Re-Reviewing: The Rise Of Skywalker

With 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' having just wrapped up, I've found myself in the middle of a hardcore Star Wars binge. As I re-watched all (well...almost all) of the movies with great joy, I realized I never got an official re-review of The Rise of Skywalker out of my system.

Now, I'm fairly certain the ~10 people that actually read my blog have a pretty good idea of how I feel about this movie (spoiler alert, I feel pretty negative), but I think it's long overdue for me to really lay out why, in greater detail than my already-very-long Trilogy review would allow, because this movie is...kind of a mind fuck. I've never seen a single movie so thoroughly derail an entire trilogy. Even people I've spoken to who hated 'The Last Jedi' openly admit that they can appreciate that movie for trying something different, while this movie is just a huge disappointment.

I already spoke about the things I liked in this movie during the trilogy review, but the short version: It's a fun enough action/adventure movie and the actors are all doing a great job, and that's really about it.

So, what about this movie is so damn frustrating? Why can't I get it out of my head? Why is this movie, in particular, so much more egregious to me than even the worst of the Prequel trilogy? The short answer is that I believe I can best describe this movie in one word: Insulting.

I realize this might sound dramatic, especially with the way people talk about this trilogy as if Disney murdered their childhood in front of them, but please understand that I mean it in the most literal, non-dramatic way. I find its lack of effort in wrapping up this beloved franchise disturbing, I think the way it treats the audience like we're stupid is offensive, I find the way it treats these characters and this universe to be lazy, and I think it actually manages to hurt the rest of the films in the trilogy. I give 'Avengers: Endgame' a lot of guff because I think it's a "just ok" follow up to the absolute banger that is 'Infinity War', but at least the ending of that film felt reasonably like the culmination of 10 years of movies. This movie is, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it, an unworthy ending to the Skywalker Saga.

It doesn't feel like the ending of a trilogy, it sure as hell doesn't feel like the culmination of 9 movies; it barely manages to create a satisfying ending to the story it makes up. And I don't put this on the characters, I don't put this on Disney "going in without a plan" (although I'm willing to bet some of their leadership was involved in the decision to pivot the story), and I definitely don't put it on any of the actors, I put this squarely on the people who tossed out the perfectly good script they already had, and gave us this instead because they were too afraid to just stick to the story set up by Episode 8; JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio (a name you may recognize from such famous critical darlings as the 2017 version of Justice League and Batman V. Superman, so that's fun).

I'm going to start breaking this down before my preamble turns into an article unto itself.

Kylo Ren - Possibly the best example of wasted potential in this trilogy, his arc is super rushed and it makes almost no sense. It feels like the writers saw somewhere online that people thought Kylo might get a redemption arc, and just decided to throw their whole weight into that despite the fact that there was just not enough set up for it. We watch Kylo Ren commit atrocities for three movies, he kills his own mentor to assume his throne, and then it's all forgotten about in the last act of this movie so that Palpatine can be the big bad again?

My biggest issue with this is that, like it or not, 'The Last Jedi' already kinda had the final word on Kylo Ren's arc; after having a heart to heart with Leia in which they agree that Ben is beyond saving, Luke goes out to confront him and confirms, beyond any doubt, that he is the villain. In his rage, Kylo attempts to strike down his former master after threatening to destroy anything and everything in his path, only to learn that he's been fooled. Having now turned down absolutely every opportunity to do the right thing, and losing the respect of his subordinates in the process, he walks through the abandoned Rebel base before making psychic contact with Rey one last time. After exchanging a short glance, Rey closes the Falcon's ramp without a word, effectively sealing his fate. His choices are made, he fucked up, and the one person he could truly reach out to is done trying to help him. He is the bad guy. The places this could have gone in the finale are many, I couldn't wait to see where they took him, but we ended up with...this. I'm genuinely not sure why experienced script writers looked at this ending and thought "oh man, this is the perfect time for his redemption arc!".

Kylo Ren's story should have ended a tragedy, a terrible mirror of his grandfather Darth Vader. Like Anakin, he believes the system of power in the galaxy to be flawed. He has real, concrete, sensible ideals, but he's been mislead and lied to, and his greed and hunger for power have cost him everything, but instead of finding a way to differentiate his arc from Vader's and make his ideals a core part of his villainy, the story settles into becoming just a cheap copy in which Kylo is nothing more than another unwitting pawn of Palpatine, and he dies to save our main character. The worst part? Even making the decision to redeem him, I'm certain you could have done it in an interesting way. But no, he's good for 5 whole minutes of screen time and then he dies. They took the best character in the whole damn trilogy and made him feel like such an afterthought.

