Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker looks set to finally pay off The Last Jedi's divisive Canto Bight scenes. Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi was a marked departure for the Star Wars franchise and deliberately toyed with the audience's expectations in instances such as the final lightsaber battle and Snoke's sudden demise. The Last Jedi attracted a partisan reaction, and while some enjoyed this vastly different take on the traditional Star Wars format, others felt that Johnson's film was a betrayal of what had come before. Perhaps the most derided element of The Last Jedi were the scenes set on the Canto Bight casino planet, and even some of the film's supporters reserved criticism for this particular storyline.
The Resistance's Finn and Rose Tico head out into space to find a master hacker who can stop the First Order tracking the good guys' dwindling fleet of ships. Although they find their man in Benicio del Toro's DJ, the mission is a failure and the hacker sells out his new friends, revealing the Resistance's evacuation to Crait in exchange for his freedom. This final sting is the only way in which the Canto Bight material has a telling impact on the plot, as without DJ's interference, the Resistance might've been able to elude their pursuers. Other than that, Canto Bight is certainly visually impressive, but does very little to push the plot forward considering how much time is spent there.
Fortunately, The Rise of Skywalker will give Canto Bight a far deeper significance. In the recently released final trailer for Star Wars 9, it becomes clear that ordinary citizens of the galaxy have started to join the Resistance in numbers. There's Poe's "good people will fight if we lead them" line, the image of a bolstered Resistance force sitting around listening to Lando and the dramatic shot of the Millennium Falcon leading a mismatch of assorted ships that have allied to the Resistance's cause. This development finally pays off the Canto Bight story from The Last Jedi.
The fights between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire, or the Resistance and the First Order, mostly take place in a bubble. The opposing forces of good and evil will usually fight in space, inside a Death Star, or on a remote planet such as Hoth, Endor or Crait. This trope removes their heroic struggle from the everyday lives of people in the galaxy. Although the Canto Bight criticism might've been justified in the context of The Last Jedi as a standalone film, it succeeded in bringing the work of the Resistance to the very people they strive to protect. Finn and Rose smash up the opulent casino, free the fathiers from captivity and inspire the children being forced to work the stables, leaving the youngsters with a heroic impression of the Resistance and the Jedi.
Although it may not have affected The Last Jedi's story in any significant fashion, seeing the interplay between the Resistance and the wider Star Wars population directly sets up why ordinary people suddenly start siding with the good guys in The Rise of Skywalker. The Rebels, Resistance and Jedi have always been an isolated bunch, only ever teaming up with others on an ad hoc basis, such as the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi or the Wookies in the prequel trilogy. They've never managed to inspire the mass social uprising that one might expect when faced with the tyranny of the Empire and its offshoots, and it would've been jarring to see everyday folk signing up to fight in The Rise of Skywalker if the change in public mood hadn't already been foreshadowed by the Canto Bight scenes in The Last Jedi.
