![]() “That’s too bad,” he says, “Chewie kind of likes you.” But we all know how good Mr. When she affirms her intention to go back to Jakku, Han makes a quintessentially Harrison Ford-ian quirk of the mouth. When they’re landing on a lush planet and Rey says she never imagined there could be so much green, the camera lingers on him staring at her - then he immediately offers her a job. No less a mentor figure than Han Solo gets in on the messaging. Rey begins The Force Awakens as the heart-tugging fusion of a young hero about to embark on her greatest journey, and Fry’s dog.Īs the movie continues, it repeatedly emphasizes that Rey cannot fill both of these archetypes at once. It’s a vision of her own future, and the realization strikes her so hard that she stops, lowering her arms as if suddenly tired.īut at the same time, we learn that Rey is terrified to leave the planet, clinging to her last memory of her parents, who said they would come back for her. She looks up from her work to see a wrinkled old woman doing exactly the same. In one of her early scenes, understated and effective, Rey is scrubbing grit from the machine parts she’s gathered to trade for bare nourishment. The Force Awakens tells us that Rey longs to leave Jakku. Rey begins the trilogy not just by escaping the physical prison of her home planet, but by escaping a more psychological prison she’s created for herself. Rey, her parents, and the path of The Force Awakens This huge story turn is set up as if it will sow some self-doubt in her mind - but Rey’s story has always been about letting go of her past. Which wouldn’t otherwise be so confusing, if Rise hadn’t introduced a big revelation about her parentage: Rey is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, and the key to an apparently pretty big plot to bring about Sith domination of the galaxy. In the final line of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey codifies her new identity, as Force ghosts of Luke and Leia look on - she is Rey Skywalker, and her destiny is what she makes of it. The movie’s final scene has one answer, but the rest of Rise has a very different one. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is here, we can finally look at Rey’s journey in its entirety, and see how its final installment definitively answers the question The Force Awakens proposed: Do Rey’s parents matter? And what was the story of Rey about in the end? The hope was that the sequel trilogy, and the final turns in The Rise of Skywalker, would give the same depth to Rey, a character crafted to be his successor both as a Jedi and as the lead of a genre-defining blockbuster franchise.įans have focused with laserlike precision on the question of who Rey’s parents are, a focus that raged on undaunted by the answers provided in The Last Jedi. The story of Luke Skywalker - how he struggles with fear and anger, grows up and into himself, and finally takes the reins of his own destiny - is intimately known by Star Wars fans.
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