Rey - This is one of the laziest cop outs I've ever seen. After having the previous movie state, definitively, that Rey was not the child of anyone important, this movie doesn't even attempt to retcon it in a way that makes sense (and this has been confirmed as a retcon, seeing as it was pitched right before filming started on Episode 9). Rey's parents left her on Jakku, in the hands of a slaver, to protect her? Instead of any of the thousands of inhabited planets where she wouldn't grow up in dirt, literally fighting to survive? They are picked up by an assassin on Jakku and tell him that Rey isn't there, while Rey is literally outside the ship screaming at them not to leave? This is what I mean when I say that this movie thinks the audience is stupid. They either wrote this thinking we wouldn't ask any questions, or they legitimately just didn't care to make it make sense.

Rey's journey of self discovery in 'The Last Jedi' is one of my favorite Jedi arcs ever. She goes all across the galaxy searching for a hero in Luke, she risks her life to try and find the hero in Kylo Ren, because these are the people that we (and therefore our audience surrogate) assume can have an impact, but at the end of it all she realizes that SHE can be the hero. Not because her parents are powerful, not because she's the chosen one, but because she has the ability, and the desire, to do what is right. But no, that's not enticing enough for this crew apparently. No, she's Palpatine's granddaughter, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I'm not sure there are words strong enough to describe how LITTLE it matters that she's related to Palpatine, absolutely nothing about the plot of this movie changes because she's related to him. It's just an excuse for her to struggle with the dark side and also shoot force lightning one time, because this movie just has to devote so many scenes to undoing 'The Last Jedi' for some reason.

Rey's entire arc throughout the first two movies is about finding herself; who is she, what can she do, who will she become? This movie refuses to give us a satisfying conclusion to this arc. She doesn't find purpose, she doesn't choose a path, she's GIVEN purpose, if you take my meaning. Her power isn't that she's willing to fight for what's right, her power is a bloodline thrust upon her by the writers at the last minute, and at the end of it all, instead of finding pride in being "just Rey", she adopts a name that isn't hers and that she had almost no connection to, because JJ Abrams thinks that being a Skywalker is all that makes someone important in Star Wars.

Palpatine - Just...everything with Palpatine. How did he come back? I mean we've dealt with some pretty stupid stuff from Star Wars (with such gems as Padme losing the will to live and just leaving her two kids behind despite the attending droid diagnosing her as perfectly healthy, or Palpatine telling the entire galactic Senate that they're just the Empire now) but by far, "Somehow Palpatine returned" is the stupidest thing these movies have ever done. They don't even bother to come up with a good reason for him being the bad guy again, let alone a good explanation for how the hell he came back after being atomized, aside from trying to woo us with the "Dark Side is a path to many abilities..." line. What does Palpatine returning bring to this narrative? What was gained by having him take over for Kylo as the bad guy?

Anyway, he's just back. He has a vat full of Snoke's which totally invalidates what an interesting and intimidating new character Snoke was, he has another plan that makes absolutely no sense, which I guess is at least pretty on-brand for him, and in the end, the heroic victory over him consists of Rey...holding TWO lightsabers in his direction (because one lightsaber alone didn't work when Mace Windu did it) so that he blows himself up. No effort goes into defeating Palpatine. Why would they bring him back if they were just going to shit out this final battle with him? At least when Vader tossed him into a hole it meant something for Vader's character arc. This entire thing is so lazy and reeks of last minute decisions.

Also, Palpatine tells Rey to kill him so that he can pass into her, so...what happens? Because she does kill him. Does he win now? Does Rey end this series taken over by Palpatine? It sure doesn't seem that way. It feels like they made up this final scene as they were filming it.

Finn and Poe - Finn and Poe get done so dirty by this movie. Finn was probably my second favorite character in 'The Force Awakens'. It was bad enough in 'The Last Jedi' when Finn spent most of the movie running in place, but this movie seems to have forgotten that he was ever a character at all. I'm pretty sure he spends at least half of his screen time in this movie shouting Rey's name, and the other half is the writers doing their best to dance around whether or not he's force sensitive (thanks, Mystery Box!). I thought maybe his arc was going somewhere when he met another former stormtrooper, like maybe we'd get to see him sow discord amongst the First Order by planting seeds of doubt throughout their ranks, especially considering the fiasco that a large portion of The First Order army witnessed at the end of TLJ, but then it just didn't go anywhere. The movie couldn't be bothered to slow down and let interesting, character-appropriate things happen. Finn, the child soldier turned rebel, should shine in a story about the people of the galaxy rising up against their oppressors, but this movie can't slow down from it's convoluted ass plot long enough for him to be anything other than Rey's sidekick. Is this really the best we could do with this character?

