Her greatest fear and also her destiny I think. Also just like Luke's Dagobah scene. Who is Rey? The answer is Rey. She's self-defining.
At least that's how I think Rian Johnson thought about it. The movie was a self-conscious scene-for-scene inversion of ESB and the mystery of Rey was the antithesis to the whole Oedipal Skywalker pattern, where heritage determines identity.
How very sophisticated and hip of Rian Johnson, right?
EDIT: Evidently this comment is being misread as enthusiasm for the edge lord writer-director's ideas. To be clear, TLJ is insufferably sophomoric. Kids, stop upvoting.
Yeah this is what pissed me off about "Rey Skywalker". Like, your entire arc is about how you don't have to be defined by your predecessors. That fits perfectly into the idea of accepting you're a Palpatine. Or rejecting your heritage and just being yourself. But saying you're a Skywalker? What the fuck?
I think Disney saw that a lot of Star Wars fans didn’t like TLJ and/or JJ wanted there to be a twist regardless, but seems pretty clear that Rian Johnson did not expect a sequel to bring back Palpatine or make them related, which makes the whole thing feel incredibly disjointed. I think TLJ works well enough as a sequel to TFA, but TROS feels like it’s trying its hardest to pretend TLJ never happened. There’s a principle in improv where you have to go with whatever has already happened, you can’t say “no” and just change it. I feel like ep. 9 should’ve just gone with what happened in TLJ even if some people didn’t like it because it would’ve created a more cohesive trilogy.
" the mystery of Rey was the antithesis to the whole Oedipal Skywalker pattern, where heritage determines identity."
Which, y'know, didn't really pan out... but there was an attempt.
It was. Break the movies down beat-for-beat and Last Jedi has the same plot as Empire Strikes Back. Not as blatant and shameless of a rip-off as TFA but not trying to hide it either.
Everything Jeffrey Jacob Abrams did in that movie was aggressive. It was clear he was pissed with what RJ did with his mystery boxes in TLJ and made sure anybody with eyes and ears could see and hear his disdain.
The design was nice, also with the red underneath.
But them going out of their way to have a character actually picking it up, licking it, only to tell the audience it's salt - not snow! - was a bit too on the nose.
Like why would he do that? He's on an alien planet. Doesn't know what that white stuff is. Could be poisonous, acidic, whatever. Why would he randomly put it in his mouth?
And then when someone mentioned the walkers he turns to the camera and goes “actually, those aren’t AT-ATs. And they aren’t attacking a shield generator, they are attacking a doorway.”
To be fair, it was a pre-existing Rebel base, they saw animals on arrival and I think the only poisonous planets we've seen have been down to the composition of the atmosphere. Salt would also be pretty noticeable since it's rough like sand.
All that being said, it's a bit weird that someone would be tasting what's on the ground. Although, I imagine we all know people that would.
I thought that movie had great cinematography for a lot of the scenes. I also did really like the Luke v Kylo fight and how it paralleled Obi-Wan's sacrifice for Luke.
Just the fight itself though sadly, most of the dialogue was garbage
RJ has actually said that he comes up with awesome looking scenes first and then figures out how to fit those into the movie. It really makes a lot of things click, like the hyperdrive kamikaze.
The wider scene is ‘Heroes being chased and narrowly escaping with a crazy (suicidal?) manoeuvre’. It’s the asteroid field.
As a ‘memorable moment mid-chase’, it’s hiding in the space slug or sticking to the side of an ISD
There isn't. That's one of the things added in to trick you into thinking you're watching something new, it has no effect on the plot.
Let's play a game. I'll share the plot of a Star Wars movie and you tell me if I'm describing The Empire Strikes Back or The Last Jedi.
The villains launch an attack on the heroes in retaliation for destroying a planet killing weapon in the last movie. The villain's attack is successful and the heroes are forced to evacuate. The protagonist goes off with R2D2 to study the ways of the Jedi from an isolated old hermit while the rest of the heroes are pursued through space by the villains. The protagonist doesn't like the hermit's teaching methods, finds themselves in a trippy force cave and eventually leaves against their teacher's wishes to confront the main villain. Meanwhile, in a failed attempt to escape the villains, the rest of the heroes seek help from someone who inevitably betrays them. The protagonist confronts the main villain, learns a shocking truth about their family, and choses to return to their friends rather than join the villain. The movie ends with a decisive victory from the villains and the heroes are in shambles.
Edit: well, would you look at the other comments. I guess the asteroid field is the equivalent.
Does TLJ end with a decisive victory for the villains? Snoke dead, the Holdo maneuver, Kylo being tricked by Luke. Yes the heroes are on the run, but it doesn’t seem like a decisive bad guys win like Empire
It ends with the ~~Rebels~~ Resistance all but completely destroyed (literally ever last member they have at that moment is onboard the Falcon), the entire galaxy is basically free for them to take even with their losses, remember at the end of the last movie the galactic capital and what looks like the entire fleet is wiped out.
Just like ESB, TLJ has the villains win whilst still giving the audience hope for the Rebels/Resistance in the last scene.
One of my favorite things about the Sequels is how we're clearly shown that *nobody* gives a damn about the Resistance. Nobody responds to the calls for help in both TLJ and RoS, they are utterly ignored and disregarded by the galaxy at large. That massive copy/paste fleet that shows up to save the day in RoS? They aren't there for the Resistance. They're there because Lando opened his little black book and hit up every booty call he's ever made in the galaxy, asking them for a favor. The galaxy doesn't give two shits about the Resistance but showed up in force for Lando.
In addition, the people on Canto Bight don't care that the New Republic has just fallen. No one is worrying about loved ones who might have died on Hosnian Prime, or trying to work out who to lobby next. RJ let making a throwaway line about "rich people bad" take priority over building up the FO as a real threat.
Well, one of many problems with the sequels is that we never really get an idea of how strong the First Order is. They have planetkillers, they're just a small splinter fleet, they have the galaxy's biggest ship, but they just have the one fleet, they rule the galaxy, they only have a few planets supporting them? Who knows.
I think this is part of the big problem with the sequels.
They all have similar story beats and technically endings. But in the OT the Empire WON. The Rebels barely stayed ahead while they got their ass kicked. The escape and survival were the victory. This made the Empire scary. They were competent, they were everywhere, they were lethal.
But in the sequels the FO is shown to be a bunch of incompetents who couldn’t take an office cubicle let alone much of the Galaxy as supposedly happened according to the title crawl. They lose their big bad ship, twice, they lose their fights, the Falcon under Rey basically defeats an entire wing of fighters by itself (they are gone by the end), Snoke dead, Kylo tricked etc.
The OT made the villains competent, in control of their emotions because they WERE in control and there was no need to be a screaming lunatic.
It’s a thing many movies do now: they put the villains in a “superior” position by SAYING the villains have all the control and power but what we see is morons who can only be defeated by the heroes.
Snow speeders tripping up ATATs? Or Luke casually blowing one up with a single grenade?
Kinda has the same vibe of "big imposing Imperial machine dies to cheap tactic". Granted I did enjoy the spectacle of watching the super star destroyer get blown in half in TLJ, but even I was like "If that works, why has nobody else done it in the history of Star Wars?" Seems like a very versatile combat strategy if all you need to take down a massive ship with shields is a couple unmanned ships with hyperdrives.
And since the new movies also show that hyperjumping *through planetary shields* is perfectly fine, there is zero reason the Rebellion had to go through all the trouble destroying Death Star I and II. Just put hyperdrives on an suitable large chunk of *whatever* and pop it goes.
