The Rise of Skywalker review (spoiler and non)

While this review will not contain outright spoilers [CLICK HERE for my spoiler-filled thoughts], I will be discussing the movie in broad, general ways, and that might be too much for someone who hasn’t seen it and who wants to go in totally blind. If you’ve seen the trailers and a few commercials for the movie then there won’t be anything said here that will be new.

With that said…yikes.

I want to be fair. Really, I want to be more than fair; I want to be magnanimous. Star Wars is such an important part of my childhood and experiencing them as a father of a Star Wars fan has been so wonderful these past several years. I want to like this movie, just as I wanted to like The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on their respective opening nights (I love them both).

I did not like this movie.

To be fair, JJ Abrams had a very difficult task in front of him. He had three things to accomplish all within the same film:

He had to make a good movie.

He had to make a good third-part of a trilogy.

He had to make a good final installment of a nine-part saga.

With that three-pronged task ahead of him, the director famous for “starting” many great projects (Alias, Lost, Star Trek 09, The Force Awakens) now had to finish one.

Sadly, I think he wilted under the enormity of the pressure.

It’s very clear while watching the movie that, of the three tasks previously mentioned, JJ mostly concerned himself with the latter two, and especially focused on the middle one. The movie tries very hard to tie up the loose ends (as he sees them) of this Sequel Trilogy. Along the way it gives plenty of nods to the whole saga.

Where the ball is dropped is in making the actual movie itself any good.

There’s simply no way to sugarcoat it: The Rise of Skywalker is a bad movie. It fails the reason most movies fail and because of the same problems most failed movies have: Bad editing, bad plotting, too much going on with nothing of any weight happening, etc.

Obviously, I have some serious issues with the story (what little “story” there actually was) but I’ll save those for the spoiler-filled comments. In the meantime here are some spoiler-free thoughts:

It’s a mess.

It’s the worst edited Star Wars movie by a country mile. Every scene has a wildly different tone from the one before it. It’s like the movie had two different editors, each tasked with cutting together half the movie, one who wanted there to be tension and angst while the other wanted a light-hearted romp. Then they threw both of their halves into a blender and released this.

There are like fifty things going on but only three of them matter and those three should have been what the movie was about. Instead, it’s not about anything.

The movie is not about anything.

What in the world is this movie supposed to be about? Everything the characters do is motivated by something they discovered three seconds before. The “plot” of the movie is basically this:

We have to do X to stop Y: Let’s go!

Action scene on the way to X.

We did X…it says here we now have to do X2 to stop Y2: Let’s go!

Action scene on the way to X2.

We did X2…and now it seems we have to do X3 to stop Y3: Let’s go!

For two hours it’s like this.

After about thirty minutes I thought to myself: “Hmm. Is JJ trying to audition to direct an Indiana Jones movie? Is that what he’s going for?” I soon decided no, he’s not trying for the “thrill ride, every ten minutes is an action scene” route. He’s going for the “we don’t have a plot or anything to say so let’s just go loud and crazy for two hours and hope no one notices.”

The climax of the film is good as an idea and some of the moments are good but writers JJ Abrams/Chris Tierro had no idea how to get to that climax in any way that made any sense.

I don’t want to harp too much on the way it tried to bridge the disparity between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. I’m maybe the only person on planet earth that loved both of those movies. I know they’re not the same movie; they had different goals and different approaches but they did their jobs really well, in my opinion. I love the way JJ weaved nostalgia into the story of a new trio of heroes in TFA. I love the way Rian Johnson gave Finn, Poe, Kylo, and Luke strong and discernible character arcs that moved them from point A to point B to point C in a logical fashion.

So there are two wildly different movies from two directors with very different ways of making their movies, and I loved them both.

And then there’s this mess of a movie.

Again, I’ll get into the characters and where they all end up in the spoiler-filled review, but just to summarize: There was no commitment by JJ Abrams (as co-writer or director) to give anyone anything close to a character arc. People do things but it feels more like box-checking to service the needs of the thin plot, as opposed to a character slowly evolving over the course of a story.

