I wrote this review in Jan-Feb 2020, and it is intended as part of a book on the mythology of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. As such, there are references to different chapters. To dispell confusion, you’ll have to wait until I publish that book soon to read the other chapters.
Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker
Score: B-/C+
My thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker are many but here’s the gist: I enjoyed it, but I found it to be very unoriginal. All the choices made in terms of story were safe ones, like they were checking boxes of things that would appease the most fans. It was formulaic. But maybe that’s just a JJ film, because The Force Awakens was like that, too. The Last Jedi was not like that at all, which may be why some “fans” hated it. But I loved The Last Jedi for the fact that it was daring and challenging and genuinely surprising. No more sober, complex Star Wars like in The Last Jedi. For better or worse, we’re now back to the bright, flashy shininess of The Force Awakens because J.J. Abrams is back to write/direct.
Having explained in my The Force Awakens review why I’m ok with reading spoilers before the film comes out, I should mention that no matter what I spoilers I read for The Last Jedi, almost nothing was spoiled for me. I did not know that Luke and Snoke would die. I did not know about the Force projection ability. None of it. However, I unfortunately knew what was going to happen in The Rise of Skywalker because of internet leaks by someone called JediPaxis (“The basic plot of Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker assembled from my sources”). However, there were things that I hadn’t heard from the leaks: Kylo and Leia would vanish upon death, that Leia’s body would wait for Ben to die before vanishing, as if mother and son were connected even in death (my wife pointed that out to me). I’ve seen this explained like this: When Leia “offers her own life to save Ben Solo, her body does not leave as her journey is not complete,” having seen in a vision that her path would lead to the death of her son (Sheraz Farooqi, “Star Wars: Why Leia Only Disappeared After Kylo Ren’s Death”). She “does not completely pass into the netherworld of the Force until she can guide Ben Solo to come with her” (Farooqi). Farooqi observes that Leia’s ultimate purpose on The Rise of Skywalker “was to save and redeem her son, and in turn, redeem the Skywalker family” (Farooqi).
My opinions often align with film critics. I’m always interested when they don’t. Am I missing something, or are they? And they almost align with The Rise of Skywalker. As of January 2020, The Rise of Skywalker is now the worst rated Star Wars film, even lower than The Phantom Menace (Tassi, “‘Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’ Is Now The Worst-Reviewed ‘Star Wars’ Movie Ever”). It is more than 12% below Attack of the Clones. This makes no sense to me because Attack of the Clones is by far the worst Star Wars film ever made. I love Obi-wan sleuthing around the galaxy and the end battle scene, but everything about the Anakin and Padme scenes is too terrible to bear. So my opinions don’t always align with film critics. I happen to like The Godfather better than The Godfather Part II, which goes against popular opinion. Go figure. Some film critics have called The Rise of Skywalker a failure. I think that’s wrong. Was it a formulaic retread? Sure. But it wasn’t a failure. However, I think that it was easily the weakest of the Sequel Trilogy. For me, The Last Jedi was easily the best of the Sequel Trilogy.
It is interesting now to re-watch The Force Awakens knowing what where the story goes in The Rise of Skywalker. The granddaughter of the Emperor and a stormtrooper defector take on the remnants of the Empire, led by Leia’s son/Luke’s nephew. They are interesting reversals, like those that Lucas did in the Prequel Trilogy, where the stormtroopers are the army of the good guys (the Republic) and the rebels (the Separatists) are the bad guys. It also reminds me of the generational reversals in the Dune series of novels.
In a perfect world we got the Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly’s Episode IX film, in which Rey Solana accepted both the light and dark sides of the Force to finally balance it—she would not deny her anger nor reject her love—and defeated a (mostly) unrepentant, evil Kylo. It made much more sense as the culminating arc of not just the Sequel Trilogy but solved the desire for balancing of the Force in the Prequels. Instead we got The Rise of Skywalker, which feels like the ending chapter to some other trilogy of films. (More on Trevorrow and Connolly’s Episode IX at the end of this review.)
The good.
