Ahead of the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, director J.J. Abrams strongly hinted that the trilogy-closer would be something of a “course correction” after 2017’s divisive The Last Jedi, and sure enough, Episode IX turned out to be every bit as apologetic as folks had either dreaded or hoped.
Most obviously, we can see Abrams’ attempts to reach out to the haters in the way that Rise basically undoes one of the boldest twists of The Last Jedi. But more controversial still is perhaps how the film reduces Rose Tico to a minor supporting player after her major role in the last movie.
Indeed, after the release of Rian Johnson’s effort, actress Kelly Marie Tran found herself subjected to vicious online abuse and with this backlash in mind, it feels like no coincidence that Abrams only gave Rose 76 seconds of screen time in his film. Of course, this hasn’t sat well with many fans and folks have started accusing Abrams and Disney of pandering to the trolls. But according to co-writer Chris Terrio, it was never their intention to sideline Rose, even though that’s what ended up happening.
Speaking to Awards Daily, the scribe said the following:
“First of all, J.J. and I adore Kelly Marie Tran. One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have though has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to.”
“We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together. A few of the scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out not to meet the standard of photo-realism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes unfortunately fell out of the film. The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose.”
That’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, Rose was indeed sidelined and with only 76 seconds of screen time in a movie as big as The Rise of Skywalker, you can’t help but feel that the footage of Leia wasn’t the only reason that Kelly Marie Tran got such a big shaft.
Not to mention that it just feels like a real slap in the face for someone who was being positioned as a major background character. Still, given that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is more or less one big apologist-driven helping of fan service, anything that the fans didn’t like had to either be reduced or removed entirely, and that includes Rose Tico.