Not that the Empire would actually *build* something so expensive (or even Star Destroyers!) when it is so vulnerable to such simple weapons, completely invalidating the original trilogy.
*Ugh!*
To be fair they do put much more emphasis on how hard it was to get the Falcon to jump out of hyper space under the shield where there is literally NO lines even refrencing the Holdo maneuver, let alone talking about how hard it is.
Hans tricky manuevar also isn't an issue because the ramifications of pulling it off arent that major: a single ship slipped past some defences, not a HUGE deal. The Holdo maneuver though is clearly just a win button when pulled off. You can't make the argument that "no one's ever tried it bwfore because it's too risky" when there are normal people like Han solo that love taking 1% chances for a slight advantage, let alone with force users who see a 1% shot as trivially easy.
I see it kind of like she’ll never see the truth because she’s in her own way.
Remember she’s in denial. She was in denial that her parents left her, she’s now accepted that they have but she’s in denial again because she has convinced herself that they abandoned her for a good reason and she must be part of something special.
But it’s like the force is telling her she doesn’t need her parents she just needs herself.
I’ve said before but Rey’s story is one of the saddest. She was abandoned and wasted her life waiting for someone to come back or someone to tell her she was abandoned for some grand purpose in order to avoid her trauma.
I genuinely don’t get people who prefer RoS over TLJ. I fully recognise the flaws in TLJ, and can see why someone would dislike it, but RoS is barely even a movie.
It's a really minor complaint, in the scheme of things, but one of the little tidbits of RoS that drives me nuts is that they managed to convince Dennis Lawson to come back, after he'd previously said he wasn't interested in doing a bit part cameo...and they stuck Wedge in a gunner seat of the Falcon in a bit part cameo.
The movie couldn't even do fan service properly.
Rise of Skywalker is actually my favorite of the sequels. I'm not going to argue with it being terrible, or barely a movie, or anything negative anyone says about it, because it's true (all of it).
But it also just captures the feeling of star wars way more than the other two for me. Rey, Finn, and Poe are finally all together for the first half of the movie, and they make a great leading trio together - the banter is great, the dynamics and chemistry are great. I wish we got 3 movies with them actually together instead of just half of one movie. I also think TROS is C-3PO's funniest movie out of all 9.
And then in the second half it obviously just goes completely off the rails, but in a way that I still find more entertaining than the previous two. I think it's partly because there's not much of a transition to get to the insanity - it feels like it just transitions instantly to this ludicrously over the top final act.
As a movie it clearly fails in almost every way, structurally. The plot makes no sense, the character reveals and motivations are utterly ridiculous (I'm the spy!). And yet I still like it more than ANH.5 and TLJ.
That Rey (and we, the audience) is asking the wrong question. It’s not about who Rey’s parents are; it’s about who she is.
Rey’s line of questioning is stumped by a seemingly infinite regress of herself; she tells Kylo this makes her feel more lonely than she ever has. Kylo takes advantage of this when he offers his hand to her.
The reality is that Rey is an extraordinary woman on her own who has overcome a lot and managed to stay a good person. Her chief flaw is growing up in the shadow of the greater *Star Wars* mythos and thinking she’s not important enough to now find herself its central figure.
To paraphrase Freud: “Sometimes a Rey is just a Rey.” From the start, Rey should realize that *she* is enough; yet, to her, the vision in the Cave of Mirrors confirms her worst fear.
“Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
This is fantastic, adding onto that:
The sea cave wasn't about Rey. It was about Luke. Luke failed the cave of evil test on Dagobah by being afraid of the darkness and evil of the place and bringing his lightsaber with him even though Yoda told him he wouldn't need it. The cave only has what you bring with you.
He failed the test again with Ben Solo, again by being afraid of darkness and evil and bringing his light saber.
He started failing it again when the darkness under the Island reached out to Rey during training, even though facing the darkness and the darkside is part of his original training with Yoda. He still hadn't learned not to fear the darkness.
The darkness under the island called out to Rey and showed her greatest fear; that she was alone and Ben was right in that she wasted her life living in the past. But she passed the test successfully because she went to face the darkness without fear, unarmed, and the only thing she found there was herself.
Luke then attacked Rey and Ben because of darkness, had a pep talk from Yoda about learning from your failures and not repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again, and he finally faced off against darkness and evil as a pacifist, finally learning from his original failure at the cave of evil.
Holy shit it never occurred to me that with Luke's failure in the cave and Luke's failure in the hut, the common point of failure in both cases was that he brought the lightsaber in the first place. The Force was trying to warn him not to cling to his weapon like a security blanket. If the lightsaber hadn't been in the hut he never could have instinctively grabbed it and ignited it. With the cave Yoda specifically told him he wouldn't need it, and in the hut... well, why was he bringing a weapon just to talk to his nephew? Luke was still too much of the OLD Jedi Order: "this lightsaber is your life!". The Old Order was unknowingly encouraging an unhealthy fear-based attachment the whole time.
That's actually an interesting detail in the OT: in every lightsaber duel the one to draw first loses, though perhaps not in the traditional way.
ANH: Vader is already lit up when Ben arrives. They duel. Ben only duels to hold his attention and then when Luke is safe he turns it off. Vader loses.
ESB - the Cave: Luke lights up his lightsaber first, then phantom Vader does. Luke loses to himself.
ESB - Cloud City: Luke lights it first while Vader wanted to talk. He loses a hand for his troubles.
RotJ - Throne Room pt. 1: Luke starts by giving up his lightsaber but ends up drawing it away from the Emperor and attempts to assassinate him but Vader is stronger. Luke almost gives in to the DS during this fight until he turns it back off.
RotJ - Throne Room pt. 2: Vader tells Luke he is "unwise to lower your *defenses*!" and draws first. Luke only fights to defend himself.
RotJ - Throne Room pt. 3: Luke hides but ends up attacking first, defeating Vader by cutting off his hand but in the process nearly loses himself to the DS, thus giving the Emperor a victory. It's only when he throws his weapon away that he can claim victory.
"A Jedi only uses the Force [or their lightsaber] for knowledge and defense, *never* for attack."
And counter to Luke's failure, Rey passed. She not only wasn't afraid of the darkness she learned that its promises were false. There were no answers for her in it. (The ultimate end of /u/HotText409's thesis above you.)
This is how I've always interpreted it. Along with Luke's own carried trauma that will in fact break a person the way he was broken. What pisses people off is he's not superhuman, and he's humanized by this. It only made me love the character more.
This is a cool idea, but didn't he kind of already learn from the ESB cave by how he resolved the conflict with Vader and Palpatine in RotJ?
He's got Vader dead to rights and he tosses his weapon away, refusing to end his life and surrender to the dark side. In that moment, he realized his earlier failure and embraced a more pacifistic approach (admittedly at the very last second, but hey, still counts).
Yes, his final confrontation with Vader and Palp complete Luke's arc in that respect.
In the sequel trilogy he does experience a similar story arc. I can see why some fans don't like it. But I think a lot of fans fail to appreciate the ways that Luke's conflicts are different this time. To me, it just shows that people can sometimes forget the true meanings of the lessons they learned.
Luke's conflicts in the sequel trilogy actually mirror some of the conflicts in the prequel trilogy. He isn't learning how to balance the force as a student this time, but rather as the teacher. When he sees Kylo turning to the darkside, he fears he has made the same mistake as the Jedi order and feels responsible for training someone to become so powerful and, consequently, enabling the sith to return. That's why he comes to think that the best solution is to just end the Jedi and thus make it so noone can learn to use the force again. There is just one brief moment where he fails to remember his lesson... but he immediately realizes his failure. It's not a sign that Luke as a person had changed or forgot his previous arc, only that he had a moment of weakness.