I preferred Rey being related to no one famous. She doesn’t need to have a famous lineage to be an interesting and engaging character. While I would have preferred that, I am ok with Rey being a Palpatine in that it’s a lineage and a past that she has to overcome. If she’d been a Skywalker by blood, it would have been too easy. “Oh, well, she’s another hero in a line of heroes” (except for Anakin, obviously). This goes back to the whole “democratization of the Force” that Rian Johnson supposedly did in The Last Jedi. As I said in the last section on that film, it was George Lucas who democratized the Force in the Prequel Trilogy when he made the Jedi celibate monks. No Jedi ever had a famous lineage before the Skywalker family, and now the Palpatine family, of course.
Some people who love The Last Jedi complain that The Rise of Skywalker retcons some elements. I agree with this. Some of the things that happen in the film directly refute The Last Jedi. However, in everything I’ve seen about J.J. Abrams, he seems to have nothing but good things to say about Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. Why did Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio make Rey descended from Palpatine? It apparently wasn’t meant as a dig against The Last Jedi. Abrams says of the decision,
One of the themes of [The Last Jedi] is that anyone can be anything regardless of where you’re from . . . Though I completely understand ‘you’re nobody’ is a devastating thing, to me the more painful, the more shocking thing was ‘you’re from the worst possible place.’ And is your destiny, is that thing that you feel, that you know is part of you, somehow, that you’re haunted by, is that your destiny? The idea that choices -- there are things more powerful than blood, as Luke says. That feeling was an important thing to convey for us. (Abrams qtd. in Gina Carbone, “Rey’s Parents Revealed? J.J. Abrams Explains Lineage Choice In Star Wars: Rise Of Skywalker”).
It was interesting to note that Kylo and Rey’s relationship in the Sequel Trilogy is the inverse of Luke and Leia’s in the Original Trilogy. Writing for Salon, Matthew Rozsa states,
With Luke and Leia, we started out thinking they might become love interests before learning that they are in fact siblings. With Kylo Ren and Rey, audiences speculated that they would wind up being related to each other before learning in the end that, nope, their connection was actually supposed to be romantic. (Rozsa, “The Force dyad, critiqued and explained in ‘Rise of Skywalker’”)
Something interesting to note is that in The Rise of Skywalker we finally see a Force power—the ability to save others from death—that Anakin Skywalker sought after in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. It was revealed to be what drove Anakin to the dark side in the Prequel Trilogy; his fear that he would lose his beloved as he had lost his mother in Attack of the Clones. Anakin wanted this power for selfish reasons. He wanted to save his wife Padme from death in childbirth so that he could continue to be with her. It’s love, but it’s a selfish sort of love. When Ben Solo resurrected Rey, he sacrificed his own life doing it. It’s the one redemptive act he performs to undo some of the death and damage he caused as Kylo Ren. In opposition to Anakin’s selfish love, Ben’s is a selfless love. At the end of the film, when Rey adopts the surname Skywalker. What is incredibly interesting about that is that Rey actually is pretty much the carrier of that bloodline now, since Ben (the last of the Skywalker line) transferred his life force to resurrect her.
I liked in the film that Hux didn’t turn on the First Order out of altruism. , but for the contemptible reason of simply wanting to see Kylo fail. I think it’s still in line with his character.
I liked that for the Luke and Leia flashback, they used cut scenes from the Original Trilogy, probably Return of the Jedi. Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett explains that, “We scoured outtakes from the original movies, and we took some pieces and then had to try and figure out the technical aspect of putting that shot together” (qtd. in Hoai-Tran Bui, “Billie Lourd Played Leia in ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Flashback Scene”). Note that it was actress Carrie Fisher’s own daughter, Billie Lourd, who played Leia’s body double in that scene (Bui, “Billie Lourd Played Leia”).
I liked the stadium of people at the end, watching the Sith ritual between Rey and Palpatine. But who in the world are they? According the Visual Dictionary, they are the Sith Eternal, (Pablo Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker The Visual Dictionary 178). Since those Sith Eternal hissed out words very similar to the “Duel of the Fates” song from The Phantom Menace, I wonder if it is the Sith Eternal on that track. Is that a retcon?