Oh and I really like the idea that while everyone was watching Rey and Kylo fight over the transport trying to fly away because Finn somehow pointed out the wrong vehicle, that the other transport was just sneaking out in the background. That's hilarious.

Poe get's a little backstory in this movie, except not really; we learn that he used to do criminal stuff, which his friends seem to view negatively despite the fact that under the First Order they're all criminals. It's just strange that the movie calls specific attention to this at all. Anyway, we meet his old friends on the most pointless planet with the dumbest name (Kijimi), so that we have something to be upset about when the planet blows up, except not really again because his friends lived because we can't have actual stakes or consequences in a Star Wars film. We also get like ten whole seconds of Poe being a great pilot, and absolutely zero mention of the fact that he's supposedly the leader of the Resistance at this point, because this film forgot that we like to see our character's do their character things. Oh and Poe and Finn are not allowed to be gay so they both meet compatible women in this one.

The Other Stuff

- The First Order, despite being the dominant power in the galaxy, is so unthreatening in this movie. Our heroes fly an entire ship into the hangar bay of a Star Destroyer and disembark with little to no resistance, and the enemy reacts so apathetically to its presence. Are you telling me that a fully armed Star Destroyer, crewed by an army of unrelenting fascists, didn't blow this thing up on sight? Our heroes go to a planet that is supposedly occupied by the Order, but they run into a grand total of 6 stormtroopers (I counted). The new Star Destroyers all have planet killing weaponry attached to them, but oh wow if you shoot the weapon it blows up the whole ship. Stormtroopers are somehow even worse at their jobs now then they were in the originals. There's just no stakes at all, there were never any scenes where it felt like our heroes were truly in danger. We haven't done enough in previous movies to establish that the First Order is dominating the galaxy, so to have them be so in the background in this film just makes it feel like they were never really that much of a threat.

- The conveniences in this movie made me roll my eyes into my skull. Palpatine's magic assassin dagger perfectly matching the shape of the Death Star debris? Our heroes happening upon both the ship and the magic dagger completely by accident? The Sith Wayfinder not being vaporized with the rest of the Death Star? Wasn't it vaporized? It sure looked like it in 'Return of the Jedi' but I guess we're retconning that too. These might sound like minor things on paper, but they're indicative of the larger issue with this movie; It doesn't really have...a plot.

Our characters just keep stumbling upon the next thing that's going to keep the film moving towards the inevitable final confrontation with Palpatine. Scene transitions are really awkward, characters all just appear where they need to be as soon as they need to be there, and so much happens so fast it's difficult to stop and take it all in. It all feels very amateurish. I understand that Star Wars has always mimicked the feeling of adventure serials but this one is just so disjointed, so disconnected, and for no reason. They could have simply followed up on the previous film and made a decent finale but instead we get rushed into this completely new conflict in the final act, not just of the trilogy, but apparently of the entire franchise, all because there was some backlash to how things went in the previous movie. It's such a bone headed creative decision. If you're going to make a divisive movie like 'The Last Jedi', the worst thing you can do is not have the stones to follow up on it, at the very least you should aim to make the trilogy cohesive.

- I know I mentioned this in my trilogy review, but the fact that Rose and Hux are both completely sidelined as characters feels like such a waste. I didn't love Rose by any means in The Last Jedi, but her character had a lot of potential, as did Hux now that he has to unwillingly following Kylo Ren's leadership, but neither of them get to do anything in this film. The way this film just randomly adds and throws away characters on a whim makes the entire trilogy feel so hollow. How can I go back and watch either of the other two films now? All I'll be able to think about is how nothing happens with Hux, how Kylo Ren's arc in the first two films barely matters, how Rey is just Palpatine's granddaughter, how Snoke is a test tube baby that I guess Palpatine just kind of unleashed into the galaxy, and about Palpatine somehow returning with his 100% crewed fleet of Star Destroyers that makes the villains of the first two films completely obsolete.

Also, a minor thing, but why is Hux's death played like a comedy beat? Why does he go flying from a standard rifles' blaster bolt? If they were going to just remove him from the story they could have at least tried to make us care a little when it happened.