The prequels had bad dialogue and too much reverse engineering. That being said, no one would ever (nor should they) argue against the “plot” of those three movies. There’s a story there and George told it, albeit poorly thanks to being a bad actor’s-director and a poor dialogue-writer.

The Rise of Skywalker, however, is just mired in terrible plotting. It’s a movie with nothing to say, with too much “going and doing” without any story or plot to ground it. The characters are largely wasted. The editing is horrendous. Not only does it fail as a sequel to The Last Jedi, but it also fails as the end of the whole Trilogy and as the end to the whole Skywalker saga.

It makes me sad.

5/10 – The Rise of Skywalker is a frustrating, poorly-written, edited, and executed movie. It’s an ignominious end to an important saga in film.

*****

RISE OF SKYWALKER SPOILER THOUGHTS

I am going to be doing a lot of digesting of this movie over the next few months. I did that with The Last Jedi too, but in that case, it was due to a need to defend the film from unwarranted criticism (it’s okay not to like TLJ but some of the complaints against it are spurious). In this case, I’ll be writing about everything that went wrong, why, what could have been done, etc.

Let’s keep things basic, though. This movie did not need a massive rewrite.

Okay, it really really did, but even if you couldn’t do that and you had to get by with editing and customary reshoots, you could have salvaged this movie.

Three things needed to change.

1) Cut out the Sith dagger, 3PO memory wipe, Chewie kidnap/rescue. It was all superfluous. Chewie’s “death” was headfaked within minutes, 3PO got his memory back; all of that was a shaggy dog segment, spinning the plot in a circle without advancing anything. Cut that out and you save half an hour.

2) Give that newfound half-hour over to a more deliberate pace and, more importantly, more character development for Ben so that his turn from dark to light isn’t confined to a single scene standing in the rain.

3) Don’t make Rey a Palpatine. The movie didn’t need it. The shock value in the reveal isn’t worth all the retconning you have to do with previous movies, going all the way back to the beginning of the saga. Rey being a Palpatine was always ever just a stupid shock move that becomes more stupid the more the shock wears off. Nothing about it makes any sense, either as a plot device or as a narrative choice. Just keep her no one and let Palpy tempt her to become the ultimate someone/empress. It’s the same basic idea only without the baggage weighing everything else down. Rey has to choose between having a name, identity, destiny given to her or remaining a no one and forging her own destiny. She, of course, would choose the latter and if you still want to end with the schmaltzy “I’m Rey Skywalker” bit that’s fine.

You fix those three things (messy and pointless first half, Kylo lacking a good character arc, and Rey being a Palpatine) and the movie improves exponentially.

Star Wars Rise Skywalker Daisy Ridley Rey John Boyega Finn Oscar Isaac Poe Dameron Chewbacca

Random thoughts:

Let’s start with the magic protractor that pointed the way to the Death Star II throne room despite the fact that the dagger was older than the wreckage and that if Rey had only been on the other side of the water it wouldn’t have worked in the first place. Did JJ lose a bet or something with the writing of this movie? That stupid protractor isn’t even that important. It’s just a McGuffin that leads to the OTHER McGuffin, which itself is one of two duplicate McGuffins in the movie, the latter of which is all that’s used in the end anyway!

To be clear, I don’t want to harp too much on making Rey a Palpatine. As with TLJ, I didn’t sit down to watch thinking “here’s what I want to happen and if it doesn’t go how I want then I will complain.” No, I wanted to let JJ/Tierro tell their story and then judge it on those merits. If you want to make Rey into Palpatine’s granddaughter, fine. That’s your call. But you better do more with it than just the reveal and some vague speechifying about “fulfilling your destiny.” It’s not that I need ten-minute exposition speeches, but I would like to know who exactly Palpatine made a baby with who then later had Rey. When did that take place? Why were Palpatine’s son and his wife so eager to hide Rey from their Emperor daddy? What is even the point of that?

