And Star Wars is…finished? I watched the very first showing of The Rise of Skywalker in Iowa City. On the heels of my post earlier this week on Holdo and Poe Dameron in The Last Jedi, here are a few thoughts on the big ending.
1. It worked.
The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t a disaster. It wrapped up all major plot points, from the mystery of Snoke to the family status of Rey to exactly what happened to Emperor Palpatine after Return of the Jedi.
Given the disconnect between the first two films, I thought there was a lot of potential for total disaster. And they managed to avoid it. Given my low expectations for this, things weren’t as bad as they could’ve been.
2. It retconned the shit out of The Last Jedi.
I take a curmudgeonly sci-fi fan’s attitude toward the old retcon. Sometimes you’ve got to do it, but you should keep it to a minimum and you should never be proud of it. J.J. Abrams boldly and proudly retcons away in this one.
Abrams and Rian Johnson have low-level sniped at one another in the press, but they’ve mostly played nice about their different visions for the Star Wars franchise. That happens when you work for a multi-billion dollar franchise.
Don’t believe it.
In The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams systematically overturns, writes out, and otherwise erases just about all of what Johnson did in The Last Jedi. If you’re a stickler for plot continuity, you won’t like that. If you prefer The Last Jedi’s new direction to The Force Awakens’s nostalgia trip, you won’t like that. But if you prefer the feel and story of The Force Awakens over The Last Jedi, you might think Abrams gets things back on track. These issues are really up to viewer preference.
3. The pacing is awful.
I’ve watched quite a few J.J. Abrams films: M:i:III, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Force Awakens. His films carry a distinct pacing, and I think it’s a bad one. It’s fast, yes. Fast is fine. But it’s also incredibly impatient and jerky. He never gives the viewer time to have an emotional reaction to anything that’s happening.
Consider, for example, the ‘death and rebirth of Captain Kirk’ narrative from Star Trek Into Darkness. Whereas in the original Star Trek film series, the death and rebirth of Spock takes place over the course of multiple films, it takes all of about 20 minutes in the Abrams film. We’ve barely realized Kirk is dead before he pops back to life.
The other problem with that film, of course, is that he just recycles old plots from previous Star Trek incarnations. Speaking of which…
4. It’s fan service.
The Force Awakens was a pretty good film, with one obvious problem. It recycled too many old plots from the original Star Wars trilogy. Abrams cranks this up yet another notch in The Rise of Skywalker. Between these two films, it’s clear Abrams doesn’t trust his audience. He’s well qualified to do fan service, but he’s just not very good with original ideas or new directions.
5. The Rise of Skywalker should be the last Star Wars film for awhile, but it won’t be.
If there’s a deeper issue here, it’s that the story is tired. There’s nowhere else to go with it, and it’s not clear how Star Wars applies to a 21st century world. Rian Johnson gave it a bold attempt. J.J. Abrams punted. This new trilogy was one bold new film (The Last Jedi) and two fan tributes (The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker).
Disney should give the franchise a long rest, but they won’t. There’s simply too much money to be made. If they make more of these, Disney should at least do something very different with it.