- Despite all the claims that 'The Last Jedi' somehow disrespects Luke as a character, I found this movies cowardly retconning of him to be the more offensive take. Why did JJ and crew think it was necessary to try and pretend that Luke was secretly hunting for Exegol the entire time? Is it really so unacceptable that one of our heroes had a crisis of faith and closed themselves off from the galaxy? This isn't even the first time we've had that arc for a Jedi (Obi-Wan, Yoda), but this was apparently so offensive that the team decided to just pretend that Luke was secretly doing good-guy stuff the whole time.

This goes for the scene of him catching his lightsaber as well. Did I think it was the correct move for Luke to throw the lightsaber over his shoulder in TLJ? Not really, I think there were better ways to handle that moment, but this movie doesn't seem to understand the intended emotions behind that action, and so like everything else this movie tries to plaster over, it "fixes" Luke on a surface level to attempt to appease people who hated the previous film. To then follow this up with a pale recreation of the scene where Yoda lifts the X-Wing (aka quite possibly my favorite movie scene of all time) is just gross. Luke's presence adds nothing to this movie and is disrespectful of his awesome arc in the previous film.

The Littler Stuff

- Why Exegol? This trilogy's outright refusal to use any of the original extended universe content just feels so weird. If you were going to do a story where the Emperor comes back, why not use Byss, the famous planet that the Emperor used when he came back?

- I know I asked this before, but why can't C-3P0 speak the language of the Sith? Like, I know WHY in the movie he can't, but story-wise this is the most obvious plot device.

- This movies fake out deaths are exhausting. If you were gonna kill Chewbacca, just do it. He has no importance to the rest of the movie anyway, and at least if he'd died then Rey could have had an honest to goodness struggle with her own darkness. Revealing him to be alive less than 3 minutes after he supposedly died is the wrong kind of rollercoaster.

- Another thing I mentioned in my trilogy review that bears repeating; the visual metaphors. It's not surprising to me that the guy who wrote the "Martha Scene" from BvS doesn't understand subtlety or metaphors when it comes to character growth, but the way this movie goes back on the character evolutions from TLJ is a point of constant frustration for me. Rey and Kylo, instead of continuing their trend from TLJ, are just back in almost their exact costumes from 'The Force Awakens'. Dumb.

- On that same note; why did Rey have to reassemble Luke's lightsaber? Why, in the name of the Force, did she not have that classic Jedi journey to create her own? And why would you not give the GIRL WITH THE STAFF a SABERSTAFF to use as her lightsaber?! This slavish adherence to callbacks from the original trilogy is just so bizarre. This same thing goes for those stupid Yavin medals. Star Wars is so much more than "The adventures of Skywalker and friends", but this movie is like...60% callbacks.

- What was Kylo Ren's plan when he was flying his Tie Silencer directly at Rey at full speed? I know this is such a little thing, but why would he do this? And how did he survive the crash? This movie is endlessly confusing.

- This one's just more of a fun fact; apparently JJ Abrams wouldn't even confirm to people on set whether or not Palpatine had returned, so complete was his desire to perpetuate the Mystery Box.

Look I think you get my point.

When Disney took over Star Wars, there was so much concern that it would turn into a soulless, corporate product, that people would get tired of Star Wars, and this movie feels like that fear given life. Despite the frankly surprising amount of good Star Wars content that's been released under Disney, the stain that this movie in particular left on the franchise isn't going away anytime soon. A low-effort, creatively bankrupt finale that offers up not only an unsatisfying conclusion to a ludicrously beloved franchise, but can't be bothered to reach the imaginative, endearing charm of even the worst of the prequels.

Ya know, I was watching Star Wars (1977) the other day (aka 'A New Hope', sorry I'm a snob about this), and I was completely entranced, once again, by what an awesome movie it is. Right from the start it has stakes, spectacle, enjoyable characters, a terrifying villain, near-perfect pacing, and so much creativity and heart. It's a truly special thing. Watching that while thinking of this movie made me experience so much frustration. I don't like not liking a Star Wars movie. Plenty of Star Wars films have been not-very-good, but this one is the first to truly get under my skin. Not just because it's not a great movie, as I said we've dealt with that before, but because it's so focused on trying to be so many different things that it forgets to be its own Star Wars movie. It feels like they just completely lost sight of the goal posts with this one.

Final Review Score: 2/5, an utterly bizarre mess and a damn shame.