If you’re an avid reader of my blog you will know that I pretty much despise The Rise of Skywalker for practically everything that it is. The story makes absolutely no sense in context with the Skywalker saga, Rey’s Palpatine return fills like a swing from left field and possesses no weight in the actual movie, and the film’s climactic battle on Exegol feels like a joke.
But…despite my annoyance with this movie and about 90% of its narrative choices, there is one moment that feels perfect and I wouldn’t change for the world. And that is the Poe-flashlight scene.
We have seen humorous moments in Star Wars before but this one truly hits my tickle button in ways that most jokes in this franchise don’t. I love that we see Poe Dameron, in a desperate effort to be just as cool as Rey, turn on his flashlight as if it’s a lightsaber. It’s genius and I wanted to randomly praise it today because I love it that much.
What did you think about this joke? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a wonderful day. May the Force be with you.
Annlyel Online 
Hi Annlyel, that joke was funny and even amused some of the members in the Custom Lightsaber owner community. I think Poe should have talked to me first though as I designed a saber for him ages ago and it matches his X-Wing : https://ftsabersite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/dameron-saber-blender-version-1/
But I have to say Poe’s saber in TROS looks very much like this one…
At least you have “The High Republic” to look forward to and that has new saber designs in it including a “folding Trident crossguard”!
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Yeah… I mean, TROS wasn’t a total loss. It had its moments. It’ll still have a bittersweet memory as the last time we got to see Carrie Fisher on a Star Wars screen (even if it was zombie footage taken from previous installments and spliced in). The last lightsaber duel between Rey and Kylo was dramatic. The scene where Rey walks into the wreckage of the throne room on Death Star II is neat, even if it’s a bit of a stretch to figure there’s a piece of the thing that big still left (or that the moon it landed on would still be habitable after it came down). There’s a bit of emotional gravity there when she comes in, and maybe it’s just sheer Force sensitivity that has her pause in instinctive awareness that this is where the fate the galaxy was once decided… well, sort of.
Although a fleet of Star Destroyers being able to destroy planets was a bit of a silly escalation… but the actual scene of the planet destruction was still cool Although… oh dear, I just had another “fridge logic” moment. Um… you know how the climax of ROTS is the ragtag resistance fighters turkey-shooting all the planet killing Star Destroyers? Um… what about the one that did come out and blew up Kamini? They, uh… did they miss that one? That one’s still out there, unless they figure it came back to Exegol and was destroyed with the rest.
And yeah, the flashlight was funny. Even in its weakest installments, Star Wars has its moments. I’m not ready to actually hate or despise the sequels. On their own, they’re reasonably good space opera. They’re just not as good as the other two trilogies. Started off ok. Could’ve been better. But it wasn’t.
See, I’m already starting to forgive them. 🙃
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Exactly, right. I have a bit of a confession. About two (actually maybe three) months ago I watched TROS after having a weekend long Star Wars marathon and well…I cried a lot. I chose to not think about everything I didn’t like about the film and to just watch it for what it is and yeah…I was quite emotional. Of course, afterwards the next day, I found myself upset by all of the things that doesn’t make sense in the movie but still…it has its moments.
As a Star Wars fan, I’m way too severe on a movie that’s actually pretty decent. It’s like X-Men: Dark Phoenix. The fans hated it but I happen to really enjoy it. But of course, I’m not an avid X-Men fan. I just watch the films and enjoy them for being superhero stories.
All in all, if we look at these stories with less discernment we may actually be able to enjoy them fully and sometimes that’s the best way to look at a movie.
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Yeah. Star Wars will do that to us. The original trilogy was sooooooo good that it’s hard to watch the others with the same logo and then see it not measure up. Episode 3 was kinda there. Episode 7 was…. slightly less there, but kinda there. Rogue One was about there too.
