STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Writer Discusses The Film's Opening Crawl
Every film in the Skywalker Saga has opened with an opening crawl accompanied by the iconic John Williams’ Star Wars theme. I imagine it’s not an easy thing to come up with as it has to explain everything that has been happening in between the films.
As you know, the crawl for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had to pack in and explain a lot of things to get the audience caught up on what had been going on over the course of a few years since the end of The Last Jedi. That included the big news of the return of Palpatine.
During a recent interview with IndieWire, writer Chris Terrio discussed the process of coming up with what the opening crawl would entail and what needed to be said in it:
“We debated and debated what the crawl would say, and we wanted to have the word ‘revenge’ in the crawl, a message of revenge in the voice of the late Galactic Emperor Palpatine. We also wanted that line, ‘The dead speak.’ … You might be able to say ‘kill the past,’ and that might be genuinely what Kylo Ren is trying to do in ‘Episode 8’ and even at the beginning of ‘Episode 9,’ but the past isn’t done with him yet. The character might be mentally ready to be done with it, [but] there’s the voice of the past, literally, the emperor saying, ‘Not so fast, my boy. History has its eye on you.’ History remembers what happened, and the Sith should not go quietly into the night.”
The opening crawl did gloss over a lot of information that seems would be important, mostly regarding Palpatine. In fact, there was an alternate opening crawl written that may have revealed more about Emperor Palpatine’s return, but Terrio explains that the original opening crawl for Star Wars: A New Hope inspired them to go in a different direction:
“We went back to the crawl of Episode IV [A New Hope] and realized that it’s a fairly complex situation you’re being thrown into. It very much feels like a Saturday morning serial, because they’ve just stolen the plans to a battle station called the Death Star, and that’s all brand new information in 1977. We decided that we were going to just go for it and begin with an inciting event, which is that this broadcast has been heard.”
I can see the reasoning with that, but at the same time, I still think it would have been nice for some things to have been made clearer. I would like to see what that original opening crawl for The Rise of Skywalker had to say.