I liked how the door on the Death Star opens for Rey in a similar way to the door in the bowels of Maz’s castle in The Force Awakens that leads her to Luke’s lightsaber. In The Rise of Skywalker she is searching for the Wayfinder, probably the worst, most on-the-nose name of anything in a film in history, except for the equally ridiculous name of “Unobtainium” used in Avatar (2009).
Some people question why Rey didn’t disappear after she destroyed Palpatine. The answer is: For the same reason that no Jedi before Obi-wan disappeared when they died. No Jedi disappears in the Prequel Trilogy, which of course surprised all the audience members at the time. And it has still never been sufficiently explained by Lucas or anyone at Lucasfilm.
No matter what the story issues anyone has with any of the Sequel Trilogy (myself included), at the very least they were well acted, directed, and written; unlike Lucas’ Prequel Trilogy. There was no Jar Jar Binks stepping in poop and getting farted on by a long-legged tapir (in The Phantom Menace). The dialogue was good throughout, unlike the dreadful dialogue in—especially—the love scenes of Attack of the Clones. Every word Anakin or Padme says is just so bad, so ill-conceived, and their acting is so wooden and stilted, that it just snaps you out of the fantasy of it all. Thank the Maker the Sequel Trilogy isn’t like that!
And yet, if they hadn’t planned on the Emperor returning—Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly’s original script confirms that—and if they weren’t going to release the Emperor’s communication at either the end of The Last Jedi or the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker itself, then they should have at least made it as the opening paragraph of the crawl, instead of releasing it on Fortnite.
Some critics I read thought that having a bunch of Snoke clones in tanks was “laughable” (Kyle Larson, “Spoiler Review – Hopelessness Versus Hope in The Rise of Skywalker”). I disagree. I thought it was very economical storytelling. In screenwriting, one is supposed to show, not tell. And I thought that was done well.
I also didn’t think that the ending where Kylo/Ben dies in Rey’s arms was “cynical, shallow, and cruel” (Larson). I saw it as fitting and in keeping with Romeo and Juliet. And the Force heal is not an “inexplicable Force-ability dropped in the idle of the story” (Larson). It is shown earlier in Rey healing the snake creature. It was shown days before The Rise of Skywalker’s premier in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. I know that this is not an in-film display of it, but I do think it’s worth noting.
I like that the Flash Fights turned out to not be in the film. According to early spoilers, while Kylo and Rey were fighting in the film, they were supposed to be able to physically jump from planet-to-planet, hoping around the galaxy to well-known Star Wars planets. Jumping from planet-to-planet while fighting, even if they’re connected via the Force, always sounded like such a terrible idea to me. I’m glad that whatever they do it’s in semi-close proximity, and they both don’t physically go to different planets. They can pass objects to each other via their Force connection? Ok. That’s at least in line with The Last Jedi where Kylo has sea spray/rain from Ahch-To on his face after one of their conversations. For me, The Last Jedi is by far the best, most challenging film of the Sequel Trilogy.
I liked that Poe and Zurii did not end up together, even after their shared history… or really because of it. Their relationship, too, was formulaic, but in a good Casablanca kind of way.
I really liked the little droid mechanic Babu Frik. He was a classic Star Wars character, cute and a little goofy. Some may say that this trend started with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, but I say that it really started with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and probably with R2-D2 in A New Hope.
Finn ends up with no one, romantically-speaking. His affections seem all over the place in The Rise of Skywalker. He likes Rey (as shown in The Force Awakens). He likes Rose (as shown in The Last Jedi). Now in The Rise of Skywalker, he likes Jannah. He can’t pick. And of course, he seems to have some chemistry with Poe, but it’s just a “bromance.” Most people felt a heaping helping of (mostly unhealthy) Kylo/Rey romance, myself included. Sure, they’re star-struck lovers, à la Romeo and Juliet, but who can’t help pulling for them anyway? “Maybe they’ll make it one day… oh… one of them died. Whelp… who didn’t see that coming? Am I right?” “I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison yet doth hang on them” and the like. Reylo have so much sexual tension you could cut it with a lightsaber. That’s right. I said it.
