Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Rating: 1% out of 100
If your brain was active and you were paying attention to the major fault lines in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, you already knew there was zero possiblity of this movie being good.
I'm not going to waste time listing all the plot holes and all the stupid little unexplained things that made no sense in this movie, of which there are many (it's not lazy writing, it's the Force!). Instead I'd rather try and elaborate on the fundamental problems at the heart of this movie and the whole trilogy in general. Honestly, I get what they were trying to do -- people really hated The Last Jedi, so the third movie needed to go in a different direction. But now we have the problem of setting up an entirely new plot and then resolving it in a single film, and the end result is nothing short of a clusterfuck. If we pull back and look at the trilogy as a whole, the second film ignores the first one, and now the third one ignores the second. Perhaps the biggest problem with this trilogy is that all of these movies frustratingly pretend the others don't exist, which makes it feel like we didn't arrive at this point through any sort of natural development. In direct contrast to Disney's treatment of the Marvel universe it all feels manufactured and random -- because it was. We are quite literally blindsided by the return of Palpatine, who through a fantastic deus ex machina has been pulling the strings all along -- but the movie never slows down once to allow this huge revelation to sink in. We must press forward, there's too much plot to get through!
But seriously Jor, a 1% rating, you ask? You get more points by writing your name correctly on the SAT. What could possibly be so horrible about this movie? Well, everything. The pacing, the utter lack of anything resembling creativity, the poorly written characters, the incoherent mess of events that masquerades as a plot. Everything sucks and this movie is a giant waste of time. I'll start off with the pacing. This is literally a fucking Transformers movie. Rise of Skywalker rushes through the plot at such breakneck speed that we visit like 5 different planets within the first 30 minutes. We have no time to digest the return of Palpatine, explore relationships between characters or even the consequences of major character "deaths". The film distracts from this by placing things you recognize from your childhood in front of you in hopes that you turn your brain off. Look, it's Lando! Hey, it's Luke's X-Wing again! Wow, is that a cameo of Wedge Antilles? The movie charges forth at such mind-numbing pace without explaining anything, that your brain is not given time to think about any of it. This seems intentional. The Rise of Skywalker is cinema of bewilderment at its finest. It demands you turn your brain into a potato to sit through it. For lots of people, that's not a problem.
Because Star Wars isn't allowed to have any original ideas anymore, just like J.J.'s first derivative effort was a remake, this movie (the important parts anyway) was basically a remake of Return of the Jedi, and wouldn't you know, this movie also suffers from some of the same problems Return of the Jedi did, in addition to a litany of others. When you think about the situation the writers were faced with, bringing Palpatine back wasn't just the "smart" choice -- it was in fact the only choice. With Snoke dead and Kylo Ren an ineffective villain, the new movie needed a central antagonist. You can either create a new one or reach back and pull one from the past -- either effort is going to appear clunky and disjunct, but since this movie relies 100% on fan nostalgia to pull the audience through its grueling two-and-a-half-hours, the choice was clear. The creative bankruptcy of this trilogy as a whole is probably one of the most dissatisfying things about it. There are nine movies in this saga and it feels like the Star Wars universe shrinks further with each new addition. Rather than having the spirit of an intrepid explorer seeking to expand the boundaries of a universe with near limitless possibilities, J.J. Abrams assumes the role of soulless corporate executive. Repeat what sells, don't change the formula. Half of the movies in this saga are now some derivative of people trying to stop a big evil superweapon. Do people ever get tired of this shit? The Rise of Skywalker is just the last in this series of disappointments, the final headstone in the graveyard of wasted potential known as the sequel trilogy.
Probably the weakest part of this movie is the characters. If you thought the characters would get any better after The Last Jedi, you're in for major disappointment. Characters do not evolve or naturally progress in any way and character relationships go nowhere. Despite every other protagonist besides Rey essentially being narrative dead weight at this point, the movie inexplicably introduces new characters and then does nothing with them. Characters are treated in a utilitarian fashion to simply advance the plot to the next location, nothing more. Poe is given a pseudo-love interest, who is introduced in the beginning of the film and then never explored again, her purpose of giving the heroes the needed macguffin having been accomplished. The black chick, whose name I can't even remember, follows the same trend, essentially just becoming another face during the final battle. You have to wonder why, instead of simply assigning more important roles to Finn and Poe, the writers instead chose to introduce even more pointless characters. Rose is there but might as well have just been a cardboard cut-out, she says and does nothing of importance because this movie is trying hard to make you forget how annoying she was in The Last Jedi and that cringy kiss with Finn, but we still have to show her anyway because reasons. So she's there, just entirely inconsequential and all the ramifications of that strange romance with Finn have been completely scrubbed from memory.