Kylo went from being the most interesting character in the trilogy to being Jon Snow in Game of Thrones Season 8.

This movie featured the deaths of Hux, Leia, Kylo, and the headfake death of Chewie, and the headfake memory-wipe of 3PO. None of them conjured up any emotions and I wept like a child at his grandma’s funeral when Han died in TFA and when Luke died in TLJ. Those deaths were earned. They had a purpose. They had a weight of consequence before and ahead of them.

Hux’s death was a box to check. He went from being a stooge to being revealed as the spy to being discovered as the spy (moments after saying “shoot me otherwise they’ll discover I’m a spy”) and then killed all within the span of five minutes. Why write it that way? You don’t HAVE to write a character’s death like that. It’s your story, JJ/Tierro. You can do whatever you want with it. Why would you do that?

Leia’s death was what it was. For a year all we heard was “we found enough footage from TFA deleted scenes to adapt and give her a fitting story and closure.” What we got was Leia digitally superimposed into a few scenes, while characters say weird lines that don’t really make sense except to serve as a set-up for whatever already-recorded Leia line they had available for her to say. It felt like it was cobbled together, which it was. I can’t really fault them as it was a rock and a hard place situation.

Kylo did all of nothing and a half in this movie. He put his helmet back on for no reason. He claimed he was going to kill the Emperor and invited Rey to join him which…I mean he literally already did that in the last movie. Why are you doing it again? His redemption and the return of Han was a moment that needed to happen (a box to check) but it was unearned in the story this movie told. In the end, he dies saving Rey which did nothing for me. I wish it did. I wish it moved me. Kylo was my favorite character in this trilogy. I wanted his ending, whatever it may be, to be special. As I said, the movie had a good climax with two hours of set up that let it down.

The cameos were nice.

There were too many things like Leia very conveniently having a lightsaber at Luke’s hidden island. Too many “we need something and voila here it is and not only that but it’s actually always been here we just haven’t mentioned it before but it’s super important all of a sudden.” Lookit, if I give you a key in scene one and you come to a locked door in scene five and then use the key, that’s good writing. If you just happen upon a locked door and then suddenly say “oh wait, I have a key. I’ve always had it but never mentioned it until now!” that’s bad writing.

This movie has a lot of bad writing.

The prequels had bad dialogue and too much reverse engineering. No one, however, ever argues against the plot of the three movies. There’s a good story there and George told it, albeit poorly thanks to being a bad actor’s-director and a putrid dialogue man.

TROS is just a bad story.

A good story with bad editing is going to be a poor movie. A bad story with good editing is usually an okay movie. A bad story with bad editing is a disaster. Guess which one this is?

If you want to know how important John Williams is to the franchise, watch the first half of the horrendously boring Kylo vs Rey fight on the DSII, which happens without any musical accompaniment from John Williams.

They never explain how Luke’s lightsaber got put back together and I told myself a week ago that if they didn’t do that I’d be really disappointed. Instead, it’s like #47 on the list of things wrong with the movie.

Palpatine’s storyline in four points:

Act one: Kylo, I want you to kill Rey!

Act two: Nevermind, I am going to kill Rey.

Act three: Rey, I want you to kill me!

Act three and a half: Nevermind, I’ll just kill you both.

Pick a lane, JJ!

Star Wars Rise Skywalker Anthony Daniels C 3po

In conclusion, haha just kidding I’ll be ranting about this one for a year:

The movie has nothing to say.

There’s too much “going and doing” without any story or plot to ground it.

The characters are wasted.

The editing is atrocious.

There are three good ideas that should have been developed but instead are lumped in there along with fifty other pointless ones that add up to nothing at all.

John Williams’ score is great.

When next I rant, I will focus on what specifically went wrong with the “story” of the movie (such as it was). After that I’ll go character by character, breaking down all the ways this movie failed them.

Joy.