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'Star Wars' Fans Actually Agree On One Thing: This Was the Dumbest Moment Of the Entire Series

Photo credit: Elaine Chung
Photo credit: Elaine Chung

From Esquire

For some of you, watching The Rise of Skywalker in theaters probably feels like a fuzzy, far-off quarantine dream. Cheering at the dum-dum-dum-dummmmm, welcoming back Rey and the new trilogy crew, then wondering exactly what in the hell was going on the rest of the time.

Namely, you know, the MacGuffin that drives the whole damn movie forward: A Sith dagger, inscribed with the Google Maps directions to Exegol, where grampy Palps and his fans are waiting. Without much Star Wars news nowadays, fans on Reddit (a group that has a history of constant divisiveness as long as the franchise itself) have united in roasting one dumb, shining moment of idiocy in The Rise of Skywalker. It’s when Rey holds up the knife to a nearby mountain range, realizing that, holy shit, the grooves on the dagger match up juuust right with the mountain’s peaks and curves.

Eh… kind of. Not really. If you look at the borderline pained-looking, OMGeee faces Rey and her crew are making, you’d think that the dagger and the mountains are such a perfect fit that the credits were about to roll. And that’s not really the case. You’d have to match them up from the perfect distance, at the perfect angle, surely, to even find the vaguest resemblance. Probably not the best use of an ancient Sith Artifact—one of those janky pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t really fit anywhere.

Since one Reddit user, DaTruestEva, pointed this out two weeks ago in the Star Wars subreddit, the post has nearly 78,000 upvotes, with virtually unanimously approving comments. "If they had done something cooler with the dagger, then great, but it literally relied upon the death star ruins existing in the shape of its little tape measure," reads the top comment. "The Goonies did this part better," reads another. Sure, fans have complained about this clunky story device—along with the unimaginative, lazy writing—before. But with nothing much better to do right now than ruminate on the latest movie, fans seem to have found common ground on this one, baffling scene.

It’s a little surprising that the Sith butter knife is the fan-unifying moment in The Rise of Skywalker, though. There were so many other contenders for the dumbest dumb moment crown! You have Rey’s Force oopsie, the one that nearly incinerated poor Chewy. The whole business about The Rise of Skywalker’s crusty grampy Palpatine not really being Palpatine, but a Palpatine clone. As one user pointed out, Palpatine's voice memo that was broadcast on Fortnite. And an ending that did a disservice to the new trilogy's central female hero.

Really, this is all one large case for LucasFilm to greenlight the Baby Yoda Saga: A nine-movie-long series, each running about two hours, composed entirely of Baby Yoda peeking behind corners and antagonizing the big space people. I’d give Disney Plus my life’s savings for even a 10-minute look at that one.

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