And then you go watch Empire Strikes Back and there’s pretty much nothing wrong with it at all. A few spots slow down a little and show you things in an understated way. There are times when if I don’t have the full two hours to sit, and I just wanna see the coolest parts, I’ll skip the pre-battle part of Hoth and most of the asteroid and Dagobah stuff. But Hoth is the best land battle scene in any of the three trilogies, and Cloud City is the best and most emotion packed lightsaber duel. “You have failed me for the last time, Admiral” is possibly the most awesome Vader scene in the trilogy – the magnitude of Vader’s lethal yet understated rage is shown here for the first time, from the quiver in Veers’ voice when he realizes Vader isn’t happy foreshadowing what’s to come, to Ozzel cheerfully stepping up to report before he’s fatally cut off in mid sentence, to Piett’s understated combination of discomfort and ambition in his facial expressions through the rest of the scene. It’s the first time we see Vader kill an underling for failing him, and – although we only actually see it one other time, with Captain Needa, in the entire trilogy, it establishes Vader’s character as the hate and rage filled monster that he is at his peak in the dark side, even though he’s so calm in the way he usually expresses himself. Every other character reaction in the trilogy is explained in this moment, even when they don’t die.
I know. I’ve raved about that, and other scenes in Empire before. Rogue One has two very good Vader scenes, too, and it elevates the movie a good deal. But… most of the other six movies and Solo outside of the trilogy do suffer for not having Vader in it. Vader is Star Wars at its peak. The other movies are still good… but he’s the standard bearer. BUT – and here’s where I’ll be damning them with faint praise – Star Wars without Vader is still better than at least seven of the Star Trek movies (I will take TROS in a heartbeat over Star Trek 1, 5, Insurrection, and Nemesis, and I’m willing to negotiate Generations, Beyond, and 3), all the Aliens movies without Ripley (and at least two of the four with her), most/all of the Riddick movies (I’m ok with Pitch Black, didn’t care for Chronicles, and didn’t even bother seeing the other one), most of the Terminator movies (any but the first two really), any of the Fantastic Four movies, almost any of the X-Men movies (yeah sorry… I’d only cleanly take the first one and maybe First Class over it), and in general, probably about 80-90% of the schlocky scifi out there.
And that’s just kind of the negotiating process true Star Wars fans go through with the other six movies. The prequels aren’t world beater great movies… but they get an important story across and they ended very well, and you can talk yourself into recognizing a lot of the subtle genius even of the parts that didn’t work. The sequels… had less subtle genius to them. The one “wait… whoa” moment that had me sitting up once I saw it again was seeing Rey’s “Chong Li with a lightsaber” expression in her duel with Kylo in Ep7 after I knew she was Palpatine’s granddaughter. Like… somehow I managed not to see it when I first saw the movies. It’s like, yeah, she’s wanting revenge for everything that’s happened, but once you know who she is, you start to realize that it probably a minor miracle this woman didn’t wind up on the dark side. There’s both rage and actual cruelty in that look, and it’s kind of shocking – Yoda’s admonition that the dark side is quick to join you in a fight really comes out there.
That said, it also frankly just establishes that Kylo is a bit of a piker, able to handle common rabble but frankly just can’t be that good if Rey is overwhelming him this badly on raw talent and nothing more, at least not at that point. In fairness, Snoke seems to think he’s a quite unfinished product in Ep7, so maybe that’s ok. When Rey is less given to rage and Kylo is better trained, he catches up to her.
But… there’s a lot it could’ve done better. Like… what if Rey had gone dark outright, and Finn had to redeem her through the rest of the movies? What if Snoke had been more and Palpatine hadn’t returned? What if they’d found a way to tie Vader (or a clone) back into the sequel trilogy instead of reducing it to Palpatine on a crane being behind it all?
But… it is what it is. We only have trouble with it because we’ve seen better. We wanted better. But if it had had any other logo on it, it would’ve been pretty good. Heck, it would’ve annoyed us less because they wouldn’t have needed to burn 20-30 minutes checking the boxes on a reunion tour from the rest of the saga. I do sort of wish it didn’t have the Roman numerals on it. But it’s ok.
Ten or twenty years from now, we’ll have forgiven these movies and just accept them as somewhat lesser entries in a great overall story. The haters will hate. The true fans will forgive.
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Well said.
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