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Finales are tough, especially when they are capping off a trilogy of trilogies filmed over 42 years and especially when it’s a franchise that has captured the imagination of entire generations.
So when Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was first announced, I had my reservations. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the third series of movies. Both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were tolerably fantastic – beautiful CGI, layered stories and slightly more woke diversity.
But there was very little original set up for any kind of unique send-off. Yes, the “Skywalker” this time was Rey (Daisy Ridley), a woman unrelated to Luke, Leia or Anakin. But the structure changed very little. She still embarks on a hero’s journey against the backdrop of galaxy-sized shifting politics, which can easily be digested as good vs evil.
The new Vader, I mean, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) starts his angsty “Am I good or evil?” phase earlier, but seems to forget about it at the drop of a light saber.
Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Luke (Mark Hamill) are jammed into the series to kick up its marketability. Oh and look, for Episode IX, even Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) is back.
But the Force remains as mysterious a plot hole-cover up can get. Forty two years and you would have thought that the writers would figure out how it works. But herein lies the post-original Star Wars’ biggest problem – it’s all about marketing the next movie, so nothing gets wrapped up neatly.
Heck, this movie starts with undoing the wrap up of the original movies. Palpatine is somehow still alive. How? We are never told. What was he up to for 30-odd years and how did he gather the resources to build another fleet and staff of Star Destroyers without attracting anyone’s attention? No one knows. Come on, after a maniac took over a supposedly democratic galactic government and was defeated, someone might have said: “Oh hey, let’s try and find a way to avoid another Death Star.” Instead the Death Star is miniaturised into a single cannon… somehow and we get a whole fleet of baddies.
On the hero side, Luke, I mean Anakin, I mean Rey, has doubts about her morality, and Han, I mean Obi-Wan, I mean Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) help her find herself as she continually tries to do the same for Kylo.
Finn has been the only original addition to the film series. For the first time, on the big screen, there was an opportunity to explore the workings of the faceless storm trooper army. However, after doing a bit of it in The Last Jedi, his story line is thrown aside, because, back away everyone, Rey needs three more hours to seduce Kylo and find her family.
Not to say that the movie wasn’t a visual spectacle. The fights were gorgeous. The fight choreography was great. The production was huge, especially when experienced in IMAX.
But after 42 years, having set up an entire universe of living and non-living concepts to explore, it all came down to a white saviour versus the exact same comically half-dimensional supervillain with the exact same super move.
I didn’t expect it to be completely novel, but a little more effort and tying up well-set up plots would have been nice. But this is what happens when the producer (Kathleen Kennedy) takes over despite a history of butchering Star Wars canon (for reference, Solo) and replaces the director mid-way instead of fleshing out the script properly. Solely for its visuals, this movie earns its two stars.