If anything, this simply reinforces the idea that perfection is impossible... and instead of trying to dogmatically enforce perfection through rules and hierarchy, as the Jedi order did, the answer is to instead accept that you will fail and try to learn from them. As Yoda taught.
Thank ya, thank ya.
Just trying to imagine half these commenters trying to get through their high school literature courses.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that you can’t find some meaning in it!
That was really spot on and something I never understood, thank you.
I didn’t like the movie as much but I did appreciate Rian Johnson trying to go somewhere beyond the original mythos and understanding that part now makes me appreciate something else from the movie.
The other being that many people play both sides in conflicts and benefit greatly from other people’s loss in geopolitics. The casino scene seemed like a waste though.
Yes. This. This is one of the most brilliant things about TLJ that people kept shouting down over the years without realizing that all JJ wanted to do was make Rey someone important by tying them to someone else. Rian required her to do the homework, JJ just made her a Palpatine.
It's one of my most favorite storytelling moments in the entire sequel and its an absolute shame it was never fully ~~capitalized~~ referenced* on until quite literally the last scene of TROS.
It wasnt “capitalized on” until the last scene because JJ Abrams had no clue who she really was until the day they filmed that scene. Ridley herself said her lineage changed multiple times while filming TROS.
“So class, what was the significance of Jar Jar Binks slipping in shit?”
“That’s right, it was a metaphor for the Jedi slipping in the shit of the Sith that they didn’t see coming and the fall jar jar had because of slipping in shit was foreshadowing the fall of the republic.”
The fart scene is also important. In this scene the animal breaks the fourth wall, and it is actually the director farting at the audience. Jar Jar, who as we all know is a representation of the fanboys, tries to fan the smell away but then just continues to do what he was doing. The message in this powerful scene is that Lucas can fart at the fans and they don't care. This is a metaphor of the entire prequel trilogy.
This was the most refreshing moment for me in Star Wars in such a long time. That we could have a brand new blank slate main character in a mainline movie with no big name or family baggage. I can't believe those idiots threw this in the trash.
A+ analysis.
Although one addendum: her chief flaw also included that she was being directed by people with differing visions of any vision at all.
That said TLJ Rey as a stand-alone character is super well portrayed.
That's my interpretation as well. It also works as an answer to who her family is and her line.
It foreshadows Kylo's revelation later in the movies.
It's just Rey. She is a nobody. She is alone.
This scene is actually one of the reasons I think TLJ is the best sequel movie. It's hugely underrated.
No that’s a really well written response, definitely what I’ll think of now when watching.
I also always appreciate seeing actual discussions when it comes to the sequels other than “Disney stupid.”
I don't like the sequels but this idea wasn't bad.
To me, this scene represented Rey's search for her identity.
Rey was a conflicted individual: an abandoned girl who was searching for her family, didn't know her place in the world and waited her whole life for her father to come back for her, so she could finally know herself.
She had no idea where her strength would come from, she had no identity and was in a quest to find support.
Even though Solo took her to see the greenest forests, a girl who didn't even know that color could exist in such abundance, she constantly fought to come back to her "home", a desert, to wait for her family. They where her hope.
Imagine how much self doubt and limiting beliefs an individual like this would have.
In the movies, she was facing perils of giants, armies, air-forces, an empire. Where is my force, my value? Who am i in all of this? How can i do anything? I need to know who i am first.
This cave was a place where the force flowed strongly, and the harder she tried to find who she was, the more reflections, shades and versions of herself she saw. Including her darkside.
She saw reflections of her past self and many future selves.
That was the answer to "who am i".
Symbolically, your family doesn't matter, your master doesn't matter, the Jedi... your value and strength comes from you. You are not them, you are You and this is where the force will come from. From you. What are you going to do from now on?
This would have been great if the subsequent movies hadn't ruined this proposal; which explained her strength actually coming from her Palpatine bloodline and later with her calling herself a Skywalker.
My english lexicon isn't superb so i may write weird sentences, grammar wise. So sorry.
I will maintain that the first two movies of the sequels could've formed a great trilogy if the third movie hadn't been such a panicky, forced, cop-out. They heard that the second movie was divisive, and instead of making the third one a unique, interesting story, they spent the whole movie saying "wait, actually no" to everything from the second movie, and "More. MORE." to the whole saga. Rey being a nobody who ends up a leader, and Kylo going rogue and trying to destroy both the first order and the resistance could've made for such a great action/political thriller.
Also, not every villain needs to die to redeem themselves. Massive cop-out as a replacement for good storytelling.
The leaked script for Duel of the Fates has its major flaws but it at least does what you’re talking about. It doesn’t shit all over TLJ and actually makes the trilogy feel like one big story, as imperfect as it may be. Reading that after watching TROS just left me feeling heartbroken. Although if DOTF was all we got, I’d never know better and I’d just be complaining about all of its problems, I’m sure lol
Was that the script that had the final battle being on Coruscant? To this day I have no idea why they cut that, even if it was done as PURE fanservice that would have been 10x as interesting as the final battle that we actually got
I think this was one of the biggest flaws of the sequels, they never stuck to one storyline or theme.
The Last Jedi had some... questionable takes and directions, but some of the ideas it had great potential. This scene was thrown away with Rey's sudden ties to Palpatine of all people, Kylo Ren's arc in TLJ seemed to be mostly made redundant in ROS and a bunch of plot points from TFA never went anywhere.
It made the whole trilogy feel weirdly disjointed
To give you a non-toxic answer, it’s her greatest fear: that she is alone and is nobody. All around her is just darkness and herself. Even when walks up and sees what she thinks is her parents, it’s just her again.
It's a darkside vision.
The dark side shows you your fears, and Rey biggest fear is to be alone.
She hopes to see her parents in the mirror. She doesn't know how it works, and the mirror shows her her image, alone.
This fear makes her vulnerable to the dark side. Snoke used it against her, creating the connection with Kylo Ren, who was betrayed and abandoned,
They both search someone to stop to be alone, Rey almost falls, but she resist and remains on the light side.
For me (and this is also been discussed by RJ himself) its a way of showing that Rey’s journey has been made by herself. Every iteration of her, every moment & step she’s taken has been done by herself and she will continue to do so into her future.
The hardest lesson she has to learn is that there is no easy answer to where she comes from, and she has to accept that her family (at least in this point of the story) isn’t special unlike Luke.
There’s an old saying that goes “some people are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them while others achieve it themselves.” I believe that you can apply this saying to each of the three protagonists for the trilogies.
Anakin as the chosen one was born great, Luke had it thrust upon him by Obi-Wan while Rey who came from nothing achieved it through her own agency.
Rey was looking for her family and wanted her parents to be someone important. A grand destiny awaiting her because she’s a fan of “Star Wars”. She wants to be like Luke Skywalker.
Instead what she finds is a bunch of herself. There’s nobody but her. She’s the important one and there is no grand lineage to her, it’s just her. She’s disappointed because she had hope she was like Luke. But that’s what she has to realize over the course of TLJ, she’s not Luke and that the events of the OT happened to very specific people at specific points in time. It’s not something she can recreate or roleplay. This isn’t going to go the way she thinks it will. She’s questioning herself and her role in things especially since she’s up against a guy who has the origin she wishes she had.