With Rey being a Palpatine, I’m more glad that Dooku/Tyranus and Snoke were shown using Force lightning, otherwise ignorant fans might claim that only Palpatines could create Force lightning, when George Lucas has said that Anakin/Vader should have been able to do it, too, but he couldn’t because he had cybernetic arms. Lucas has said only Sith could do it. Any Sith. Yoda could absorb lightning straight into his hands, just as Palpatine could create it. I always assumed it was to show how powerful in the Force they both were. If Yoda could do it, then by rights any Jedi should be able to… if they’re strong enough in the Force.
When Rey and Kylo are fighting on the Death Star and she backflips over the wave and lands, I kept thinking about Deadpool’s comment on superhero landings. I wanted Kylo to walk through the wave and say, “Maximum effort.”
The bad.
In the film, it is revealed that Rey is Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter. This notion gave people anxiety realizing that Palpatine had sex at one point, however it should be noted that Palpatine did have a son in the Expanded Universe named… Triclops (Bill Slavicseck, A Guide to the Star Wars Universe 450-451). Triclops was a mutant with a third eye in the back of his head, and he was kept hidden away in an Imperial insane asylum (450-451). Whatever I or anyone else thinks negatively about The Rise of Skywalker, let’s all be thankful that Triclops did not show up in the Sequel Trilogy. Also, Triclops had a son named Ken, who was a Jedi Prince, so Rey does sort of fit that vague outline of Palpatine’s grandchild (451).
It is revealed that Luke and Leia knew about Rey’s parentage the whole time, during the events of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Withholding Rey’s parentage from her seems like a particularly audacious thing for Luke to do, since his own parentage was withheld from him until the worst possible moment in The Empire Strikes Back. (The answer to this, of course, is that Rey was not originally supposed to be descended from Emperor Palpatine in The Last Jedi or Episode IX, at one time called Duel of the Fates. For more information on the unused Duel of the Fates script, turn to Chapter 9.)
I think at this point, I should note that it makes very little sense for Rey to take the surname Skywalker in The Rise of Skywalker. She knew Luke Skywalker for about as long as Luke knew Yoda: a few days to maybe as long as one week. The entirety of Rey’s training by Luke takes place during the time that the Resistance is being chased by the First Order in The Last Jedi. Likewise, Luke’s whole training by Yoda takes place during the time that the Millennium Falcon is being chased by the Imperials in The Empire Strikes Back. Maybe differing time on different planets—because of gravity—has something to do with either training taking longer? But we can only guess at that. The point I am making is that Rey knew Luke for a short period of time. She was trained by Leia for at least a year, as it was explained that The Rise of Skywalker takes place at least a year after The Last Jedi (Chris Agar, “Star War 9 Takes Place One Year After Last Jedi”). While Leia is a Skywalker, she uses her adoptive surname of Organa throughout the Original Trilogy and Sequel Trilogy, where Organa is stated in all three films’ opening crawls (Wookieepedia, “Opening Crawl”). Wouldn’t it make more sense for Rey to take on the surname Organa? For the character, yes, it would, because Rey knew Leia Organa for far longer than she ever knew Luke Skywalker. By the way, I got this notion from YouTuber Just Write’s video “The Rise of Skywalker Is The Most Frustrating JJ Abrams Film.”
I did not notice any new musical themes from John Williams. There are a heaping ton of callbacks to previous motifs and themes, but no new ones I could hear after three theater viewings.
I wanted the filmmakers to do away with Jedi and Sith altogether and have people who walk the line between light and dark sides of the Force use Luke’s last name as a title. I like “Skywalker” as a title much better than “Gray Jedi,” which was used in the Expanded Universe, now Star Wars “Legends.” This notion was more prominent in Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly’s Duel of the Fates, which I will get to in Chapter 9.)
