The dead speak! Or, more accurately, the cut characters speak!
As most of us saw recently, Rose Tico was hardly in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which some people see as Disney catering to the louder critics of the divisive Last Jedi. Now, we’re hearing from Kelly Marie Tran herself that Rose was definitely supposed to be in more than 76 seconds of the film, and was actually supposed to do something during the final battle.
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Tran was asked about all things Star Wars, from hugging Chewie to Canto Blight. Most pertinent to Rise of Skywalker though was her response to working on the massive Battle of Exegol, with the actress saying:
Yeah, it was probably one of the biggest sets I had ever been on. It was incredible to see what the stunt teams did. It was also insane to be running across this platform — which I know you only see for a second in the movie — but we shot it so many times. I remember having bruises on my knees the next day because we kept running and then we would fall onto our knees and do some more shooting stuff. I don’t think that’s in the movie. It was definitely organized chaos as stormtroopers were flying, people were on horses…. It was pretty insane.
We already knew about the huge edits that the pic went through and we’re now hearing rumors of inner turmoil at the House of Mouse as well, with creators, producers and fans all unhappy for different reasons. A fair amount of people are very upset at the lack of Rose in Skywalker, though, and understandably so.
Personally, I’m just really let down that, instead of trying to give her more depth to assuage deeper complaints about her character that they just chickened out and cut her completely, for the most part. Cowards, all of em!
Am I a huge Rose stan? Not particularly. In hindsight, while I still don’t like decent chunks or aspects of The Last Jedi, at least it did try some interesting stuff. It was more emotional than this last one, too, which rang almost entirely hollow for yours truly. Why add new stuff when you can develop all the rich content you already have at your disposal? “Nah screw it just throw the Emperor back in there,” is what we imagine Lucasfilm said. And it resulted in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker closing out the saga with a whimper rather than a bang.