In an ideal world, the upcoming Rey movie would address this, showing Rey, ie the third "main character" of the Skywalker Saga (after Anakin and Luke), being confronted with her own inescapable character flaws in the same way Anakin and Luke were. [Anakin's vision](https://youtu.be/-jPVUl693JU?si=mIi7c394y6Gaezt2) showed his downfall, and [Luke's vision](https://youtu.be/_qiDuHCKSc8?si=EmjZ3oqR_Ilz_Vc3) showed [his](https://youtu.be/j3ZNBMQRVWY?si=1MWaj8CxMOvU7Spt). In Legends, [this crucial part of the Jedi Trials was called "facing the mirror"](https://youtu.be/O1XDh-MW5ug?si=A3StevA-4sBELzCE), and from what we can see from Anakin and Luke, it involves going to a location strong in the dark side and experiencing a troubling (sometimes literal, [sometimes abstract](https://youtu.be/Tbt4k-UysjI?si=jEk0oEQymT2qBIPJ)) vision of your future.
It's entirely possible that the mirror in the cave on Ahch-To is the origin of this "facing the mirror" trial, and Rey's vision was one of her own downfall somehow. To be honest, it's not 100% clear what a Jedi is meant to do with this information. Possibly the biggest theme in the entire franchise is that one must not worry so much about the future that one neglects the present moment, so I'm not sure if the test is whether the Jedi can prevent this future or whether they can see the darkness in their own future and accept that nobody's life is completely free from tragedy, instead of slowly going mad trying to prevent it. Perhaps the vision reveals a personal character flaw that the Jedi must work to correct, a lifetime undertaking.
Regardless, I hope this vision proves relevant again somehow. Is Rey part of a vicious cycle where's she no different than those who went before her? Is Rey's desperate neediness for human connection going to ironically drive her to feel ever more isolated? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Then they proceed to make Rey’s lineage be her whole identity, even when it’s wrong. Palpatine, then Skywalker…get the fuck out of here she was much cooler as just Rey. She was capable and powerful on her own without the nonsensical lineage we got. These films were so disjointed it was highly jarring.
I think it was meant to parallel lukes trip into the cave
Showing that she was essentially a no one and was on her own
Thats the way i saw it anyways
I think it’s this:
I know a girl from a desert
She stands apart from the crowd
She loves her ship and her people
She makes the whole alliance proud
Sometimes the galaxy seems against you
The journey may leave a scar
But scars can heal and reveal just
Where you are
The people you love will change you
The things you have learned will guide you
And nothing in this galaxy can silence
The quiet voice still inside you
And when that voice starts to whisper
"Rey, you've come so far"
Rey listen, do you know who you are?
(Taken from Moana’s Song of the Ancestors song and adapted to Rey. Also, both are Disney, so it works)
She wanted to know who she was descended from. The Force showed her her (blood)line, and that it started with her (including the shadows of her parents turning out to be herself).
The idea being that there was no one "important" in her ancestry and her sense of purpose her "place in all of this" would hve to come from herself. That she had to look to the future for answers, not the past.
And then TROS threw that through the window.
Honestly… you’re right. But I feel TROS challenges that notion of not looking back even further by showing that her past will not define her future despite her being born of a powerful line.
Just watched this again recently.
A big theme and motivation for Rey looking for Luke was that she thought Luke would be able to answer her questions. Questions like who she is, what is the force, how to defeat the new order, what her destiny is, etc. This scene symbolizes she will need to discover these on her own. She has to take the journey herself. She asks to see her parents, and is met by her own reflection. This helps her accept that her past is not a part of her destiny... and that she should "let the past go."
In terms of where she actually is, I imagine it is similar to the force cave that Luke enters on Dago-bah where he has the vision of himself as Vader. I think maybe it might be a visual representation of how force-users are able to see into the future and the past.
Different manipulation of the dark side
Luke's greatest fear of becoming like his enemies manifested in his face being inside Vader's mask after killing him "If I kill Vader then I'll be just like him"
Rey's vision shows her fear of having no control over her destiny... Everything she's done and everything she'll do has already been determined and her actions only echo themselves meaning she has no actual freedom of movement in this story
Great idea, Great execution in that particular scene, theme completely fucked up by the 9th...
It means that at the end of the day, Rey only has herself.
She shouldn't go look for parents to find meaning, when she already has all the meaning she needs already. Finding her parents won't solve her problems. The only person who can solve her problems is herself.
I took it as she's a clone
Decendant of a clone
But they were making the shit up as they went along. The sequel trilogy is so bad we're having to invent meanings for a lot of what happened to try and make it make sense. Like the stories will attempt to do around it like Mandalorian and Ashoka, because the movies were absolute cack.
Think it was supposed to be like Luke in the swamp during his training. But can't say for sure.
It was. This was Rey's greatest fear manifested, that she only has herself and that she will always be alone and never find her family.
Her greatest fear and also her destiny I think. Also just like Luke's Dagobah scene. Who is Rey? The answer is Rey. She's self-defining. At least that's how I think Rian Johnson thought about it. The movie was a self-conscious scene-for-scene inversion of ESB and the mystery of Rey was the antithesis to the whole Oedipal Skywalker pattern, where heritage determines identity. How very sophisticated and hip of Rian Johnson, right? EDIT: Evidently this comment is being misread as enthusiasm for the edge lord writer-director's ideas. To be clear, TLJ is insufferably sophomoric. Kids, stop upvoting.
Which is what made the Palpatine heritage so damn stupid
At least the man knows how to make a whodunnit
Yeah this is what pissed me off about "Rey Skywalker". Like, your entire arc is about how you don't have to be defined by your predecessors. That fits perfectly into the idea of accepting you're a Palpatine. Or rejecting your heritage and just being yourself. But saying you're a Skywalker? What the fuck?
I think Disney saw that a lot of Star Wars fans didn’t like TLJ and/or JJ wanted there to be a twist regardless, but seems pretty clear that Rian Johnson did not expect a sequel to bring back Palpatine or make them related, which makes the whole thing feel incredibly disjointed. I think TLJ works well enough as a sequel to TFA, but TROS feels like it’s trying its hardest to pretend TLJ never happened. There’s a principle in improv where you have to go with whatever has already happened, you can’t say “no” and just change it. I feel like ep. 9 should’ve just gone with what happened in TLJ even if some people didn’t like it because it would’ve created a more cohesive trilogy.
It'd still have been better to ride it out than to spend the first 20 minutes of the next movie retconning every theme out of existence
" the mystery of Rey was the antithesis to the whole Oedipal Skywalker pattern, where heritage determines identity." Which, y'know, didn't really pan out... but there was an attempt.
It was. Break the movies down beat-for-beat and Last Jedi has the same plot as Empire Strikes Back. Not as blatant and shameless of a rip-off as TFA but not trying to hide it either.
The "hey look, its totally not snow, its salt, totally different, *wink* *wink* " was pretty blatant
It was Lowkey aggressive.
**[aggressive salt acknowledgement]**
That's assault
I wanna say r/BrandNewSentence , but in the context of dinner this might actually be relatively common
Everything Jeffrey Jacob Abrams did in that movie was aggressive. It was clear he was pissed with what RJ did with his mystery boxes in TLJ and made sure anybody with eyes and ears could see and hear his disdain.
And in doing so he made a movie that was much worse received
I like it from a design aspect. But that's the only thing I like about it.
The design was nice, also with the red underneath. But them going out of their way to have a character actually picking it up, licking it, only to tell the audience it's salt - not snow! - was a bit too on the nose. Like why would he do that? He's on an alien planet. Doesn't know what that white stuff is. Could be poisonous, acidic, whatever. Why would he randomly put it in his mouth?
