Dark Side is “total misdirection”.

The one prediction he would confidently make about the ninth instalment, he says, is that there will be a rapid run through past history, a kind of covert greatest hits recap of what has gone before: in Avengers: Endgame, for example, this was done in a time-travel sequence, and in Frozen II it happens in a song.

It is an increasing tendency in franchise cinema, he says, a move in which filmmakers tell the audience: “Remember that thing. We’ll present it in an interesting way, we’ll reposition it, often in such a way that it doesn’t seem as if we’re re-presenting it.” How comprehensive might this be? “Definitely this trilogy and the first one,” Golding says. “The prequels? I don’t know. With Sheev Palpatine (Darth Vader’s master) maybe. There have been rumours for some time that Hayden Christensen (who played the older Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy) has been on set.”

One of the big reveals, at the end of a teaser trailer, was the sound of a cackling laugh — immediately recognisable to fans as that of the villainous Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).

McDiarmid had been on set, it turns out, but it was a well-kept secret. Yet there are plenty of questions about his part in the narrative. He appeared in the first and the prequel trilogy: he was seemingly killed at the end of Return of the Jedi by Darth Vader. Fan theories include the notion that he might be what is known as a “Force ghost”.

Palpatine, it seems, was one of Abrams’s ideas. He was involved in forward planning when he took on The Force Awakens aka VII. “We had a very loose plan at the beginning of VII,” he says. “There was a sense of where the thing could go, and where episode VIII went” — The Last Jedi — “did not in any way derail where I thought it might be going, what sort of direction. But I didn’t of course have every specific thing figured out, I was very much focused on trying to make VII work.”

Another returning figure in the new film is Lando Calrissian, an old buddy of Han Solo from the first trilogy, played once again by Billy Dee Williams. There is speculation there might be a connection between Lando Calrissian and a new Rise of Skywalker character, Jannah, played by Naomi Ackie. She is the first person Abrams mentions when we talk about new elements in the final film. He highlights Ackie’s performance. “I cannot possibly say enough about her, she’s just remarkable,” he says.

Jannah is a warrior who wields a space bow and arrow, and rides a horse-like creature called an orbak. She seems to be a member of the Resistance, or so it is intimated. There has been fan speculation that Jannah could be Calrissian’s daughter, something Ackie has neither confirmed nor denied. “Lando is a very charming man, so he could have children all over the universe, that’s all I’m saying,” she told Stephen Colbert when he raised the possibility in an interview.

Another newcomer is Keri Russell (The Americans), whose first lead role was as a college student in Abrams’s TV series, Felicity. Russell is cast as Zorii Bliss, a bounty hunter and a scammer. Once again, there have been fan theories about her identity. In The Last Jedi, Rey agreed with Kylo Ren’s characterisation of her parents as “nobodies” who sold her off for drinking money. There are fan theorists hoping this will prove to have been misleading — they’d love Rey to be the daughter of Luke. Or Han Solo. For some, even Zorii Bliss would do.

Abrams hasn’t said anything conclusive one way or the other, although he has intimated that we might learn more in the last instalment about Rey’s antecedents — which might or might not reinforce what was said in The Last Jedi.

He also promises that we’ll find out more in this last film about the Force, that mysterious essential element of the Star Wars mythology. “For me, one of the defining strokes of genius of George Lucas in the very first movie was the idea of introducing this power and spirituality that connects all living things.

“You will see in this movie some things done with the Force that you haven’t seen before.”

When it comes to the Dark Side of the Force, Abrams says: “That power is raw power that can be used in either direction, and the question is what you do with that. The Dark Side is greed, the Dark Side is selfishness, is not having compassion. In a way, it’s teaching fundamental morality and the golden rule of treating others the way that you wish to be treated, but it’s about so much more than that.”

More is also less, it seems. “I think that one of the brilliant things that George did in the original trilogy was do very little explaining of it. And in a way the more you talk about it, sometimes the less impactful it is. Allowing people to imbue it with their own meaning is part of the way it works so well in the original trilogy.” (The second trilogy introduced a quasi-scientific aspect that rather served to undermine the premise.)

When Abrams talks about bringing the saga to an end, he says that as a writer, he’s struck by how often you can agonise over a direction or a set of possibilities, only to discover that the answer was there all along. There can be no impossible twists, in the sense that “everything that happens in IX has been set up, or exists in some way, in reference or specificity, in the prior movies”.

The Skywalker saga is “a familial story, an operatic, heightened story, something that was going to involve new characters and a new narrative, but existing in the shadow of the old narrative”.

“The goal here is clearly to leave people feeling there is stuff to still consider and debate. And there’s nuance, and at the same time we need to make sure that people feel like there’s an absolutely emotional, visceral and rousing and satisfying conclusion.”

The ending, he says, should be more than “the biggest threat against the galaxy, the biggest battle”. It should also be “the biggest internal struggle. Hopefully it’s something that’s as emotional as it is visually spectacular”.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is released on December 19.