How to watch Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker if you have epilepsy

In a word: don’t.

Don’t just take my word for it, because I don’t have epilepsy, but one of our gracious fans who has mild epilepsy was kind enough to give us some feedback on the issue, and her recommendation is to avoid seeing it in theaters. Wait until Rise of Skywalker is streaming, or on DVD, and people who know can make a thoughtful examination of which scenes might induce an episode and what time in the movie they are shown.

If you want to risk it, then there are two primary scenes to watch out for.

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Warning: spoilers ahead. (It’s not a big deal, if you don’t already know you’ll find out who the mystery character is during the opening screen crawl.)

About 4 1/2 minutes into the movie you’ll hear Emperor Palpatine speaking with multiple voices, “I have been every voice, you have ever heard, inside your head.”

After that we see a closeup of Palpatine speaking, and his face is lighted from different angles in a strobing effect. (Something I’ve never seen done before.)

The scene is over at about the 6 1/2 minute mark — about 2 minutes long. Once you hear the sound of the Millennium Falcon, you can watch the movie again.

Of course, the entire movie is littered with blasters, lightsaber battles, explosions, etc., all too numerous to list.

Near the end of the movie, Rey runs into a Sith temple to face Palpatine. There’s a few scenes in there where they apply the same strobe light effect to his face. But, each time they do it he’s viewed closeup. All I can say is be quick to look away anytime you see Palpatine closeup.

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I hope that helps. And if you have feedback to help improve this content please comment below, or email me [email protected], and I’ll update this post.

Dan Gardner

Creator and developer of the RunPee app. When something doesn’t work right in the app it’s pretty much his fault. 🙂

Aspiring author. Would like to finish his “Zombie Revelations” trilogy if he could break away for working on RunPee and the cottage he’s building for RunPee Mom.