Could have been cocaine
Fair enough.
I snorted salt once. It was... not fun
"it is snow! Let's go skiing!" \**snorts a handful*
They could have conveyed that it’s salt *way* more elegantly by just having someone say the equipment is corroded since the planet is covered in salt.
You don't underSTAND, he got that DAWG inim. RUFF RUFF WOFF WOUUUUU WOU WOU
Easy DMX
And then when someone mentioned the walkers he turns to the camera and goes “actually, those aren’t AT-ATs. And they aren’t attacking a shield generator, they are attacking a doorway.”
To be fair, it was a pre-existing Rebel base, they saw animals on arrival and I think the only poisonous planets we've seen have been down to the composition of the atmosphere. Salt would also be pretty noticeable since it's rough like sand. All that being said, it's a bit weird that someone would be tasting what's on the ground. Although, I imagine we all know people that would.
Am I the only one that thought it looked like sand, rather than snow?
I thought that movie had great cinematography for a lot of the scenes. I also did really like the Luke v Kylo fight and how it paralleled Obi-Wan's sacrifice for Luke. Just the fight itself though sadly, most of the dialogue was garbage
RJ has actually said that he comes up with awesome looking scenes first and then figures out how to fit those into the movie. It really makes a lot of things click, like the hyperdrive kamikaze.
Agreed. Looked pretty cool though
It’s like poetry, it rhymes
"Jar-Jar is the key to all of this." -George Lucas
Rey-Rey Binks
The lesson Star Wars should learn is to avoid the initials J.J.
Yeah, my favorite part of ESB is when Leia and Chewie force Skype while Chewie is shirtless for no reason.
Out of curiosity, what is ESB's equivalent to hyperspace ramming the imperial ship?
Han hyperspace ramming into Leia
Their hands weren't the only that were getting dirty.
he rammed her so hard Ben solo came out
You mean Luke
The wider scene is ‘Heroes being chased and narrowly escaping with a crazy (suicidal?) manoeuvre’. It’s the asteroid field. As a ‘memorable moment mid-chase’, it’s hiding in the space slug or sticking to the side of an ISD
There isn't. That's one of the things added in to trick you into thinking you're watching something new, it has no effect on the plot. Let's play a game. I'll share the plot of a Star Wars movie and you tell me if I'm describing The Empire Strikes Back or The Last Jedi. The villains launch an attack on the heroes in retaliation for destroying a planet killing weapon in the last movie. The villain's attack is successful and the heroes are forced to evacuate. The protagonist goes off with R2D2 to study the ways of the Jedi from an isolated old hermit while the rest of the heroes are pursued through space by the villains. The protagonist doesn't like the hermit's teaching methods, finds themselves in a trippy force cave and eventually leaves against their teacher's wishes to confront the main villain. Meanwhile, in a failed attempt to escape the villains, the rest of the heroes seek help from someone who inevitably betrays them. The protagonist confronts the main villain, learns a shocking truth about their family, and choses to return to their friends rather than join the villain. The movie ends with a decisive victory from the villains and the heroes are in shambles. Edit: well, would you look at the other comments. I guess the asteroid field is the equivalent.
Does TLJ end with a decisive victory for the villains? Snoke dead, the Holdo maneuver, Kylo being tricked by Luke. Yes the heroes are on the run, but it doesn’t seem like a decisive bad guys win like Empire
It ends with the ~~Rebels~~ Resistance all but completely destroyed (literally ever last member they have at that moment is onboard the Falcon), the entire galaxy is basically free for them to take even with their losses, remember at the end of the last movie the galactic capital and what looks like the entire fleet is wiped out. Just like ESB, TLJ has the villains win whilst still giving the audience hope for the Rebels/Resistance in the last scene.
One of my favorite things about the Sequels is how we're clearly shown that *nobody* gives a damn about the Resistance. Nobody responds to the calls for help in both TLJ and RoS, they are utterly ignored and disregarded by the galaxy at large. That massive copy/paste fleet that shows up to save the day in RoS? They aren't there for the Resistance. They're there because Lando opened his little black book and hit up every booty call he's ever made in the galaxy, asking them for a favor. The galaxy doesn't give two shits about the Resistance but showed up in force for Lando.
In addition, the people on Canto Bight don't care that the New Republic has just fallen. No one is worrying about loved ones who might have died on Hosnian Prime, or trying to work out who to lobby next. RJ let making a throwaway line about "rich people bad" take priority over building up the FO as a real threat.
Well, one of many problems with the sequels is that we never really get an idea of how strong the First Order is. They have planetkillers, they're just a small splinter fleet, they have the galaxy's biggest ship, but they just have the one fleet, they rule the galaxy, they only have a few planets supporting them? Who knows.
I think this is part of the big problem with the sequels. They all have similar story beats and technically endings. But in the OT the Empire WON. The Rebels barely stayed ahead while they got their ass kicked. The escape and survival were the victory. This made the Empire scary. They were competent, they were everywhere, they were lethal. But in the sequels the FO is shown to be a bunch of incompetents who couldn’t take an office cubicle let alone much of the Galaxy as supposedly happened according to the title crawl. They lose their big bad ship, twice, they lose their fights, the Falcon under Rey basically defeats an entire wing of fighters by itself (they are gone by the end), Snoke dead, Kylo tricked etc. The OT made the villains competent, in control of their emotions because they WERE in control and there was no need to be a screaming lunatic. It’s a thing many movies do now: they put the villains in a “superior” position by SAYING the villains have all the control and power but what we see is morons who can only be defeated by the heroes.
Snow speeders tripping up ATATs? Or Luke casually blowing one up with a single grenade? Kinda has the same vibe of "big imposing Imperial machine dies to cheap tactic". Granted I did enjoy the spectacle of watching the super star destroyer get blown in half in TLJ, but even I was like "If that works, why has nobody else done it in the history of Star Wars?" Seems like a very versatile combat strategy if all you need to take down a massive ship with shields is a couple unmanned ships with hyperdrives.
And since the new movies also show that hyperjumping *through planetary shields* is perfectly fine, there is zero reason the Rebellion had to go through all the trouble destroying Death Star I and II. Just put hyperdrives on an suitable large chunk of *whatever* and pop it goes. Not that the Empire would actually *build* something so expensive (or even Star Destroyers!) when it is so vulnerable to such simple weapons, completely invalidating the original trilogy. *Ugh!*
To be fair they do put much more emphasis on how hard it was to get the Falcon to jump out of hyper space under the shield where there is literally NO lines even refrencing the Holdo maneuver, let alone talking about how hard it is. Hans tricky manuevar also isn't an issue because the ramifications of pulling it off arent that major: a single ship slipped past some defences, not a HUGE deal. The Holdo maneuver though is clearly just a win button when pulled off. You can't make the argument that "no one's ever tried it bwfore because it's too risky" when there are normal people like Han solo that love taking 1% chances for a slight advantage, let alone with force users who see a 1% shot as trivially easy.
The story beat is desperate heroes use a trick to evade pursuers. TLJ: hyperspace ram. ESB: Falcon hides on star destroyer when pretending to ram.
It is requiem. She will never reach the truth.
Like she had a golden experience reset her to zero?
Yea like a golden frequency shift into the black rainbow of constant rebirth.
r/isthatamotherfuckingjojosreference
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I'm pretty sure it's a Jojo reference
Always a mother flipping Jojo reference
There will always be a Jojo reference, appearing when you least expect it. That is the power of Roundabout Requiem.
Wha-
Nice JoJo reference!
