Rose Tico fans can claim a victory, well, sort of.
An alleged summary of the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker script has emerged on YouTube
from a former professional screenplay reader named Robert Burnett.
This supposed version of the script is said to have been written during Colin Trevorrow's
time in the director's chair, before he lost his job in 2017 and the entire project started
over with The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams back at the helm.
This script, with the working title The Duel of the Fates, appears to be a profoundly different
movie from the one we received in December 2019, though several of the individual concepts
are similar enough that they might have been repurposed for The Rise of Skywalker.
The story itself, however, is entirely different, and Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico is at its
core.
"I work behind pipes all day.
Doing talking with resistance heroes is not my forte.
I'm Rose."
Fans of Rose, who was introduced in The Last Jedi, have been upset by how The Rise of Skywalker
minimized her presence and insulted the character, on top of the real-life harassment Tran experienced
on social media because of her role.
They can perhaps find some bittersweet comfort in the possibility that, somewhere along the
line, someone might have cared about Rose.
However, we can't 100% guarantee that the alleged script described in the video is genuine.
Burnett explains straight away that he won't provide proof of the script beyond cropped
images of the title page and the original narration crawl, or any detail as to how he
got a hold of it, but if you want to imagine this is legit, hey, go for it.
Let's take a look at the version of Rose Tico in The Rise of Skywalker that might have been.
This alleged original Rise of Skywalker script actually opens on Rose Tico and BB-8.
A good chunk of the first act has her attempting, along with Finn, Poe, and eventually Rey,
to sabotage the transportation of ore used for building Star Destroyers at the Kuat Shipyards.
Long story short, the sabotage goes very poorly for our heroes, but with luck, they escape
(are you ready for this?) by jacking an entire freaking Star Destroyer off the lot and peeling
out of the shipyards at lightspeed.
All the while, Rose is described as being front and center, doing her best to reorganize
when plans A, B, and Z all fail.
There are two major teams performing missions in this alleged script: Rey, Poe, and Chewbacca
take off on their own to do their half, while Rose, Finn, C3PO, and R2-D2 depart for Coruscant
to try a desperate gamble.
In trying to snuff out the Resistance for good, the First Order has choked off all intersystem
communication at its source.
Rey learns from the texts she picked up in The Last Jedi, however, that the Jedi Temple
houses a giant kyber crystal that the Old Republic used thousands of years ago as a
communication system the First Order doesn't have the means to control.
Lighting this ancient beacon is the last hope of the Resistance to gather allies, and Rose
takes point on this do-or-die mission.
Once the beacon subplot is completed on Coruscant, the alleged Rise of Skywalker script continues
on into the city itself.
Since the fall of the Republic as we knew it in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the city-planet
has taken a major hit, with most citizens falling into scavenging and homelessness.
Rose and Finn navigate this underclass and eventually help incite a revolt.
You heard that right: the woman who lost the only family she had left in a civil war gets
to assist inciting the biggest on-screen popular revolt against fascism in Star Wars, in Coruscant.
Quite a climax.
This all takes place while a massive battle occurs in orbit over Coruscant, with General
Leia's forces united by Lando Calrissian.
The cherry on top is mentioned in passing by Burnett as he wraps up the video: Once
the First Order is defeated, the remaining leadership attempt to flee from Coruscant
in a giant mobile headquarters.
At some point in the story that Burnett doesn't describe, Rose messes with the compound's
navigation computers and when the complex goes to lightspeed, the travel vectors are
incorrect and it crashes into a planet, destroying the Order for good.
It's not as elegant as a one-in-a-million shot into an exhaust port, but that is wicked
cool.
Sadly, since there's no proof that any of that is actually true, you're gonna have to
take it with a grain of salt.
In fact, though it might have existed at one point, fans of Rose might rather pretend the
screenplay draft didn't.
After all, all it would be is a reminder of something they got cheated out of.
The past three years have been tumultuous for the Star Wars franchise between the backlash
over The Last Jedi and failure of Solo, and Trevorrow's professional merit seemed to have
dropped after his film Book of Henry utterly bombed at the box office.
Being the poster boy for the biggest franchise on Earth must have been a lot of pressure
at the time, and it appears that maybe in the end, a bunch of fallible humans cracked
underneath it.
Despite the mixed overall response to The Rise of Skywalker, many people did in fact
enjoy it, and that's the legacy of Star Wars as a whole: it's too many things to too many
people, and there's no way in hell it could ever please everybody.
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