Star Wars: 10 Things Colin Trevorrow's Episode 9 Script Did Better Than The Rise Of Skywalker
9. It Gives Us A Lightsaber Duel At The End
The Rise Of Skywalker was anticlimactic in many ways, one of the most obvious being the lack of a lightsaber duel at the end of the movie.
It's true that Star Wars is much more than lightsabers, but considering a lightsaber battle has appeared at the end of all but the first Star Wars movie (yes, the Force Projection Luke and Kylo Ren fight in The Last Jedi absolutely counts), the fact that there isn't one in the very last movie seems a bit ... strange.
Of course, giving Palps a lightsaber during his confrontation with Rey barely would have fixed this. Lightsaber fights are at their best when they are used as an external metaphor demonstrating the interior struggles between or within certain characters, which is the reason why Luke's duel with Vader at the end of Return Of The Jedi remains iconic. Despite being his granddaughter, Rey never actually knew the Emperor, meaning there were absolutely no personal stakes in this final fight.
The series seemed to always be leading up to a climactic duel between Rey and Ren, as their ideologies collided head-on. This is the ending that appears in Duel Of The Fates and, to make the whole thing even more epic, the namesake track made famous by the Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon Jinn/Darth Maul fight in The Phantom Menace would have played in the background. This familiar music queue would have helped bookend the franchise, while finally transcending the Prequel erasure evident in the other Disney Star Wars movies.
Compare this to the Kylo and Rey fight that did happen in the middle act of The Rise Of Skywalker, plagued by unusually bare sound design and some of the least interesting choreography in the franchise.
A final fight, culminating in the epic orchestral score of Duel Of The Fates, would have been a suitably legendary end to such an iconic franchise.