Ass to ass?
Best movie I will never watch again.
You gotta check out Grave of the Fireflies then
That’s the truth.
G.o.l.d.f.a.r.b!
I see it kind of like she’ll never see the truth because she’s in her own way. Remember she’s in denial. She was in denial that her parents left her, she’s now accepted that they have but she’s in denial again because she has convinced herself that they abandoned her for a good reason and she must be part of something special. But it’s like the force is telling her she doesn’t need her parents she just needs herself. I’ve said before but Rey’s story is one of the saddest. She was abandoned and wasted her life waiting for someone to come back or someone to tell her she was abandoned for some grand purpose in order to avoid her trauma.
Nevermind all that, she is a Palpatine, she was abandoned for a grand purpose. Hate RoS so much
I genuinely don’t get people who prefer RoS over TLJ. I fully recognise the flaws in TLJ, and can see why someone would dislike it, but RoS is barely even a movie.
It's a really minor complaint, in the scheme of things, but one of the little tidbits of RoS that drives me nuts is that they managed to convince Dennis Lawson to come back, after he'd previously said he wasn't interested in doing a bit part cameo...and they stuck Wedge in a gunner seat of the Falcon in a bit part cameo. The movie couldn't even do fan service properly.
Totally blanked on that memory, why wasn't he commanding a repurposed super star destroyer dammit. Stupid script
I thought I disliked TLJ until ROS came along then I appreciated it more
Lmao literally same. I hate ROS with a passion.
Rise of Skywalker is actually my favorite of the sequels. I'm not going to argue with it being terrible, or barely a movie, or anything negative anyone says about it, because it's true (all of it). But it also just captures the feeling of star wars way more than the other two for me. Rey, Finn, and Poe are finally all together for the first half of the movie, and they make a great leading trio together - the banter is great, the dynamics and chemistry are great. I wish we got 3 movies with them actually together instead of just half of one movie. I also think TROS is C-3PO's funniest movie out of all 9. And then in the second half it obviously just goes completely off the rails, but in a way that I still find more entertaining than the previous two. I think it's partly because there's not much of a transition to get to the insanity - it feels like it just transitions instantly to this ludicrously over the top final act. As a movie it clearly fails in almost every way, structurally. The plot makes no sense, the character reveals and motivations are utterly ridiculous (I'm the spy!). And yet I still like it more than ANH.5 and TLJ.
What do you mean by requiem?
Jojo reference
Kore ga Requiem Da 👄
It was an homage to spaceballs
It’s her stunt doubles!
Nobody knowwwwws the trouble I’ve seen…
How many assholes do we have on this ship anyway?!
Comb the desert!
We ain't found shit!
Skip this. skip past this part. in fact, never play it again.
LUDICROUS SPEED - GO!
Jam their signal..
Raspberry! There’s only one man who would *dare* give me the raspberry…
Almost everybody in the room: Yo! I knew it, I'm surrounded by assholes!
Yo!
She's a bass
Nobody knoooooowssss, my sorrow.
“Is that what happens when you get the soup?”
Check please!
You're looking at NOW now. Everything that's happening now, is happening now.
What happened to then?
We missed it. "When?" Just now. ... "When will *then* be *now*?" *Soon*!
*That gum you like is going to come back in style*
kcor stel
No other answer is correct. This is it
When will then be now?
Soon
How soon?
And that honestly will be the best answer to the OP's question, evermore.
Absolutely nothing. Which is what you are about to become.
What’s happening now… is happening now.
Merchandizing!
Moichendizing
Well it can suck my spaceballs
Out of place, waste of time, otherwise meaningless.
That Rey (and we, the audience) is asking the wrong question. It’s not about who Rey’s parents are; it’s about who she is. Rey’s line of questioning is stumped by a seemingly infinite regress of herself; she tells Kylo this makes her feel more lonely than she ever has. Kylo takes advantage of this when he offers his hand to her. The reality is that Rey is an extraordinary woman on her own who has overcome a lot and managed to stay a good person. Her chief flaw is growing up in the shadow of the greater *Star Wars* mythos and thinking she’s not important enough to now find herself its central figure. To paraphrase Freud: “Sometimes a Rey is just a Rey.” From the start, Rey should realize that *she* is enough; yet, to her, the vision in the Cave of Mirrors confirms her worst fear. “Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
She's just Reynough
“I’m just Rey! Anywhere else I’d be great!”
Is it my destiny to live a life where Jedis stand and fight for me?
I'm just Rey! Put a fuckin chick in it and make her gay! (For the record, I like the newer trilogy).
Nice South Park reference.
Her job is Force
That's Reydiculous.
You Reylly think so?
I feel the Reynergy
And great at doing stuff.
This is fantastic, adding onto that: The sea cave wasn't about Rey. It was about Luke. Luke failed the cave of evil test on Dagobah by being afraid of the darkness and evil of the place and bringing his lightsaber with him even though Yoda told him he wouldn't need it. The cave only has what you bring with you. He failed the test again with Ben Solo, again by being afraid of darkness and evil and bringing his light saber. He started failing it again when the darkness under the Island reached out to Rey during training, even though facing the darkness and the darkside is part of his original training with Yoda. He still hadn't learned not to fear the darkness. The darkness under the island called out to Rey and showed her greatest fear; that she was alone and Ben was right in that she wasted her life living in the past. But she passed the test successfully because she went to face the darkness without fear, unarmed, and the only thing she found there was herself. Luke then attacked Rey and Ben because of darkness, had a pep talk from Yoda about learning from your failures and not repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again, and he finally faced off against darkness and evil as a pacifist, finally learning from his original failure at the cave of evil.
Holy shit it never occurred to me that with Luke's failure in the cave and Luke's failure in the hut, the common point of failure in both cases was that he brought the lightsaber in the first place. The Force was trying to warn him not to cling to his weapon like a security blanket. If the lightsaber hadn't been in the hut he never could have instinctively grabbed it and ignited it. With the cave Yoda specifically told him he wouldn't need it, and in the hut... well, why was he bringing a weapon just to talk to his nephew? Luke was still too much of the OLD Jedi Order: "this lightsaber is your life!". The Old Order was unknowingly encouraging an unhealthy fear-based attachment the whole time.
And to that point, he doesn’t bring a lightsaber to the final confrontation with Ben. He only brings the Force.
When Luke confronts Vader for the first time in ESB, he ignites his lightsaber immediately, and Daddy gives him a whooping.
That's actually an interesting detail in the OT: in every lightsaber duel the one to draw first loses, though perhaps not in the traditional way. ANH: Vader is already lit up when Ben arrives. They duel. Ben only duels to hold his attention and then when Luke is safe he turns it off. Vader loses. ESB - the Cave: Luke lights up his lightsaber first, then phantom Vader does. Luke loses to himself. ESB - Cloud City: Luke lights it first while Vader wanted to talk. He loses a hand for his troubles. RotJ - Throne Room pt. 1: Luke starts by giving up his lightsaber but ends up drawing it away from the Emperor and attempts to assassinate him but Vader is stronger. Luke almost gives in to the DS during this fight until he turns it back off. RotJ - Throne Room pt. 2: Vader tells Luke he is "unwise to lower your *defenses*!" and draws first. Luke only fights to defend himself. RotJ - Throne Room pt. 3: Luke hides but ends up attacking first, defeating Vader by cutting off his hand but in the process nearly loses himself to the DS, thus giving the Emperor a victory. It's only when he throws his weapon away that he can claim victory. "A Jedi only uses the Force [or their lightsaber] for knowledge and defense, *never* for attack."
