Meeting Rey

The Force Awakens

Movie soundtracks are my jam. The majority of the albums that populate my Spotify feed are film scores and John Williams brilliance is never far from my recently played.

It’s often suggested that without Williams’ music, Star Wars would not have risen to being the cultural phenomenon that it is. Whether it is Luke Skywalker staring at Tatooine’s binary sunset or Anakin and Obi-Wan battling above the lava rivers of Mustafar, Williams’ music elevates the greatest Star Wars moments to another level. Intense, beautiful and distinctively from a galaxy far, far away.

However, my favourite piece of Williams music is not from the original trilogy or indeed the prequels. Just when you thought that he could not deliver a product to exceed his previous mastery, Williams produces a theme for our new hero Rey to help create the most compelling character introduction in the series.

The Jakku desert is harsh, desolate and littered with relics of the Galactic Civil War. Inside a fallen Star Destroyer we meet a Scavenger tearing pieces out of the old Imperial cruiser. Her resourcefulness established as being key to her survival soon after, as we see her slide down a sandy bank on a piece of scrap metal. That’s when Williams’ score kicks in.

It tells us all we need to know about Rey from Jakku, (or is it Knowhere?) The music is hopeful and always gives me a sense of adventure and as Rey crosses the desert on her speeder, clubbed together from parts salvaged from the starship graveyards, we know that this scavenger will be well suited to it.

When she arrives at Niima Outpost, we see just how tough Rey’s life is as she accepts measly earnings from trading parts to Unkar Plutt, before returning to the solitude of the fallen AT-AT that she calls home, scratching another day into the wall and wearing a salvaged rebel pilot’s helmet as if reaching out for a life of excitement that she can’t quite reach.

The scene echoes Luke Skywalker, moisture farmer, staring at the twin suns and yearning for something more, while still being brand new. We’ve only known Rey for a few minutes and yet we already know so much about her.

Williams weaves Rey’s theme into the rest of his Force Awakens and The Last Jedi scores. No doubt we’ll hear it in The Rise of Skywalker too. But whenever I hear it, I’m simply reminded of this perfect character introduction, how much I relate to Rey and just how Star Wars’y this all feels.