J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker capitalizes on some of this potential, but unfortunately, it does so through a hefty dose of retroactive continuity that often undermines what made The Last Jedi so compelling. It also repeats and magnifies some of The Last Jedi’s faults, along with some of the nagging annoyances of The Force Awakens, particularly that entry’s penchant for rehashing elements of the earlier films. There are still some good things in The Rise of Skywalker, and on the whole the good outweighs the bad, but by a much smaller margin than in the two preceding films. After the highs of The Last Jedi, the lows of The Rise of Skywalker are resoundingly disappointing.
Her struggle with the light/dark duality of the force thus further extends the parallels between her and Ben: Rey fights against the dark side of herself here, much like how Ben fought against the good side of himself in The Force Awakens. In one of many instances of The Rise of Skywalker gilding the lily, Ben even puts a button on the parallel midway through the film, telling Rey that the dark side is in both his and her nature, and thus neither of them can return to Leia.
Eventually, Rey resolves her fear by vanquishing a symbol of her potential for evil, and Ben is redeemed by joining Rey’s efforts, giving in to the good still inside him, and allowing Rey to fully embrace him in his reformation. Rey’s story ends with her confident in her identity and her place in the universe, and Ben’s story ends in a nice reversal: he begins the film committed to turning Rey to the dark side, but ends it with her having turned him back toward the light (Leia helps too – more on that later).
Described abstractly like this, it’s a story that could work, even if it’s pretty familiar. However, its execution leaves a lot to be desired. Most obviously, Rey’s doubts about herself are largely a product of her learning she’s Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter, and Palpatine himself is literally resurrected here to play the boogeyman once again. The Emperor’s return and his familial relation to Rey are the film’s most egregious acts of retroactive continuity, and while they offer some interesting material for Rey and Ben, their impact is far more negative than positive.
First, though, the positives: one of the few benefits of the Emperor’s return is that his presence actually reinforces the conflict between Rey and Ben. Once Ben learns that Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter, he’s even more drawn to her. He wants to help her kill the Emperor not only because the Emperor is a threat to Ben’s own power, but more importantly, because murdering the Emperor will make Rey and Ben even more alike, via parricide. For her part, Rey also wants to murder the Emperor because he is evil and a threat to the galaxy, but also because she wants to avenge the Emperor’s murder of her parents (yet another retcon). However, this desire for revenge scares her; as the previous films have established ad nauseum, vengeance leads to the dark side. Both she and Ben know it, which is why their scenes remain so interesting. They both want the same thing, but for different reasons, and those differences are enough to make Rey feel conflicted about all of it.
After defeating the Emperor, Rey demonstrates her confidence in her identity by her rejecting her family name – Palpatine – and claiming the Skywalker family name as her own. While problematic in some respects, this resolution neatly extends her Last Jedi ethos of preserving the good parts of the past in order to build a better future from it, and the film itself concludes by echoing her sentiment, with Rey staring hopefully at Tatooine’s twin sunset, just like Luke once did. By declaring herself a Skywalker, Rey actually seems to adopt a bit of Ben’s perspective from The Last Jedi, deciding that she isn’t beholden to her family’s past in deciding how to shape her future.
However, these positives are small compensation for the negative repercussions of the Emperor’s return. For one, making Rey into Palpatine’s granddaughter completely negates some of the most vital and refreshing aspects of The Last Jedi, like Rey’s independent ancestry. Making Rey unrelated to any of the other Star Wars families was a surprising storytelling maneuver, but it made this universe feel bigger and more robust. Retconning her into a Palpatine contracts it again, and turns this story into yet another family squabble. Moreover, ending the film with Rey embracing the Skywalker lineage tarnishes one of the more winning ideas of The Last Jedi, that even if you come from nothing, you can still carve out a significant role for yourself in the world.
More significantly, the Emperor’s return makes The Rise of Skywalker into a derivative retread of Return of the Jedi, while also negating the most wonderfully shocking aspect of The Last Jedi: Ben’s unceremonious dispatching of Snoke. Snoke’s murder was a brutally effective way of freeing The Last Jedi from uninteresting expositional baggage, and of advancing Rey and Ben’s relationship by briefly turning them into uneasy allies. However, by resurrecting the Emperor, Abrams has frustratingly gone back to retrieve the baggage Johnson cut loose, making the Emperor the literal power behind Snoke all along: when we’re first introduced to the Emperor’s mad scientist-like lair, it’s decked out with vats of unused Snoke clones.