There are too many fake-out deaths in The Rise of Skywalker: Chewbacca, C-3PO’s memory wipe, even Kylo has two fake-out deaths (stabbed by Rey, and thrown off a cliff by Palpatine). Also, Palpatine’s return is a fake-out death from ROTJ (although he does state early in the film that he has died before). Rey, too, dies after defeating Palpatine, until Kylo resurrects her.
Another thing that was bad about the film: The final film of the “Skywalker Saga”—as Disney has labeled it—ends with two Palpatines fighting to the death? That’s an odd choice, to say the least.
In The Rise of Skywalker, they say that the “Holdo Maneuver” was a one-in-a-million chance of working. It didn’t. You just need a big ship and a suicidal pilot. Also, isn’t the star destroyer that is destroyed above Endor being taken down by using the Holdo Maneuver? It sure looks like it. Craig Elvy at ScreenRant noticed the same thing, stating that The Rise of Skywalker “complicates matters further when it shows what appears to be a second Holdo Maneuver being executed on a Star Destroyer above Endor during the film’s final moments” (Elvy, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Confirms Why Holdo Maneuver Only Happened Once”).
One thing that I don’t like in any of the Star Wars films is what happens when lightsabers meet Force lightning. Sometimes lightsabers absorb the lightning (Rey in The Rise of Skywalker or Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones). Sometimes they deflect the lightning (Rey in The Rise of Skywalker and Mace in Revenge of the Sith). Sometimes the lightning morphs Palpatine’s face once its deflected back on him, sometimes it makes him explode (it also seemed to have had this effect on Vader in Return of the Jedi). Either way, it never occurs to Palpatine to simply stop shooting his lightning. Maybe it’s difficult to stop using it once you start? What are the rules behind this? There probably are none.
Having Ewoks, and Wickett explicitly, in an overt Return of the Jedi remake is ridiculous. I cannot believe that anyone truly liked that.
When people saw The Rise of Skywalker, I heard a lot of chatter, with people saying things like, “The Emperor’s back? This ruins Return of the Jedi’s ending! Anakin now didn’t bring balance to the Force and died for nothing!” Writing for Forbes, Dani Di Placido states that the film, “desperately attempts to distance itself from The Last Jedi, and completely nullifies Anakin Skywalker’s sacrifice, invalidating the plot of six films, just so it can resurrect a fan favourite villain” (Placido. “‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is Now The Worst Reviewed ‘Star Wars’ Movie, But Does It Deserve The Hate?”).
Others wondered how the Emperor survived being thrown down a hole and blown up. I don’t think either are correct. While it is never explicitly stated in the film, I’m convinced that Palpatine died in Return of the Jedi, but was brought back via cloning and transfer of his spirit, à la the Dark Empire comic series from the 1990’s, which I’ve always loved. Three pieces of evidence: 1) Yes, everyone points to the line that’s originally from Revenge of the Sith about how the dark side is a pathway to unnatural abilities. But right before that Palpatine tells Kylo explicitly that he has died before. 2) Dominic Monaghan’s character says that Palpatine could have returned through science and cloning. There it is right there. 3) Co-writer Chris Terrio states that, “The entity known as Palpatine in this version – his body died in Return of the Jedi – is patient and has been waiting” (qtd. in John Hoey, “Snoke’s Death Forced Abrams’ Hand For Palpatine’s Return In The Rise Of Skywalker).
In the end, it was terrible screenwriting to leave out how the Emperor returned. Apparently, The Rise of Skywalker team didn't want to “clutter the film up with things you didn't need to know" and editor Maryann Brandon said that there originally was more information in the film about what was keeping the Emperor alive but it was cut because “it seemed to go off topic” (qtd. in Carbone, “Really? Rise of Skywalker Team Figured ‘You Didn’t Need to Know’ How Palpatine Returned”). I cannot think of anyone who would agree with those statements. Most saw the omission as a big, gapping plot hole in the film.
Redemption.
