Films and Fiction

When I think of The Rise of Skywalker, I can’t really be as hard on this movie as I might. Yes, it’s bad, but it came off the back of something even worse, The Last Jedi. It had to try and fix that movie’s problems and bring the whole sequel trilogy to a close at the same time, which was no easy task. Looking back at it, it might have been better to make two movies rather than one, to have a better chance at steadying the ship.

Despite that small caveat, I can’t let the movie get off the hook. It is bad, and in ways that it doesn’t have to be. It did have a lot standing against it, but as a movie in its own right, it fails to deliver anything truly memorable. So let’s get into it and round of my retrospective on the Star Wars sequels.

To start with the main characters, we finally get Rey, Finn and Poe together, as they should have been in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. It’s too late at this stage to give the the kind of relationships that they need, but at least the three actors have some natural chemistry, and it would have been nice to see this in TFA. The big problem is that they don’t do much other than go on an endless series of side quests to find new MacGuffins in ever weirder settings.

They need to find a Sith Wayfinder (to find their way to the Dark Side, I guess). They travel to a planet. They find a dagger with a clue written on it. But the writing’s in Sith, which C-3PO can read but won’t translate. So they need to find a droidsmith and get the information. Now they have to go to Endor. There’s the Death Star wreckage. And finally, the Wayfinder. It’s all just a convoluted video game mess, and it starts to get boring pretty quickly.

The movie also does a lot of odd stuff with its characters. So Rey’s now feeling the Dark Side. OK, she did the same in TLJ when she was on Ahch-To, but why is she suddenly reaching for it now? Why not when Han died? Or during her confrontation with Snoke? Or when fighting the Praetorian Guard? Why only after Chewie is kidnapped?

Another thing I don’t like is the Force Dyad connection between Rey and Kylo Ren. There doesn’t seem to be any rational explanation for why this happens, and the idea that you can pass objects through the Force is a strange one. It all seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t have the feeling of destiny that made a lot of Anakin’s particular skills more acceptable.

As for the other two heroes, Finn is once again just there to fill spaces. He does the odd bit of comedy, has a few hero moments, but his character development still remains stuck in a rut.

As for ace pilot Poe, he’s still an ace pilot. He does have to take command of the Resistance after Leia’s death, which is nice considering everything he’s gone through before, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.

The villains are much the same. Hux is made into a Resistance spy out of nowhere in one of the most contrived plot conveniences ever. There are so many ways he could have undermined Ren and sought his defeat without having to sell out the entire First Order, which he’s been fanatically devoted too all this time. It’s just ridiculous and makes his character into a complete joke.

Admiral Pryce is a welcome inclusion as an intelligent, competent officer, which has been lacking so far, but he’s mostly there just to fill the spot of enemy commander without actually contributing anything to the plot.

Kylo Ren spends most of the movie being whiny and irritating. I do wonder how the FO lasted even a week under his command. His eventual turn to Ben Solo is completely unearned. It worked with Vader because he sacrificed himself to save his son from the Emperor. Why does Ren turn good? Because he has a weird hallucination about Han Solo.

For some reason, this movie thought that it needed to introduce more characters, even though Rose Tico is barely even a cameo. For some reason, characters like Zori Bliss and Jannah come and go without any purpose. Which brings us to the real loss here: Lando Calrissian.

He’s the final character from the original trilogy to make an appearance and it’s such a waste. He’s barely here and doesn’t do anything onscreen, which makes him seem more like an insert to please fans who wanted to see him. This is sad because there were clearly moments earlier on in the sequels where he would have fit perfectly (master codebreaker, anyone?) but wasn’t included. Now it’s much too little, much too late.

Now for the big twist. Somehow, Palpatine returned! I really don’t know what to say about this particular development. It manages to be completely obvious and completely ridiculous at the same time. It feels like a last desperate act to bring in a genuinely good villain now the this trilogy has killed or assassinated all of its own supply. Kylo Ren clearly wasn’t going to cut it so time to bring back the big guns. I won’t believe that this was the whole purpose of the sequels, though, as it’s such a cheap twist, not worthy of two set up movies, and really is just a last cry now that Snoke is gone.

Now, regardless of that, Ian McDiarmid is still a brilliantly theatrical actor, and his performance in this movie is worth watching. The whole thing about him being Rey’s grandfather, though. Where did that come from? It’s yet another contrivance, and I wonder if when J.J. Abrams wrote the orphan backstory in TFA, he thought he’d come up with a really good reveal later on, then couldn’t think of anything and desperately grabbed the most unlikely answer.

Does the movie have any redeeming qualities? Not really. It’s a muddled, hyperactive mess that’s always jumping about all over the place. It’s not satisfying either as a standalone movie, or as the conclusion to a trilogy. The finale battle is OK, but the idea of an entire fleet of Star Destroyers equipped with planet killing superweapons is too far fetched to take seriously, or even to comprehend it as a realistic threat. If you just keep destroying planets, there won’t be any left. The point of the Death Star is that it was a nuclear bomb. Something that could be used once or twice to set an example, and once people knew of its power, they would never dare to resist, and the Empire would never need to use it again. Both Starkiller Base and this fleet are just too much to take in, and they don’t seem anywhere near as threatening as the original Death Star, going for the ‘bigger is obviously scarier’ approach.

I don’t think the The Force Awakens is a great film, but I think any attempt to make a good trilogy was scuppered by the outright ‘subversion’ of The Last Jedi, which left the finale movie with no base and nowhere clear to go. As a result, it failed, and failed hard. There’s no way it could have wrapped up the sequels in a truly satisfying way, but sadly it didn’t try that hard to fix the mistakes of its predecessors. I do wonder how future movies will deal with the problems of unfinished character arcs, poor world building, and badly thought out plot. What will Rey’s ‘New Jedi Order’ movies do to correct this? Finn being a Jedi would have fit perfectly here, if only the sequels had made an effort to develop it.

Sadly, The Rise of Skywalker is a what might have been, not just for itself, but for the entire Star Wars franchise as developed by Disney. It’s surely no coincidence that it’s been five years since they released a SW movie following the terrible reception to TROS (and the flop of Solo). Yes, they put a lot of effort into making Disney+ shows, but there won’t be another movie released until at least 2026. The attempt to make Star Wars into a TV brand has failed. It’s a cinematic franchise, and it needs to get back to the big screen.

This piece is shorter than my other posts on the sequels, and that’s really because I don’t feel as bothered about this movie. It’s the disappointing final act of a disappointing trilogy, and it’s really what you’d expect from this particular section of Star Wars. Somehow, The Rise of Skywalker happened…

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