A ‘Star Wars’ Writer Calls J.J. Abrams And Rian Johnson’s Supposed Rivalry A ‘Bad Misreading’

One of the chief (among many) criticisms leveled at The Rise of Skywalker is how it revises The Last Jedi, which is considered the best installment of the Disney trilogy by most critics, and the worst by many Star Wars fans. (Does anyone have it ranked second among the three It feels like it has to be first or last.) Between Kylo putting his helmet back together, Luke’s insistence that a lightsaber “deserves more respect” than to be casually thrown away (a far cry from this), and the film’s treatment of Rose, there’s an argument to be made that Rise co-writers J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio intentionally set out to undo much of Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi vision. But Terrio disagrees.

“Those people who see it as a meta-argument between J.J. and Rian are missing the point, I think. At the end of The Last Jedi, Luke has changed,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I think it would be a bad misreading to think that that was somehow me and J.J. having an argument with Rian. It was more like we were in dialogue with Rian by using what Luke did at the beginning of The Last Jedi to now say that history will not repeat itself and all these characters have grown.” Tell that to the fish nuns.

In a separate interview, Terrio also discussed Kelly Marie Tran’s lack of screen time in Rise of Skywalker, explaining that it had to do with Carrie Fisher’s death. “One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie Fisher’s footage in the way we wanted to,” he said. “A few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes, unfortunately, fell out of the film.”

The only real rivalry between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker that I’m interested in is: who would win in a fight, a porg or Babu Frik My money’s on hey hey!

— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing) December 26, 2019