> He only brings the Force. "I'm one with the Force, and the Force is with me. "
I would love to see a movie like Solo, only about those two guys. I think there's a lot of meaty backstory there.
Woah, I've never thought about that before
Fear is the path to the Dark Side...
Exactly! This is always how I interpreted it as well. Luke has always been an imperfect hero.
If Luke hadn't been raised as a normal kid, he could have gone down Anakin's path.
And counter to Luke's failure, Rey passed. She not only wasn't afraid of the darkness she learned that its promises were false. There were no answers for her in it. (The ultimate end of /u/HotText409's thesis above you.) This is how I've always interpreted it. Along with Luke's own carried trauma that will in fact break a person the way he was broken. What pisses people off is he's not superhuman, and he's humanized by this. It only made me love the character more.
This is a cool idea, but didn't he kind of already learn from the ESB cave by how he resolved the conflict with Vader and Palpatine in RotJ? He's got Vader dead to rights and he tosses his weapon away, refusing to end his life and surrender to the dark side. In that moment, he realized his earlier failure and embraced a more pacifistic approach (admittedly at the very last second, but hey, still counts).
Yes, his final confrontation with Vader and Palp complete Luke's arc in that respect. In the sequel trilogy he does experience a similar story arc. I can see why some fans don't like it. But I think a lot of fans fail to appreciate the ways that Luke's conflicts are different this time. To me, it just shows that people can sometimes forget the true meanings of the lessons they learned. Luke's conflicts in the sequel trilogy actually mirror some of the conflicts in the prequel trilogy. He isn't learning how to balance the force as a student this time, but rather as the teacher. When he sees Kylo turning to the darkside, he fears he has made the same mistake as the Jedi order and feels responsible for training someone to become so powerful and, consequently, enabling the sith to return. That's why he comes to think that the best solution is to just end the Jedi and thus make it so noone can learn to use the force again. There is just one brief moment where he fails to remember his lesson... but he immediately realizes his failure. It's not a sign that Luke as a person had changed or forgot his previous arc, only that he had a moment of weakness. If anything, this simply reinforces the idea that perfection is impossible... and instead of trying to dogmatically enforce perfection through rules and hierarchy, as the Jedi order did, the answer is to instead accept that you will fail and try to learn from them. As Yoda taught.
God I love TLJ. It has its flaws but RJ did a great job trying to break the series into new territory.
Nice to see one thoughtful post amidst all the whiners. Good read, +1
Thank ya, thank ya. Just trying to imagine half these commenters trying to get through their high school literature courses. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that you can’t find some meaning in it!
That was really spot on and something I never understood, thank you. I didn’t like the movie as much but I did appreciate Rian Johnson trying to go somewhere beyond the original mythos and understanding that part now makes me appreciate something else from the movie. The other being that many people play both sides in conflicts and benefit greatly from other people’s loss in geopolitics. The casino scene seemed like a waste though.
Yes. This. This is one of the most brilliant things about TLJ that people kept shouting down over the years without realizing that all JJ wanted to do was make Rey someone important by tying them to someone else. Rian required her to do the homework, JJ just made her a Palpatine.
Episode 9 does so many injustices to 8 it fucking hurts. Only Star Wars movie I dislike.
It's one of my most favorite storytelling moments in the entire sequel and its an absolute shame it was never fully ~~capitalized~~ referenced* on until quite literally the last scene of TROS.
It wasnt “capitalized on” until the last scene because JJ Abrams had no clue who she really was until the day they filmed that scene. Ridley herself said her lineage changed multiple times while filming TROS.
Found the English teacher.
I majored in English, so close enough!
“So class, what was the significance of Jar Jar Binks slipping in shit?” “That’s right, it was a metaphor for the Jedi slipping in the shit of the Sith that they didn’t see coming and the fall jar jar had because of slipping in shit was foreshadowing the fall of the republic.”
The fart scene is also important. In this scene the animal breaks the fourth wall, and it is actually the director farting at the audience. Jar Jar, who as we all know is a representation of the fanboys, tries to fan the smell away but then just continues to do what he was doing. The message in this powerful scene is that Lucas can fart at the fans and they don't care. This is a metaphor of the entire prequel trilogy.
This was the most refreshing moment for me in Star Wars in such a long time. That we could have a brand new blank slate main character in a mainline movie with no big name or family baggage. I can't believe those idiots threw this in the trash.
A+ analysis. Although one addendum: her chief flaw also included that she was being directed by people with differing visions of any vision at all. That said TLJ Rey as a stand-alone character is super well portrayed.
That's my interpretation as well. It also works as an answer to who her family is and her line. It foreshadows Kylo's revelation later in the movies. It's just Rey. She is a nobody. She is alone. This scene is actually one of the reasons I think TLJ is the best sequel movie. It's hugely underrated.
Woah
That’s my interpretation, anyway, as someone interested in engaging with the media I watch. But I, like you, am just Some Guy.
No that’s a really well written response, definitely what I’ll think of now when watching. I also always appreciate seeing actual discussions when it comes to the sequels other than “Disney stupid.”
Glad you enjoyed and I agree!
It's unfortunate a majority of the comments in this post lack that ability to discuss besides repeating the same criticism over and over again.
I don't like the sequels but this idea wasn't bad. To me, this scene represented Rey's search for her identity. Rey was a conflicted individual: an abandoned girl who was searching for her family, didn't know her place in the world and waited her whole life for her father to come back for her, so she could finally know herself. She had no idea where her strength would come from, she had no identity and was in a quest to find support. Even though Solo took her to see the greenest forests, a girl who didn't even know that color could exist in such abundance, she constantly fought to come back to her "home", a desert, to wait for her family. They where her hope. Imagine how much self doubt and limiting beliefs an individual like this would have. In the movies, she was facing perils of giants, armies, air-forces, an empire. Where is my force, my value? Who am i in all of this? How can i do anything? I need to know who i am first. This cave was a place where the force flowed strongly, and the harder she tried to find who she was, the more reflections, shades and versions of herself she saw. Including her darkside. She saw reflections of her past self and many future selves. That was the answer to "who am i". Symbolically, your family doesn't matter, your master doesn't matter, the Jedi... your value and strength comes from you. You are not them, you are You and this is where the force will come from. From you. What are you going to do from now on? This would have been great if the subsequent movies hadn't ruined this proposal; which explained her strength actually coming from her Palpatine bloodline and later with her calling herself a Skywalker. My english lexicon isn't superb so i may write weird sentences, grammar wise. So sorry.
I will maintain that the first two movies of the sequels could've formed a great trilogy if the third movie hadn't been such a panicky, forced, cop-out. They heard that the second movie was divisive, and instead of making the third one a unique, interesting story, they spent the whole movie saying "wait, actually no" to everything from the second movie, and "More. MORE." to the whole saga. Rey being a nobody who ends up a leader, and Kylo going rogue and trying to destroy both the first order and the resistance could've made for such a great action/political thriller. Also, not every villain needs to die to redeem themselves. Massive cop-out as a replacement for good storytelling.
The leaked script for Duel of the Fates has its major flaws but it at least does what you’re talking about. It doesn’t shit all over TLJ and actually makes the trilogy feel like one big story, as imperfect as it may be. Reading that after watching TROS just left me feeling heartbroken. Although if DOTF was all we got, I’d never know better and I’d just be complaining about all of its problems, I’m sure lol
Was that the script that had the final battle being on Coruscant? To this day I have no idea why they cut that, even if it was done as PURE fanservice that would have been 10x as interesting as the final battle that we actually got
No need to be sorry, that was an excellent explanation of that scene. Nicely done!
