Movie Reaction: Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

Formula: Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens - Star Wars: Episode VIII - The LastJedi

“OMG. I’m making a Star Wars movie!” - JJ Abrams, circa 2013

“OMG. I’m making a Star Wars movie!” - Rian Johnson, circa 2015

“OMG...I’m making another Star Wars movie...” - JJ Abrams, circa 2017

There’s a viral bit of writing that goes around every few years. It’s a writing exercise in which two students are supposed to write a story alternating one paragraph at a time. In the first paragraph, Student 1 starts writing a romance story. In the second paragraph, Student 2 abruptly shifts it to an intergalactic space adventure. Student 1 attempts to shift it back to the paragraph one story. Student 2 changes it back again. Eventually, the two students start openly quarrelling with each other in the text of the story and the assignment is ruined. That’s kind of what The Rise of Skywalker feels like at times. It’s common knowledge to Star Wars fans that after JJ Abrams got the saga back on track with The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson took over for The Last Jedi, which is full of bold choices that people won’t shut the hell up about. Johnson drops a few notable elements of the Abrams story and changes some of the dynamics. After a regrettable flirtation with Colin Trevorrow on board to direct, Abrams came back for The Rise of Skywalker and promptly reverts several of Johnson’s changes back. This is the driving force of nearly all The Rise of Skywalker discussion I’ve heard in the few days since its release.

There are some good points in this discussion that I’d like to get to in a moment. The writing is also my biggest problem with TROS, but I feel like I need to remind people of a few things. All Star Wars movies are jam-packed with inconsistencies or just plain bad writing. Even The Empire Strikes Back, which is commonly held up as the critically defensible movie, has an incestuous kiss and backpack C-3P0 in it. No Star Wars fan in good faith can say that they are into the series because of the writing and structuring. TROS has problems in it that were created by The Last Jedi. It has problems in it created by The Force Awakens. And, it has problems in created by the fact that Star Wars as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Let’s also remember the death of Carrie Fisher. The plan was always to make TROS “Leia’s movie”. Her death really mucked things up with the storytelling. They had to work around archival footage of her, reusing shots and reverse-engineering dialogue. Some of the key emotional arcs had to be reworked entirely. It reminds me a lot of how the death of Heath Ledger put constraints on The Dark Knight Rises, even if there were no direct plans to use the Joker in that movie.

What I’m trying to say is that making TROS was always going to be a herculean task, and the writing was going to take the biggest hit. It just was.

My general stance with Star Wars is that I’m just so damn excited to see another Star Wars movie. I love the world. I love the characters. I love its ability to fill me with wonder. I don’t really watch Star Wars for it to make perfect sense. I’ll forever defend The Phantom Menace because that first time I saw it in theaters, it blew me away. I knew there was bad stuff in the movie. I just didn’t care, because they were the cost of getting into that galaxy far, far away. The same goes with The Rise of Skywalker.

I’m going to try and write this Reaction like it’s five years from now, and I’ve already accepted that the movie isn’t perfect: It’s Episode IX. The one that I watch 3rd when I rewatch this trilogy, 9th when I rewatch all the episodes, and 11th when I marathon every live-action Star Wars movie. It’s a movie I love because it’s part of a series I love. If you don’t love the franchise, I’m sorry. I can’t do much for you. I can take off my blinders for a lot of movies. I can’t for Star Wars.

TROS is as satisfying an installment as I could’ve hoped for. Return of the Jedi killed any chance of this ending feeling at all definitive. Anakin brought balance to the Force in Episode VI. For episodes VII, VII, and IX to have stakes at all, they basically have to undo episode the results of VI. As soon as they undo episode VI, establishing that anything in this galaxy can be undone, then no victory feels that complete. (To that point, look for episodes X, XI, and XII sometime in the next 20 years. Mark my words.) As the trailers hint at, these 9 episodes turn out to be the Palpatine saga as much as the Skywalker saga with the Emporer inexplicably returning. And I really do mean inexplicable. The movie actually begins by just saying that he’s back. There’s a token explanation given that, again, does more to undo any finality than create new stakes. The way that the movie increases the level of the threat is something out of bad fan fiction. Oh, the Sith just have a magic fleet ready. Oh, the destroyers all have planet-destroying guns on them that previously needed moon-sized bases and suns as energy sources but now are just slightly bigger cannons that the the other ones on the ships. Wasn’t The First Order powerful enough? They had the resistance down to  less than 200 people by the last movie. Do they really need to increase their power 10,000-fold in order to make the challenge for the Resistance seem insurmountable?

