Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker review

     STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is a movie that I don't want to hate on but I struggle to say something positive about. I had extremely strong feelings about THE LAST OF THE JEDI but it actually was a movie that had something to say. For all of the disagreements I had about its treatment of Luke Skywalker and other subjects, it had an emotional heart. This film is something that just feels like empty spectacle. It has some beautiful scenes and quite a lot of ideas but they jump around so much that I can't really say I'm affected by any of them. It is, in simple terms, a movie that I don't feel much about at all.

    I'm not going to spend the entire review dumping on the movie because that's a waste of good typing but will try to articulate why I think this feels like a mess. I will also talk about what I felt were the positive elements of the movie. Unfortunately, my overall impression of the film is that it felt very much like this: "What? Huh? How? Huh? Who? How did he do that? What? No wait, stop, I want to know more about this. No, hold on. Huh? Why are you doing this? How? Huh? Who are you? What? It's over?'

    The premise is that Emperor Palpatine has come back from the dead. This is something I think was a very good idea because Kylo Ren can't serve as the central bad guy for the new trilogy. Despite murdering Han Solo and his uncle Luke, Kylo Ren has been too successfully woobie-fied and shown to be a poor tortured soul to have any real emotional gravitas. There's also the fact we have yet to get a real reason why he has defected to the First Order and Dark Side other than he really liked the uniform. I don't blame Kylo Ren fangirls, like my wife, but he's also basically the Star Was equivalent of a vampire with Rey as his version of Bella.

    I don't actually need an explanation for why Palpatine has returned and this is a complaint I'm not behind but it could have been a bit more than what we're presented. The sequels lack of explanation for what the hell is going is one of its largest weaknesses. Who are the First Order? What happened to the New Republic? Why did Kylo Ren fall? How did Palpatine come back from the dead? These are things that would have made the movie better even if they're just a few lines. I'm actually satisfied with the fact, "Snoke was a clone created by Palpatine." That's about the only explanation we get, though.

   Anyway, Kylo Ren submits to the Emperor in exchange for a fleet of star destroyers and the First Order becomes the Final Order. Meanwhile, the Resistance spends a good deal of time trying to find a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead them to the Emperor's hideout of Exegol. Rey is training under Leia to be a Jedi Knight (okay, that's cool but when did she train?) while Finn as well as Poe are running around the galaxy to fight evil. There's some tension over this as Poe thinks Rey would be an asset as an agent but nothing comes of it.    

 

   Essentially, the rest of the movie consists of the heroes tracking down the thing that needs to be gotten to get the thing that needs to get the other thing. It feels a lot like Knights of the Old Republic's search for the Star Forge but less coherent. We find a party planet, a planet where the First Order stole everyone's children, and a planet which I thought was Endor but turned out not to be Endor. Then everyone eventually goes to the planet Exegol that is basically Space Mordor for the final confrontation with Palpatine.

    There's some decent moments spread throughout the movie that I wish had been expanded on. I was interested in Kylo Ren's decision to serve Palpatine versus being his own man. I liked Finn's brief encounter with another defecting stormtrooper. I liked Lando's appearance and wanted more (Lando for Supreme Chancellor!). Hell, I was really interested in the plotline where General Hux turns out to be a traitor to the First Order even if I felt that it was an unnecessary plot twist and all of General Pryde's scenes could have been given to him.

    However, the movie moves at a lightning pace with no time to dwell on character beats or revelations. At one point. Poe Damoren is revealed to have been a former spice smuggler. When the hell did this happen? There's nothing about him in the movies or the EU that implies he's not a Republic/Resistance lifer. Finn wants to proclaim his love for Rey but never gets a chance to and immediately backs out. The relationship between Rose and Finn is also abandoned, which just makes the entire film's worth of development for them feel pointless.

    The movie feels like it's gone through multiple rewrites. For example, the characters of Chewbacca and 3PO both have death scenes. Chewbacca dies due to Rey's dark side lightning and 3PO sacrifices his life to translate a Sith artifact's inscription. Both of these get reversed, though, and I can't help but think this is Disney knowing that both of them are characters that have a shelf-life over the living actors. After all, you can get anyone to wear the Chewbacca suit and 3PO could theoretically be dubbed by someone other than Anthony Daniels (blasphemy as that may be).

    The death of Carrie Fisher hangs over the movie and there's not really much that could have been done with that. There are some genuinely touching moments but it's easy to see what they originally planned for the movie from the novelization. Kudos to Billie Lourd for her willingness to help make a tribute to her mother. I also believe General Organa being Rey's Jedi Master is as important a thing for the reviving of the Jedi as Luke. It makes her, "There is another" in a way she wasn't in the Legends universe.

    In conclusion, this movie was not very good. There were a few bits that I truly appreciated like when the entirety of the galaxy threw their starfighters, capital ships, and presumably armed space freighters against the First Order. If you're going to say that democracy and the people are enemies of fascism (and why wouldn't you?) then this is the best visual way to show it. However, the majority of the movie seems just lacking in any real plot coherence. At one point Rey and the others find the thing they're looking for by going into quicksand that our heroes could get out of easily (because one of them has telekinesis). Yeesh.

5/10