A Look At: Star Wars - Episode IX: Duel of the Fates

(http://scriptshadow.net/screenplay-review-star-wars-episode-9-duel-of-the-fates/)

The original plan for Star Wars: Episode IX  was that it would be directed by Colin Trevorrow, then most famous for Jurassic World. However, he was fired from the project a couple of months before production was due to start. The reasons for this have never exactly been spelled out, although The Book of Henry bombing at the box office, and production troubles on Solo: A Star Wars Story likely gave Lucasfilm cold feet about allowing a relatively inexperienced director to have a handle on the big tent-pole finisher for the franchise. Rian Johnson was originally offered the gig, but he baulked at the tight production schedule and so J. J. Abrams was brought back. The Rise of Skywalker was the result.

Whatever you thought of The Rise of Skywalker (my own view: fun popcorn movie, but misses opportunities to be something more), it had something of a disappointing reception. As a result of this, many people started to wonder 'what if' and whether or not the Trevorrow draft may have been better.

Well they need wonder no more. Since the turn of the year Colin Trevorrow a mysterious person has been leaking concept art that was done for the movie, followed up by the script being obtained by a YouTuber who promptly gave a rendition of the plot. And, come February, the script itself, by Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, was leaked online. You can find it here.

So, on this May the Fourth, let's try and answer the question of whether it could have been better than The Rise of Skywalker, as we take a look at Star Wars: Episode IX; Duel of the Fates.

Now, obviously, the first thing to set out is that this script is not the complete version of what the Trevorrow film would have looked like. We don't know how finished this draft was, as screenplays often undergo constant revision as production begins and even whilst filming is in motion. This draft was also before Carrie Fishers untimely and unfortunate death, so rewrites would have had to happen to account for that in any case (though perhaps less than allegedly happened with The Rise of Skywalker, as Leia's role here is not that large). Similarly we don't know how the backlash to The  Last Jedi would have effected things (as seemed to again do in the case of The Rise of Skywalker, which seemed to written with a checklist of complaints next to the monitor).

The plot essentially divides into three main strands. Rey, equipped with a snazzy new double-bladed lightsabre, is continuing her journey as a Jedi, but is struggling with the Jedi codes rulings, particularly as regards straying away from emotions of all sorts. The Resistance has worked out that all signals between planets are being blocked by the First Order, now fully, if shakily, established as a new Empire and set up on Coruscant. They realise, however, that there's an old Jedi communication network beneath the Jedi Temple that they can use to bypass the communication blcok.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is off (leaving Chancellor Hux in charge) searching for a way to make himself more powerful, whilst being haunted by the (literal and metaphorical) ghost of Luke Skywalker. This journey has taken him to Mustafar, former home of Darth Vader, where he finds a Sith holocron that may provide the answers he seeks.

With that preliminary established, I'll now set out what I think are the bad parts and the good parts of Duel of the Fates (I won't do a long summary, as those are already out there if you're not inclined to read the screenplay). So, first of all, the bad.

The Dark Side

There are I think two major issues. The first is that, for some Godforsaken reason, they've crowbarred in a Rey/Poe romance. This doesn't work at all, and seems to exist for no other reason than to stop people (including Oscar Issaac and John Boyega) from clamouring for a Finn/Poe pairing. Whilst Hollywood is happy to accept that homosexual romances are a thing, in blockbusters they must be confined to the background and be short, to make it easy for the Chinese censors to snip it out. Rey's only two plausible pairings (if she had to have one) are either Rey/Ben (which Rise of Skywalker sort of went with) or Rey/Finn, and the latter was never going to happen given Hollywood's squeamishness over black male, white female pairings. As it is, then, this pairing feels forced, doesn't really add much to either character (other than a means of externalizing Rey's struggles with her emotions) and saps time and space away from other characters to develop. Which leads neatly to the second issue - Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.

Kylo here has an interesting plot. Searching for more power, but also an easy way of obtaining it, a hologram of Darth Sidious sends him out to search for Tor Vallum, a 7,000 year old Sith Lord responsible for teaching Darth Plageius (Sidious' master). With his face new mutilated by the hologram, and a new mask applied, Kylo heads out and finds Vallum. The sequence here is quite cool and Kylo goes through a parallel of Luke's journey in the Empire Strikes Back, where he faces a Vader conjured by the force. Unlike Luke, however, Kylo loses his duel (symbolizing his inability to overcome the darkness). From Vallum he also learns the power to drain the force for living beings and add it to his own. He promptly does this to Vallum.

