In response to actress Kelly Marie Tran’s relegation to little more than background noise in the recently released finale to Disney’s “Star Wars” trilogy, the hashtag #RoseTicoDeservedBetter has been trending on social media — with many noting the racist abuse she received at the hands of alt-right trolls on social media following “The Last Jedi,” the prior installment in the “Star Wars” saga.
“The treatment of [R]ose in [“The Rise of Skywalker”] sends the message that if you, as a woman, do your job as an actress … and men don’t like it and proceed to attack you online, the writers of the next movie will listen to that and totally erase you from it. [W]hat the f**[*]?!” lamented one Twitter user.
“Quite frankly, Rose Tico IS ‘Star Wars.’ She is the common person of the galaxy, rising up in resistance and rebellion. Her message of fighting out of love, not hate, is THE central theme. It’s the main lesson George Lucas was trying to teach us,” said another Twitter user.
“Seriously, was it that hard to give Rose a role similar to Lando in [“Return of the Jedi”]? Doing something amazing in the climax to save the day? Even Jar Jar [Binks] had a crucial purpose in [“Attack of the Clones”], and Rose is a way better character than Jar Jar. Come the f*** on,” said another.
Others were more defensive, arguing that J.J. Abrams had to make a difficult choice by elevating the main characters, who were already so flatly drawn as a result of the previous two movies.
“I’m about to say something controversial, but I think [Abrams] was better off giving characters that were already established more vital roles, like Connix and Rose, than introducing more characters that aided this whole whack a** McGuffin plot,” said one Twitter user.
“#RoseTicoDeservedBetter is the [“The Rise of Skywalker”] take I can’t stand. [Kelly Marie Tran] didn’t deserve harassment. But that is not a justification to give more screen time to a character that failed to land with the majority. Simply put, [Abrams] didn’t find value in her character. Stop making it more than that,” said another user.
According to Violet Kim of Slate, the sidelining of Rose Tico was so dramatic that she received less than two minutes of total screen time in “The Rise of Skywalker” — compared to her voluminous presence in “The Last Jedi.”
Just how bad is it? I conducted an investigation, watching both “The Last Jedi” and “The Rise of Skywalker” with my finger poised over a stopwatch app. And while I noticed Rose’s glaring lack of a presence, the results surprised even me: In “The Rise of Skywalker” … she appears for just one minute and 16 seconds, give or take a few seconds.
Even 1:16 is a fairly liberal appraisal — while I tried to be strict about only letting the timer run when Rose was actually on-screen, my definition of “on-screen” was generous. For example, I included the scene at the end where she hugs Chewbacca at the Rebel base, although it’s possible to argue that she wasn’t quite in the foreground of the action. I was so alert for any sign of Rose that I even included the part where she is only seen in (partial) profile staring intently at Poe while he speaks.
Regardless of how audiences received Rose Tico in “The Last Jedi,” the fact of the matter is her character played a pivotal role in the movie’s outcome — so much so that she nearly sacrificed her own life to save the character Finn. For “The Rise of Skywalker” to just sideline her character rather than creatively elevating it appears more like a cheap game of audience damage control rather than an act of genuine storytelling.