Anna Daniels
This is because Rise of Skywalker has been accompanied by more supplemental materials than any other Star Wars movie — not to mention any non-Star Wars movie we can think of, and most Supreme Court cases. For starters, there’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary, released on the same day the film came out; that ginormous tome revealed such plot points as the fact that Jannah (as most suspected, but the film failed to make clear) is Lando Calrissian’s long-lost daughter, that the planet Kylo visits in the film’s opening is indeed the same one (Exegol) where Anakin Skywalker lost his famous game of “The floor is lava” with Obi-Wan Kenobi, and that the vaunted Knights of the Old Republic RPG is freakin’ canon.
More lost plot points will be laid out by the Rise of Skywalker five-issue limited comic series, to be published by Marvel in May 2020, while even more literally had to be explained by the movie’s crew in various interviews (like how Emperor Palpatine managed to return, and what it was that Finn kept trying to tell Rey for the entire movie). Now we have the novelization, and if you’re thinking that the substance of Rey and Solo’s mysterious dialogue will be the only revelation revealed therein, we’re thinking you’ve got another thing coming.
Depending on whom you ask, this all makes Rise of Skywalker a) a thematically rich, narratively dense work containing too much story to fit into its run time, or b) an incomplete film which asks its fans to shell out extra cash for supplemental materials to fill in its plot holes. We’ll let you be the judge; the flick will hit digital platforms on March 17, and DVD/Blu-ray on March 31.
Written by: Looper
