Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

The Rise of Skywalker brings the sequel trilogy's struggle over identity into a conflict with a returning source of imperial power. Rey has gained teachers, friends and a place within the Resistance, yet the question of where she comes from still shapes how she understands her abilities. Kylo Ren carries a known family history and tries to turn it into authority over a different future. J.J. Abrams directs the 2019 film from a screenplay by Abrams and Chris Terrio, moving these characters through the remnants of older battles toward a final confrontation. It is the ninth numbered Star Wars episode, and its world is full of objects that have survived their original owners. A weapon, a ship or a name can be inherited without settling what its new bearer should do.

Palpatine offers Kylo a hidden fleet if he kills Rey. The Resistance follows clues to Exegol while Rey learns that Palpatine is her grandfather. A duel in the Death Star's wreckage ends when Leia reaches her son through the Force and dies; Rey wounds Kylo, then heals him. He rejects that identity and becomes Ben Solo again. Luke encourages Rey to face Palpatine, and she guides the Resistance to Exegol. Ben joins her, but Palpatine drains their shared Force power. Supported by the voices of past Jedi, Rey turns his lightning against him and dies defeating him. Ben revives her at the cost of his own life. Lando's arriving civilian fleet helps win the battle. After the victory, Rey buries Luke and Leia's lightsabers on Tatooine and takes the name Skywalker.

The search for Exegol gives the adventure a route through different kinds of preserved information. An inscription, a droid's restricted knowledge and the physical remains of a destroyed station each provide something the travellers cannot obtain from a single complete record. Their dependence on these pieces makes the past an active obstacle as well as a resource. C-3 PO's involvement is especially suited to that structure: the character built to interpret languages carries a rule that interferes with the group's need to understand one. The quest repeatedly places technical capability beside a restriction on using it. The film's worlds therefore do more than supply changing scenery for pursuit. They hold fragments whose meaning requires somebody to connect a place, an object and a history.

Rey's ancestry changes the direction of her uncertainty without deciding her allegiance. Palpatine treats kinship as a route toward possessing what she can become, while her relationships with Leia and Luke offer a different connection to the past. Daisy Ridley's character fears that a source of power might also determine the person using it. Her decision to confront Palpatine has to answer that fear through an action, because learning a name cannot guarantee how she will behave. The film separates an inherited connection from a chosen continuation. Taking the Skywalker name at the end does not rewrite her biological origin; it identifies the relationships she means to carry forward. The buried lightsabers and her own weapon give that choice a visible form beside the spoken answer.

Ben's struggle approaches the same question from another direction. He has spent the trilogy using a chosen name and imposing role to distance himself from family ties he cannot remove. Leia's final contact and his remembered conversation with Han place those ties before him again without restoring the people he has lost to ordinary life. Adam Driver's physical presentation changes with the abandonment of Kylo's identity, but the change does not cancel what that identity did. His final action uses power to sustain another person instead of acquiring command. The contrast with Palpatine is direct: the emperor draws life from the pair, while Ben gives his remaining life to Rey. The same extraordinary bond becomes a means of domination for one figure and a reason to relinquish power for another.

Finn and Poe keep the Resistance present as a community beyond that central bond. Their tasks concern people, movement and whether an apparently impossible battle can be joined, rather than access to the familial knowledge driving Rey's confrontation. The arrival of civilian ships expands that effort outside a formal military structure. Lando's role connects the new fighters to someone associated with an earlier generation without making him their replacement. The fleet changes the scale of what resistance looks like: individual people can answer a call even when they do not already belong to the small organization carrying the name. That public choice unfolds beside the private one on Exegol, giving the climax two forms of participation. Neither a duel nor a fleet alone can complete the resolution the film has assembled.

The environments distinguish those simultaneous struggles through their visual scale. The wrecked Death Star makes an old symbol of overwhelming force into a hazardous ruin, while Exegol gives Palpatine an enclosed space surrounded by the apparatus of another vast campaign. The final visit to Tatooine reduces that scale to a deserted dwelling and a conversation with a passerby. John Williams's score connects the closing film to musical material running through the saga, but the last exchange concerns a name rather than another explanation of galactic politics. Rey stands in a place associated with a life that began long before hers and answers for herself. The ending leaves future adventures outside its frame. Its final act is deciding how to be known after discovering what other people wanted her origins to mean.