That's the thing about this movie. Every character relationship feels like an utterly fucking hollow dead end. It opens with Rey, Finn and Poe exchanging some back-and-forth dialogue, and see look, they're all friends just like Luke, Han and Leia were. The Rise of Skywalker wants you to forget that these three characters have barely spent any time in the same room together on screen up to this point. You'll recall this is the same shit the prequels tried to pull with Obi-Wan and Anakin -- they spent the entirety of Episode II getting on each other's nerves, and in Episode III an opening action sequence is supposed to make us believe they're best friends. Sorry no, you don't get to just retroactively declare that these three characters are best pals now and make me feel any sort of attachment to their friendship. As far as I've seen in the last two movies, the three of them barely know each other. Poe's meaningless love interest has already been mentioned. The movie pretends Finn and Rose never happened, instead Finn appears to have some unchecked feelings for Rey and tells her several times he wants to speak to her alone, but this is quickly forgotten and nothing ever comes of it either, making you wonder why these scenes were even in the movie at all. Utterly bewildering. Chewie "dies" but there's no time to dwell on it or let it influence further events, and it doesn't matter anyway because it's revealed he's alive not 5 minutes later. What's the point? Perhaps the worst example is the treatment of C-3PO, who is faced with losing his memory (essentially "dying") and has a chance to make a heroic sacrifice for the team. It would have been great to see this as a reflective and somber moment for the heroes and to have 3PO voluntarily have his memory wiped for the greater good, as a way of paying homage to this character who has been in every Star Wars movie since the beginning. Instead the "heroes" have little qualms about forcing 3PO to erase his consciousness against his will, and any sentimentality expressed by 3PO towards the heroes before the procedure is met with derision. Yet again we see the chance for meaningful character interaction along with any tension evaporate into dust right before our very eyes, and it's fine anyway because 3PO gets his memories back like ten minutes later, so who cares. Just how I like my Star Wars, without any tension or gravitas or purpose whatsoever, with all the classic characters left useless or humiliated! Moments like these make me start to believe these movies weren't simply Disney being retarded but actually malicious attempts by people who hate Star Wars to destroy a thing you love and then stand over its corpse and mock you for it, because it's funny to them and because fuck you, that's why.
Then there's Rey. What more is there to say about her that hasn't been said at this point, and to be honest I'm tired of discussing her. You can read my other posts to know my feelings on this character, ultimately the same charade continues in this movie with Rey having very little agency of her own and simply doing what other characters tell her to do. Her story isn't compelling because her powers aren't earned, in fact she is quite literally given them to defeat Palpatine in the end. There is not a sense of a protagonist overcoming a great struggle here, because for Rey there never really was much of a struggle to begin with. Remember how I said this movie, being a copy of Return of the Jedi, suffers from the same problems it did? Just like how Palpatine tempting Luke with power at the end of Jedi felt unthreatening because power was never something Luke was motivated by, Palpatine's attempted seduction of Rey also falls flat for the same reasons. Rey never gave any indication that she was falling to the Dark Side up to this point, so what reason is there to believe there's any chance of it happening now? We already know Rey isn't going to turn. This just feels like a tedious formality.
Out of all the characters Kylo/Ben is the only one with any sort of forward trajectory, as his redemption story figures prominently into this movie. Unfortunately, it never quite feels legitimate, as The Force Awakens made sure to ruin the chance for any forward character motion by establishsing Kylo to be basically irredeemable after he murders his father for no reason. What changed since then? Was it nothing more than Leia's voice? Rey conveniently forgets Ben is a murderer as she kisses him, and the movie implicitly admits this narrative can't continue any further by having him die immediately after. I mean it would be a bit awkward to have Rey and Ben honeymooning while Ben is on trial for war crimes.
So, to summarize this review. Awkward pacing, terrible character treatment, hopelessly derivative plot. This is candy cinema that is banking on you turning your brain off for two-and-a-half hours for some cheap thrills and nostalgic moments that remind you of something you once loved from your childhood. There is absolutely nothing of value here. Is this my least favorite Star Wars movie of all time? Maybe. Do I hate it more than Last Jedi? Yes. At least The Last Jedi had some semblance of pace and didn't try to trick me into liking it by turning my brain into sludge. The only reason I didn't give it a 0% is because Exagol is a pretty damn cool planet visually-speaking, and the only Star Wars movie deserving of a 0% rating is The Force Awakens, the film I contend truly killed Star Wars and set it on its path toward ultimate doom we now find ourselves on. But despite the at-times cool visuals of Rise of Skywalker, in the end they amount to nothing more than the rest of the movie. Candy to keep your brain permanently stuck in adolescent nostalgia.
So yeah, I'm pretty much done with Star Wars for a while. I don't think I'd even consider myself a fan anymore at this point. Thank god this is the last one and I don't have to feel obligated to sit through any more of these tedious, soulless, creatively bankrupt disasters ever again. No more movies, please. Let Star Wars DIE!