Reviewing Star Wars
movies is really hard. Not because they’re particularly challenging or they’re
too esoteric, but because it’s difficult to look at it as just a movie instead
of a piece of one of the most hallowed mythoi of modern culture celebrated by
one of the biggest, passionate and most divisive fanbases in existence. It’s an
especially unenviable task when you’re reviewing the follow-up to The
Last Jedi, something that created a massive schism within the fanbase the
likes of which have never been seen before. In that regard, whether you like The
Force Awakens more or The Last Jedi more will almost certainly
determine where you stand on The Rise of Skywalker, since this has JJ
Abrams returning to the director’s chair and working with the pieces laid out
by Rian Johnson.
Picking up where The Last
Jedi left off, the ongoing war between the Resistance and the First Order
is thrown into disarray when it’s revealed that Emperor Palpatine (Ian MacDiarmid)
is still alive and has amassed a fleet that could destroy the Republic once and
for all. Kylo Ren (Adam Drive) seeks him out because he believes his guidance
will give the First Order the edge, and Rey (Daisy Ridley) must put her Jedi
training under General Leia (Carrie Fisher) on hold to stop him. She, Finn
(John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) must race to
find a series of ancient relics that will reveal the location of the Sith’s
home planet and take the battle to them. Meanwhile, Kylo makes one last ditch
effort to recruit Rey to the Dark Side, and Rey discovers that she might be
more in tune with the Dark Side than she’d like to admit.
One common complaint floating
around the Internet is that this was somehow supposed to be damage control for The
Last Jedi and somehow trying to backpedal and appease those crying out for
Rian Johnson’s blood, which is just one of many wrenches thrown into the gears
of this production, including the departure of original director Colin Trevorrow
and the sudden death of Carrie Fisher, but bringing JJ Abram back makes some of
these cracks all the more apparent. Because of this, the film feels like a
hodgepodge of disparate ideas that have been meatloafed together. Some parts
feel like fervent attempts to overcorrect things that didn’t really need
correcting, some feel like plot points that JJ Abrams had brewing in his head
but were shoehorned in instead of building off of Johnson’s foundation, others
feel like paying off fanservice that never should’ve been entertained in the
first place, and it all feels like two films worth of plot compressed into one
film worth of narrative. As a result, the final product is a movie that tries so
hard to be for everyone that it ends up being for no one.
As far as plot goes, it’s
still recognizably Star Wars, with this installment being an
interplanetary treasure hunt complete with laser fights, lightsaber duels, encounters
with strange creatures and visits to exotic new worlds. On that front it’s
incredibly well paced, even if it feels like it’s rushing past all the flashy
bits to get to one of its many grand reveals. On that front, it’s played
extremely safe. There are two moments where it looks like two characters make a
great sacrifice in service to the cause, but turn out to be a fake out that
strip it of any weight. Likewise, some promising elements that were previously
established were relegated to the sidelines. Rose Tico, who was famously made
the subject of ire for a particularly toxic subsect of the fandom to the point
where they chased actress Kelly Marie Tran off of social media, was demoted to
a glorified extra. Unfortunately, she’s far from the only character who was
done dirty.
The crux of the film’s
emotional weight, however, revolves around the revelation of Rey’s lineage.
Many (myself included) were satisfied with the reveal in The Last Jedi
that Rey’s parents were just a pair of nobodies, but there’s another twist in
this that undoes all of this and turns Star Wars back into the family dynasty
that I was hoping it would avoid. Likewise, Kylo Ren’s whole arc has been centered
on the inner turmoil on the duality of his family lineage, having started as an
angry Vader wannabe, tried to escape his shadow by taking charge of the First
Order, then regressing once he seeks the tutelage of the man who sent his
grandfather down the path of the Dark Side. This all leads to the attempt at redemption
that this trilogy has all been leading up to, but whether or not he’s truly
earned it is still a bit iffy. What it absolutely doesn’t earn is where his
relation with Rey ends up.
As I sat there watching all of
this unfold, for the first time I truly felt the exhausting fatigue of where
the series has found itself: not as a series of entertaining, visually inspired
and occasionally thought-provoking films, but as legacy maintenance. Although
the main trilogy preaches the importance of controlling your destiny, Abrams
adheres to such a rigid adherence to the Star Wars dynasty, a dynasty
that’s constantly at the mercy of a zealous fanbase that’s been at civil war for
as long as the Jedi and Sith have. The revelation that this is far from the last
we’ll see of this (there’s no way Disney bought Lucasfilm just so they could
make one trilogy and a few spinoffs and be done with it), and that prospect
sets a precedent specifically engineered to suck all joy out of everything. For
some, the prequels were their “you can’t go home again” moment, but that was a
time when we thought that was truly the end. For me, that moment was watching The
Rise of Skywalker, because I know for a fact that this is not the end.
5/10
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