One thing that I’m having trouble getting past is how clumsily this movie is structured. It’s structured like quests in a video game. There are two magical Sith boxes they must find. There’s a kinfe with a mysterious language they need to get translated. That knife reveals the location of an item (if you are standing in the exact right spot for it to line up with your horizon and assuming that years of constant wave erosion hasn’t moved anything). There’s a medallion they collect that grants them needed access. Rey collects multiple light sabers to be divided later. There’s even a completely arbitrary countdown that they are racing against. All Star Wars movies are quest-based, but this is the first time the quests were designed like a Zelda temple. What’s really bizarre is that it goes against what Abrams himself leaned heavily on in The Force Awakens. The Star Wars series has this amazing cheat code. It’s called The Force. If you ever need to write yourself out of a corner, just have the Force solve the problem. Why the shift to collecting items in The Rise of Skywalker? Previously, justy saying “I have a feeling we should go that way” was enough.

OK, I meant to get to all that later, but there you go. Those are my only problems with TROS. The enemy is comically overpowered. The chief villain is a complete retread. The driving-force of the story is incredibly sloppy. Oh, and Abrams and Johnson get in a really transparent pissing contest about a few things that are really distracting (Kylo-Ren’s helmet, what to do with Rose).

Otherwise, I actually really loved a lot about this movie.

I cannot stop praising how well the casting has been for this trilogy. I love the four main characters so much. The Force Awakens was about how they all meet. The Last Jedi established how they work on their own. The Rise of Skywalker is about how they all work as a team. I love every second of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) on screen together. I love how Poe and Rey bicker. I love how Poe gets jealous of Finn and Rey’s friendship. I love how Poe and Finn can’t stop themselves from addressing each other as ‘general’ in a tense moment. Then you add Kylo-Ren (Adam Driver) to the mix. He mainly interacts with Rey, and those scenes are great too. I’ll admit, I never saw the romantic angle between them that Abrams did, but that’s a minor quibble. I have nothing at all against Kelly Marie Tran as an actress or Rose Tico as a character. She was just one more character in the core group than I needed, so I didn’t mind her getting pushed to the sidelines in TROS (That said, please put Kelly Marie Tran in movies and TV shows. Give Rose a Disney+ show. I’m Team Rose, just not Team Rose Right Now). Even the additions to the cast were great. Keri Russell shows up and tells Rey she thinks she’s OK, which is one of my top 5 character interactions of 2019. I didn’t realize that there was a superior First Order general to Hux who wasn’t a Sith, but there is. His name is General Pryde. He’s played by Richard E. Grant. And, I could watch him glare menacingly out a window for hours. When I revisit this movie many times in the future, it’s all the character moments that I’ll remember most fondly. I’m going to really miss this collection of actors.

JJ Abrams doesn’t have the same eye for moments as Rian Johnson. My favorite shots of the trilogy are almost all from The Last Jedi. Abrams is the only one who understands the power of Rey in an X-Wing helmet though. TROS is filled with massive sequences, exciting fights, and distinctive locations. Maybe too many, but I’d happily take a surplus over a shortage. This movie gets a lot of moments that were going to hit me no matter who the filmmaker was. The returns of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Lando Calrissian were lovely without feeling like complete fan service. I respect the hell out of how they worked around the obvious limitations to give Leia a proper send-off. Seeing a galaxy-wide militia navy show up to aid the Resistance was a fist-pump moment. Rey fending off the Emperor with Luke and Leia’s lightsabers was incredibly satisfying. In all the places where it really mattered, this movie gave me what I wanted.

The Rise of Skywalker is my least favorite of this trilogy by a significant margin (It goes The Force Awakens 1, The Last Jedi 2, The Rise of Skywalker 3, in case you were wondering). It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve seen this year. I’m willing to be cynical about a lot of things. Not Star Wars. That was fun. I can’t wait to see what’s up next.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

After the Credits 
(A few other random thoughts)

• Look, I don’t like the idea of Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter. I like it better than her somehow being a Skywalker by blood. I like it less than Rey being a random person the Force just happens to select. The Palpatine explanation doesn’t really undo all that much though. Yoda isn’t a Skywalker or Palpatine. Neither is Obi-Wan. Rey’s parentage narrows the scope of this saga, but it doesn’t really shrink the galaxy as a whole. Anyone can still be a great Jedi. Besides, this allowed them to introduce Jodie Comer as her mother. Why would anyone want to deprive me of having Jodie Comer in the Star Wars universe?
• Is the fact that Poe is Force-sensitive supposed to be a surprise? The movie treats it like some secret he’s been keeping (from Rey in particular), but I always figured he’d be the first student when Rey opens her new Jedi Temple. I’ll admit, this might just be my lizard brain equating the fact that he held a lightsaber in The Force Awakens to him being Force-sensitive. Regardless, hear me out: Padawan Finn: A Star Wars Story, December 2022.
•  Am I the only one who choked up when Chewie got his medal? I've seen the movie twice. That nearly broke me both times. I'm a silly man-child.