The Rise of Skywalker--Spoilers!!!

The Rise of Skywalker—Spoilers!

In order to prepare for seeing the final film in the Star Wars non-ology (yeah, right, no more Star Wars films after this) I re-watched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on Netflix.  I then read a few spoiler-free reviews that commented that The Rise of Skywalker more or less chucked all the good decisions made in The Last Jedi and virtually remade The Force Awakens.  Since I decided that I liked Last Jedi more than Force Awakens, this did not motivate me to see Rise of Skywalker.  But, in its tenth week of release, the crowds had finally died down and I made my way to the very same theater I had seen the original Star Wars (none of this “A New Hope” garbage) at 43 years earlier.

I hated it.

I want to say it is the worst of the nine movies in the Star Wars canon (ten, if you add Rogue One), but frankly I have no recollection of Attack of the Clones and only fleeting memories of Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith.  I do remember walking out of the theaters and not being as disappointed as I was after seeing Rise of Skywalker.  Isn’t worse when you mother says she isn’t mad, just disappointed?

One of the criticisms of Force Awakens was that co-writer/director J.J. Abrams had constructed a movie that appeared to replicate the beats of the original Star Wars (aka “A New Hope”).  I felt that, similarly, Rise of Skywalker attempted to follow the beats of the less successful sequel, Return of the Jedi.  There was the emergence of a new threat by the bad guys that needed thwarting, there was the need for a full scale assault at the end, and there was the need for a small band to take out an object for the invasion to succeed (force field projector/nav tower).  It wasn’t bad, just very, very familiar.

One reason for that familiarity was that the bad guy was the same as in Return of the Jedi, Emperor Palpatine. After killing off the new evil overlord Snoke in Last Jedi, they had to come up with a new new bad guy and so they resurrected the bad guy from the first trilogy.  First of all, really creative move there.  Secondly, Palpatine had been vaporized in the Death Star’s nuclear core, but now he’s alive again; so, he got better?  It’s not like he was wounded and crawled away, like the killer in a horror movie, he was VAPORIZED.  No one comes back from that.  Third, him still being alive makes all the joy the characters felt at the end of Return of the Jedi to be false—they really hadn’t killed Palpatine, so there was no reason to have a party and hand out medals to everybody except Chewbaca.

Also, I swear Palpatine’s taunts to Rey saying, “Go on, strike me down, save your friends . . .” were pretty much identical to the taunts he threw at Luke in return of the Jedi.  I have trouble remembering them because I have seen the Family Guy parody of the original trilogy too many times, and their portrayal of Palpatine being a total jerk was the best thing in the series.

One of the reasons I preferred Last Jedi was that I felt writer/director Rian Johnson did a better job bringing out the personalities of the characters and not making them chess pieces being moved around a board.  One thing the sequel trilogy completely missed was the emotional story at the center of the original trilogy, the love story of Han and Leia.  The original movies somehow overcame George Lucas’ inability to write good dialog (it is part of Star Wars folklore that Han Solo’s response of “I know,” to Leia’s profession of love was ad libbed by Harrison Ford) and created a love story around all the techno babble. 

In Rise of Skywalker, everyone is too busy running around to fall in love.  It is established early in Force Awakens that Finn finds Rey attractive, enough to lie about being in the resistance, and she seems to feel similarly about him.  But at the end of Rise of Skywalker she is back on Tattooine, moving into Luke’s old farmhouse (I hope she was able to get the Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru stains off the porch), apparently alone.  Does she end up with Finn?  With Poe?  There characters are so busy moving around the chessboard there is no room for emotional attachments to form. 

The biggest flaw in Rise of Skywalker is that it ends exactly where Return of the Jedi ends, with the bad guys beaten and everyone celebrating (it is supposed to be a big deal that two women are shown kissing during the celebration, but humans are also kissing giant slug-like creatures, so it is hardly a banner day for the LGBTQ).  At least Chewy gets a medal this time.  The ending of the nine-episode series needed bigger stakes, it needed to build to something that felt inevitable since the original movie.  The original trilogy felt all of one piece, while the sequel trilogy movies all felt like they were cobbled together independently, which they were.

I recall being disappointed when I saw Force Awakens and found out that after the events of Return of the Jedi the bad guys were STILL in control and the good guys were scattered do-gooders.  Why was the Dark Side so resilient?  The Rise of Skywalker should have ended with the Dark Side permanently defeated, no more talk about “balance” in The Force, just a perpetual happy ever after.  That would have felt like a bigger win than the victory at the end of Return of the Jedi (which wasn’t a victory at all as Palpatine survived to threaten the galaxy again).

The Marvel Cinematic Universe wrapped up its 22-movie series with the cataclysmic Avengers: Endgame, which threw the kitchen sink and a few other household appliances into its resolution.  The Star Wars Saga should have ended its nine-film run with something . . . well not quite as big, but perhaps relatively proportional.  The stakes at the end of The Rise of Skywalker are exactly as big as the stakes at the end of Return of the Jedi.  Jedi was the end of the first trilogy; the ending of the 10-film series should have been much bigger.

Of course, such an ending would have made creating additional Star Wars movies difficult.  Technically, the sequel trilogy films are well-made, the acting is great (actors Daisy Ridley and John Boyega should have more successful careers than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fischer; Adam Driver already has more Oscar nominations than Harrison Ford), and they are quite entertaining.  But as a resolution to the greatest trilogy of movie trilogies ever made, they are uninteresting and flat.  It is disappointing that with all of the resources at his command, J.J. Abrams decided to set his sights so low and be content to essentially remake the earlier films.

But then this is the guy who turned the second of his Star Trek movies into a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  So, there was a precedent.