Newly Revealed Image Has Alternate View of Rey's Last Scene In 'The Rise of Skywalker'

It has been eight months since Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker closed out the Skywalker saga. It gained mixed responses from audiences and critics all over. Despite the period of time and the Star Wars content that has come out and been announced since then, people are still learning new things about this film, which turned out to be the last film that we will be getting for a few years.

The Rise of Skywalker cinematographer Dan Mendel published a photo on Instagram that may be of some interest to Star Wars enthusiasts. Daisy Ridley and the film crew are included in the picture, shooting the final scene of the film, in which Rey buries the lightsabers used by Luke Skywalker and his sister Leia Organa. The amount of people in this image shows just how many hands went into bringing this moment to life. The location attached to the image is Wadi Rum, a valley in Jordan where the Pasaana portion of the film was shot. At San Diego Comic-Con 2019, Kevin Smith told IGN that he went to London, where the final scene was being shot. So it seems that the final scene was shot at both London and Wadi Rum. It does not seem very obvious just from watching the scene, which feels seamless as it is.

The caption for the Instagram post reads, “Real time inserts with the actors on set!” For those unfamiliar, insert shots are additional shots filmed from alternative angles. The purpose can be to give context or an interesting look. Despite close-up inserts sometimes not needing the main actors to not be on set, Daisy Ridley is heavily involved throughout the making of this very important scene.

A closer look at Luke and Leia’s lightsaber hilts in this photo reveals that the weapons are being put on the ground without anything to cover them. This differs from what we see in the film, which is the lightsaber hilts being wrapped in a cloth. The Direct suggests that this new glimpse may reveal that the idea of burying the lightsabers simply as they are was considered at one point. However, speaking with IndieWire last December, screenwriter Chris Terrio said that the wrapping of the sabers in the cloth was written in the script:

“We thought of it as just paying her respects and sort of undoing the original sin at the end of the third movie, which is the separation of the twins. I mean, of course, they had to be separated to keep them safe, and the trilogy wouldn’t exist, the six movies wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t been separated! But that felt to us like it was almost like a wrong that need to be righted. We very deliberately in the script described the wrapping of the sabers, as ‘like you were wrapping infants.’”

Of course, it is possible for details from a script to be changed as a film is shot. Perhaps it may have been decided to shoot the scene with the cloth and without the cloth, and then it would have been decided in the edit which version looks best. Ultimately, the version with the cloth seemed best, if only for the symbolism that ties into the end of Revenge of the Sith, thus bringing the saga full circle. Despite the qualms that some fans have with certain aspects of the film, one can understand the reasons laid out for wanting to bury the lightsabers wrapped in a cloth by the Lars homestead on Tatooine, the first planet from this galaxy far, far away that viewers ever saw.

Written by Steven Shinder

Syndicated from Culture Slate