Inside Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

J.J. Abrams on #TheRiseOfSkywalker: "Everyone is doing the best work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But the ambition of this movie is far greater than Force Awakens. What we set out to do was far more challenging. Everything is exponentially larger on this” https://t.co/jWMuUPOp2T

— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) November 19, 2019

Entertainment Weekly spoke to J.J. Abrams and some of the Star Wars cast about the upcoming movie The Rise of Skywalker. While they didn't go into plot points all that much, we do find out some things about the movie that we didn't learn from the trailers.

Here’s what we know about how Episode IX begins: It’s been more than a year since the events of 2017’s The Last Jedi. The First Order has decimated the Resistance. Rey has been training to use the Force. Finn and hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) have been sent by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to find allies throughout the galaxy, but so far haven’t had any luck. “They’re trying to put bandaids on this leaking ship of the Resistance,” Isaac says.

Their mission leads Finn, Poe, and Rey to work together, which has, oddly, never happened before in the trilogy. And since there’s a time jump, the characters have all grown and changed since we last saw them. “We’re not just a ragtag group of people who have been thrown together,” Isaac says. “We’ve actually had time to train. There are some really great sequences with the three of us in infiltrating spaces.”

Both Isaac and Boyega say they had their character wishes granted for the final film. Isaac wanted Poe to get “out the cockpit and into the group,” while Boyega wanted Finn to become a more capable solider (and not, as the actor candidly puts it, just a “comedic goofy dude who never gets stuff done”).

The article also tells us a bit about Rey's interactions with Kylo Ren, incorporating Carrie Fisher into the film, some new characters, and the return of Palpatine and Lando Calrission. Oh yeah, and force ghosts. -via Uproxx