This, then is the problem, that Kylo's motivations are never exactly clear. He wants more power, but it's never really spelled out why or what he hopes to do with it. It's a bit of blow because his more conflicted characterization is lost in favour of 'being more evil' as a motivation. Tor Vallum is also a bit of wash. Built up really well, and then having survived 7,000 years is suddenly defeated really easily by a somewhat angsty young adult. It doesn't really work and points to the general problem of the Kylo segment, lack of development.

There are some minor issues as well. I won't dwell on all of them, but I think the one that sticks out most prominently is the sequence where we meet the warlord backers of the First Order. Hux has a conference with them and we're introduced to a variety of alien lords who all appear to be the funders of the First Order. This seems to be an attempt to build on Johnson's point in The Last Jedi on the way capitalism profits from war, but it's clumsily done. It only exists for one sequence and is then never mentioned again, so it sticks out as an odd part that doesn't really add anything to the story.

The Light Side

So what's to like? Well, there's a number of things. Rose Tyco is fully integrated into the story, and gets a number of contributing parts, which is good to see (particularly after the character was more or less written out of The Rise of Skywalker). There's also no regression in the characters either. That is it feels like these are a group of people who lived through the events of The Last Jedi, rather than collectively having amnesia and only remembering The Force Awakens. The plot in general feels more coherent - that there's an actual direction to what's going on rather than a bunch of stuff happening and being thrown together. Hux is also not given short shrift and is allowed to develop as well (and he also gets an amusing sequence where it's revealed that he's a real fanboy for the Jedi and is trying to learn how to use the force - which also puts a new spin on his conflict with Kylo, adding a factor of jealousy to the mix.)

Finn also gets a good arc, as he completes his journey from coward to leader. On Coruscant he leads a revolution of the people against the First Order, including most prominently the stormtroopers. A queasy question mark that's always been hanging about since The Force Awakens, was that if Finn could break his conditioning and rebel, why couldn't the other stormtroopers? And, additionally, if they were all kidnapped and conditioned as children then wouldn't this raise moral questions about just slaughtering them? Here we get an attempt to address that and one that ties in with Finn's own growth.

The Knights of Ren are also in this script but here they feel like an actual threat and a group of people who you would actually be running from, rather than a bunch of cosplayers who stumbled onto the stage. They also help push forward Rey's own characterisation.

Rey, Poe romance aside, is also handled much better here. She is still a nobody and is not wedged into being Palpatine's granddaughter, which consequently allows her to grow into her own terms, as well as with the realisation that not coming from a lineage does not mean she's a 'nobody' (as Poe puts it 'no one is a nobody'). This feels true to the arc. Granted, this is botched slightly by the revelation that Snoke had Kylo kill Rey's parents. Why is never revealed (I think the implication is supposed to be that Rey was a student at Luke's academy, but then that really screws up the timelines), but I imagine this would have been cut.

That aside, it also means that her conflict is more internal and true to her. Rey struggles with her emotions because she is an emotional person with trauma, which makes sense given her abandonment in one the most inhospitable planets in the galaxy, not because she has some bad genes from Palpatine. This makes sense of her struggles to follow the Jedi way, which is phobic towards any kind of emotion. The completion of her arc, then, with the realisation that emotions are not bad, but can be used productively, feels real and also serves as a good way of resolving the central conflict of the Star Wars series between the dark and the light sides, with the integration of both of them.

It's not all perfectly handled, and I think more could be done in engaging with the mythology of the world. With that said, it is a Hollywood blockbuster movie and so exists to sell tickets, not do deep ruminations. That sort of stuff gets left to the additional material, such as Knights of the Old Republic II, which does an exceedingly good job of flipping the conventional mythos of Star Wars on its head.

From a Certain Point of View

So, would Duel of the Fates have been better? On the basis of the screenplay I'd marginally give it the nod. It's not perfect by any means, there's issues here even in the stuff I liked and think it did better. For instance, I like the opening sequence where a botched bombing mission turns into a dramatic stealing of a Star Destroyer. It's silly, and far too easy really, to but it feels epic and fun and also neatly establishes the characters and how far they've come and developed in the meantime, as well as the respective positions of the factions.

Overall, I think Duel of the Fates works better as a conclusion to the saga. It builds on the themes evident through the series, and, more importantly, it does try and engage with character beats and themes that were developed in The Last Jedi, so it feels like it follows more fluidly.

Now of course we can never know how this would have turned out. Even if Carrie Fisher had not passed, and The Last Jedi hadn't had such a vocal backlash from a minority, the script likely would have changed. Add in these two developments and who knows. Similarly whilst a bad screenplay will rarely make a good movie, good screenplays don't always make good movies. What works on the page doesn't always translate well to the big screen.

But, from a certain point of view, I think it would have done.