I thoroughly disliked that Kylo Ren was redeemed in this film. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that murderous, fascist scumbags should get to be redeemed. Redemption is thought by some to be a major theme of the Star Wars films, and the “Skywalker Saga” in particular. However, I say that redemption was only a theme in Return of the Jedi, not the series as a whole. Although more people will disagree with me now that redemption is a theme in The Rise of Skywalker, too. Still, that’s only two out of nine core films, and twelve films total if one counts Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Solo: A Star Wars Story and 2008’s animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Redemption in two out of twelve films is hardly a major theme. In the Prequel Trilogy, the Jedi wanted the Chosen One to destroy the Sith, not to redeem them. And in the Original Trilogy, Obi-wan and Yoda both wanted Luke to kill Darth Vader, not redeem him. Redemption was Luke’s idea, independent of the previous galactic happenings.
Redemption of the villain, who is also from this one specific family in a whole galaxy of beings, is not even a theme. It’s a trope, which I see as having a negative connotation. Tropes are limiting. You have to make everything fit in with that one trope. It’s why Kylo’s redemption in The Rise of Skywalker was so rushed. It had to be shoe-horned into the script. Themes, on the other hand, are expansive. It’s like myth (expansive) versus dogma (limiting). Tropes are repetitive, as is The Rise of Skywalker’s use of redemption of the villain. I’m ok with it. I just don’t like it much. It’s too easy, both for the filmmakers to use and for the audience to accept. It’s banal, boring. The Last Jedi was not boring. The audience was on the edge of their seats. “Who’s going to turn, Rey or Kylo? Oh, I thought it would be that, but now it’s this other thing? Great!” With The Rise of Skywalker I just sat there thinking, “Well, I guess Kylo’s going to turn now because that seems to be what other fans are expecting. Oh, he did turn back to the light? Oh. That’s fine, I guess.”
The redemption of the villain worked in Return of the Jedi because the audience wasn’t expecting it to happen.
It doesn’t work in The Rise of Skywalker because the audience was expecting it to happen.
But most Westerners love a good redemption tale because we all have a redeemer complex. (Refer back to Chapter 5.) I also don’t like that Vader was redeemed in Return of the Jedi, because I don’t think he deserved to be. I’ve thought that since way before we saw Anakin/Vader murder a roomful of Jedi children in Revenge of the Sith. I think that the strength/power of Vader turning towards the light is not, “He became good again? Good for him!” That’s not the point. The strength/power of that happening is that it shows the strength/power of Luke, as well as the light side of the Force. Compassion is the real power, not domination. That’s what the Sith do.
Rey wanted to redeem Kylo in The Last Jedi only so that the redemption trope could be subverted. And it was a brilliant scene! Unfortunately, Abrams went back to redemption as a theme, probably out of feeling like he had to; for fan service. And it is fan service because that is what many of the fans expected because of Return of the Jedi. However, it’s boring. Instead of something interesting, it was a recycled story arc.
The interesting thing is that Kylo disappeared once he died. I’ve seen people interpret that as Leia having helped Kylo/Ben to disappear. Speaking of Leia, what happened with her when she called out to Kylo and then died? I’ve seen people interpret it in these ways: Leia used all her energy to reach Kylo across the galaxy. That effort killed her in the same way that Luke Force projecting across the galaxy killed him in The Last Jedi. I like that interpretation.
Here are some others: Some people think that Leia used the Force to forcibly push all of the dark side out of Kylo, and the effort of doing that is what killed her. That left only the light side in him and allowed him to return to being Ben Solo. I don’t like this interpretation at all, mostly because it takes autonomy away from Kylo. Sheraz Farooqi writes that since Leia had visions of her son eventually dying—which is why she gave up her Jedi training post-Return of the Jedi—Leia did not disappear into the Force until she could guide Kylo/Ben into doing it, too (Farooqi, “Why Leia Only Disappeared After Kylo Ren’s Death”). Lastly, my wife, Kinnereth, personally loved that Leia didn’t disappear until her son did because it shows the deep connection that mothers have with their children.
But Force ghost or no, no actual redemptive work was done by either Kylo or Vader. All Vader did was kill the guy who was slightly worse than him. But he didn’t pay for all the death and destruction and oppression done by him for decades. How would one even begin to do that? Kylo at least resurrected Rey. Sacrificing himself is much better than what Vader did, so in that respect I like The Rise of Skywalker more than Return of the Jedi.