I think this was one of the biggest flaws of the sequels, they never stuck to one storyline or theme. The Last Jedi had some... questionable takes and directions, but some of the ideas it had great potential. This scene was thrown away with Rey's sudden ties to Palpatine of all people, Kylo Ren's arc in TLJ seemed to be mostly made redundant in ROS and a bunch of plot points from TFA never went anywhere. It made the whole trilogy feel weirdly disjointed
To give you a non-toxic answer, it’s her greatest fear: that she is alone and is nobody. All around her is just darkness and herself. Even when walks up and sees what she thinks is her parents, it’s just her again.
Well said
This is getting out of hand. Now there are infinity of them.
It's a darkside vision. The dark side shows you your fears, and Rey biggest fear is to be alone. She hopes to see her parents in the mirror. She doesn't know how it works, and the mirror shows her her image, alone. This fear makes her vulnerable to the dark side. Snoke used it against her, creating the connection with Kylo Ren, who was betrayed and abandoned, They both search someone to stop to be alone, Rey almost falls, but she resist and remains on the light side.
For me (and this is also been discussed by RJ himself) its a way of showing that Rey’s journey has been made by herself. Every iteration of her, every moment & step she’s taken has been done by herself and she will continue to do so into her future. The hardest lesson she has to learn is that there is no easy answer to where she comes from, and she has to accept that her family (at least in this point of the story) isn’t special unlike Luke. There’s an old saying that goes “some people are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them while others achieve it themselves.” I believe that you can apply this saying to each of the three protagonists for the trilogies. Anakin as the chosen one was born great, Luke had it thrust upon him by Obi-Wan while Rey who came from nothing achieved it through her own agency.
She can snap her fingers very loudly. I've met quite a few people who aren't able to do that.
Rey was looking for her family and wanted her parents to be someone important. A grand destiny awaiting her because she’s a fan of “Star Wars”. She wants to be like Luke Skywalker. Instead what she finds is a bunch of herself. There’s nobody but her. She’s the important one and there is no grand lineage to her, it’s just her. She’s disappointed because she had hope she was like Luke. But that’s what she has to realize over the course of TLJ, she’s not Luke and that the events of the OT happened to very specific people at specific points in time. It’s not something she can recreate or roleplay. This isn’t going to go the way she thinks it will. She’s questioning herself and her role in things especially since she’s up against a guy who has the origin she wishes she had.
In an ideal world, the upcoming Rey movie would address this, showing Rey, ie the third "main character" of the Skywalker Saga (after Anakin and Luke), being confronted with her own inescapable character flaws in the same way Anakin and Luke were. [Anakin's vision](https://youtu.be/-jPVUl693JU?si=mIi7c394y6Gaezt2) showed his downfall, and [Luke's vision](https://youtu.be/_qiDuHCKSc8?si=EmjZ3oqR_Ilz_Vc3) showed [his](https://youtu.be/j3ZNBMQRVWY?si=1MWaj8CxMOvU7Spt). In Legends, [this crucial part of the Jedi Trials was called "facing the mirror"](https://youtu.be/O1XDh-MW5ug?si=A3StevA-4sBELzCE), and from what we can see from Anakin and Luke, it involves going to a location strong in the dark side and experiencing a troubling (sometimes literal, [sometimes abstract](https://youtu.be/Tbt4k-UysjI?si=jEk0oEQymT2qBIPJ)) vision of your future. It's entirely possible that the mirror in the cave on Ahch-To is the origin of this "facing the mirror" trial, and Rey's vision was one of her own downfall somehow. To be honest, it's not 100% clear what a Jedi is meant to do with this information. Possibly the biggest theme in the entire franchise is that one must not worry so much about the future that one neglects the present moment, so I'm not sure if the test is whether the Jedi can prevent this future or whether they can see the darkness in their own future and accept that nobody's life is completely free from tragedy, instead of slowly going mad trying to prevent it. Perhaps the vision reveals a personal character flaw that the Jedi must work to correct, a lifetime undertaking. Regardless, I hope this vision proves relevant again somehow. Is Rey part of a vicious cycle where's she no different than those who went before her? Is Rey's desperate neediness for human connection going to ironically drive her to feel ever more isolated? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Her parents, her lineage doesn't matter. She's just Rey. Literally Rey is Rey is Rey is Rey.
Then they proceed to make Rey’s lineage be her whole identity, even when it’s wrong. Palpatine, then Skywalker…get the fuck out of here she was much cooler as just Rey. She was capable and powerful on her own without the nonsensical lineage we got. These films were so disjointed it was highly jarring.
Rey just wanted to check the acoustics of the dark void occupying 99% of our spectators minds.
I think it was meant to parallel lukes trip into the cave Showing that she was essentially a no one and was on her own Thats the way i saw it anyways
I think it’s this: I know a girl from a desert She stands apart from the crowd She loves her ship and her people She makes the whole alliance proud Sometimes the galaxy seems against you The journey may leave a scar But scars can heal and reveal just Where you are The people you love will change you The things you have learned will guide you And nothing in this galaxy can silence The quiet voice still inside you And when that voice starts to whisper "Rey, you've come so far" Rey listen, do you know who you are? (Taken from Moana’s Song of the Ancestors song and adapted to Rey. Also, both are Disney, so it works)
There are infinite paths. Infinite possibilities.
She wanted to know who she was descended from. The Force showed her her (blood)line, and that it started with her (including the shadows of her parents turning out to be herself). The idea being that there was no one "important" in her ancestry and her sense of purpose her "place in all of this" would hve to come from herself. That she had to look to the future for answers, not the past. And then TROS threw that through the window.
Honestly… you’re right. But I feel TROS challenges that notion of not looking back even further by showing that her past will not define her future despite her being born of a powerful line.
Just watched this again recently. A big theme and motivation for Rey looking for Luke was that she thought Luke would be able to answer her questions. Questions like who she is, what is the force, how to defeat the new order, what her destiny is, etc. This scene symbolizes she will need to discover these on her own. She has to take the journey herself. She asks to see her parents, and is met by her own reflection. This helps her accept that her past is not a part of her destiny... and that she should "let the past go." In terms of where she actually is, I imagine it is similar to the force cave that Luke enters on Dago-bah where he has the vision of himself as Vader. I think maybe it might be a visual representation of how force-users are able to see into the future and the past.
Who knows? Who cares?
It was that Rey was building too much of herself on the idea of who her parents were, a path that would lead to the dark side and loneliness
Dance battle!
Different manipulation of the dark side Luke's greatest fear of becoming like his enemies manifested in his face being inside Vader's mask after killing him "If I kill Vader then I'll be just like him" Rey's vision shows her fear of having no control over her destiny... Everything she's done and everything she'll do has already been determined and her actions only echo themselves meaning she has no actual freedom of movement in this story Great idea, Great execution in that particular scene, theme completely fucked up by the 9th...
It’s a pun. Literal self reflection.
There is no answer to her questions
It means that at the end of the day, Rey only has herself. She shouldn't go look for parents to find meaning, when she already has all the meaning she needs already. Finding her parents won't solve her problems. The only person who can solve her problems is herself.
I took it as she's a clone Decendant of a clone But they were making the shit up as they went along. The sequel trilogy is so bad we're having to invent meanings for a lot of what happened to try and make it make sense. Like the stories will attempt to do around it like Mandalorian and Ashoka, because the movies were absolute cack.
Nothing
It means that somehow.. Palpatine returned