Conclusion.
I think it is complete nonsense for people to complain that the Sequel Trilogy was not all planned out beforehand. This is because the hallowed Original Trilogy was not planned out either. When Lucas wrote Star Wars, that was it. (It wasn’t even titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope yet.) When Obi-Wan tells Luke that a man named Darth Vader killed his father, that was the truth at the time it was written and filmed. How do we know this?
First off, let’s look at Alan Dean Foster’s book Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, originally published in 1978. Splinter was written as the sequel to A New Hope, and it is nothing like The Empire Strikes Back. Splinter was written in such a way that if A New Hope tanked at the box office, Lucas had a story for a sequel that he could film on a low budget. Foster states in an interview,
“The only restriction placed on me was that the follow-up novel had to be filmable on a low budget. That’s why I set it on a fog-shrouded planet. A lot of the action takes place in the fog or underground, which facilitates shooting with cheap backgrounds.” (qtd. in Brian Cronin, “Movie Legends Revealed: Was ‘Splinter of the Mind’s Eye’ Nearly a ‘Star Wars’ Movie Sequel?”)
Cronin notes that Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is “pretty explicit” in its portrayal of Luke and Leia being romantically interested in each other (Cronin, “Movie Legends Revealed”). This is because they were not yet brother and sister in the story.
Lucas originally had different plans for Darth Vader, too. Originally, Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker were two different characters. Luke was even trained by Anakin’s Force ghost while on the “Bog World” in The Empire Strikes Back while Darth Vader was running around elsewhere in the galaxy (Thomas Bacon, “Darth Vader’s Original Backstory (Before He Was Retconned To Be Luke’s Father)”). Furthermore, Bacon notes that,
This is confirmed by Leigh Brackett’s first draft of the script for The Empire Strikes Back, which was drawn up from Lucas' copious notes and doesn't contain any hint of the famous "I am your father" reveal. There are a number of key differences between this draft and the final theatrical cut, suggesting Lucas hadn't cemented his plans as much as he likes to claim. Han isn't captured, Luke doesn't lose a hand, Luke does have a twin sister (but it might not be Leia), and Luke actually gets to meet his father. On Dagobah - which Brackett referred to as Bog World - Luke is mentored by both the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Force-Ghost of his father. (Thomas Bacon, “Darth Vader’s Original Backstory (Before He Was Retconned To Be Luke’s Father)”)
After Brackett passed away, Lucas wrote a second draft for The Empire Strikes Back, which is where Vader being Luke’s father first appeared, “according to the annotated screenplay” (Bacon, “Darth Vader’s Original Backstory”). So no one has any right to complain about a sensed hodgepodge story writing of the Sequel Trilogy because the Original Trilogy was written on the fly, too, by the same writer: Lucas.
That being said, I think it is highly doubtful that Palpatine was supposed to return originally. I think that they did it because Rian Johnson killed off Snoke in The Last Jedi and Abrams thought that he still needed a “big bad” in the film. But why not simply use Kylo as the big bad? He was already the main villain in The Force Awakens, Abrams own film. And he turned out to be the main villain in The Last Jedi, too. Not only in terms of screen time, but by the fact that he killed Snoke. Johnosn did that so that Kylo would now be the main villain. He explains this in the The Last Jedi DVD audio commentary (01:56:00 – 01:56:17). And I think it is a fine idea. I mean, why not simply have Kylo as the main villain? I suppose some portion of the fandom didn’t think that Kylo was a legitimate villain. In the The Force Awakens Behind the Scenes documentary, Abrams himself states that the title of the film not only meant the awakening of the light side of the Force in Rey, but also the awakening of the dark side in Kylo (Secrets of The Force Awakens: A Cinematic Journey 01:02:30-01:02:40). But then Abrams does a weak 180-degree turn in The Rise of Skywalker and has Kylo give up all that he has done and worked towards in the span of about a two-minute scene with the memory of Han Solo (who forgives his son for patricide?)? Why did Abrams do that?
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