A part of the reason The Rise of Skywalker resurrects the Emperor is to facilitate Ben’s redemption arc. If Ben is going to be redeemed, then there needs to be some sort of greater malevolent force for Ben to turn his back on in order to prove to Rey (and viewers) that he’s reformed. Theoretically, that malevolent force could simply be “the dark side,” but this is an abstract concept. Better would be to personify this malevolence through a character, be it the Emperor or a figure like him. Snoke would have fulfilled this function nicely, but Rian Johnson removed him from the chessboard, thus Abrams pulled the Emperor out of mothballs as a makeshift replacement.*
* Co-writer Chris Terrio more or less confirms that this line of thinking lead to the resurrection of the Emperor.
However, I’m not entirely convinced Ben even needed to have a redemption arc. A tragic rather than redemptive fate could have been just as dramatically satisfying, and redeeming Ben also turns his trilogy-spanning arc into a weak imitation of Anakin’s downfall and redemption (one of many unsuccessful attempts to repeat elements of original trilogy). Ben even re-forges his Kylo Ren mask, seemingly negating the character growth he underwent in The Last Jedi by returning him to his immature Darth Vader worship.
Really, Ben’s redemption is yet another retconning of The Last Jedi. The previous film tried – successfully – to move past all of this by taking us through the paces of a redemption arc, it’s just that this arc failed. Ben already turned on a greater malevolent force (Snoke), and it did cause him to join forces with Rey. However, rather than redeeming him, it simply reaffirmed the ethos that drew him to the dark side in the first place (tear down/kill the past), and thus he and Rey were unable to reconcile. The Rise of Skywalker tries to walk back this really interesting and original narrative direction, instead reverting Ben back into refried Vader.
Like with much of this film, there are glimmers of something interesting in Ben’s redemption. His desire to return to the light side is motivated partly by his attraction to Rey, which itself is motivated by the duo being “dyad” in the force, or, as Ben explains, their being “two that are one.” It’s a slight case of gilding the lily since it literalizes the character parallels that have been implicit up to this point, but ultimately it’s a welcome addition to Star Wars since it’s one of The Rise of Skywalker’s few new ideas. By itself, his attraction to Rey isn’t quite enough for him to renounce the dark side, even after Rey more or less tells him that’s what she needs in order to trust him. To fully reform, Ben needs to repent for his cardinal sin: murdering Han. Thankfully, Leia is able to facilitate his repentance through her tremendous, fatal effort to summon Han through the force.
For a moment, Han’s reappearance is one of the bright spots in the film. Here, he’s finally able to do what he couldn’t in The Force Awakens, and helps Ben turn back from the dark side by forgiving his past transgressions. If Ben is going to be redeemed, then it’s a necessary scene, not only because it allows Ben to forgive himself, but also because it allows viewers to forgive him too. It’s also a powerfully sentimental scene, right until the moment where the two repeat verbatim their exchange from The Force Awakens. Even by Hollywood standards, this is so excessively obvious that it instantly soured my good will. It’s as though Abrams simply doesn’t trust viewers to understand the emotional beats of this and other scenes without such heavy-handedness, and they suffer for it. The same is true of Leia’s decision to reach out to Ben this way, which is narrated by Maz Kanata, who practically turns to camera and explains to us what’s about to happen (and even then, it’s still unclear initially what Leia does that takes all of her remaining strength, because she says Ben’s name and seems to die before Han appears).*
* Yes, Abrams might have been hamstrung here by Carrie Fisher’s unfortunate death prior to shooting, but there are other ways Leia’s final act of heroism could have been portrayed that wouldn’t have necessitated such clumsy storytelling.
Ben’s redemption aside, reviving the Emperor and making him into a threatening villain also creates a slew of storytelling headaches that The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t even begin to satisfactorily address. For one, it raises all sorts of uninteresting expositional questions whose answers don’t do anything to enhance the emotional conflicts at the story’s center, but without those answers the story makes no sense. How did the Emperor survive being thrown down a well, and then the explosion of the second Death Star? How did he commission the construction of an entire fleet of starships, in secret, on a hidden world that nobody knows how to find (Exegol)? Why did he do it underwater when the ships need to be in space? Who the hell is manning this fleet of ships? For that matter, who are the thousands of acolytes in the Emperor’s lair? The film waves away questions like these by having Dominic Monaghan’s nameless Resistance character muse, “Dark science, cloning, secrets only the Sith knew,” but this explanation is woefully insufficient given that Exegol’s hidden nature is a major plot point driving much of the action for the first two-thirds of the film, and given that the fleet’s need to ascend to space motivates half of the action of the climax.
Another problem with the Emperor’s return is that it turns a lot of The Rise of Skywalker’s climax into a pallid rehash of the climax of Return of the Jedi. Once again, we have a villain receiving a redemption arc, along with crosscutting between two simultaneous confrontations involving dogfighting spaceships and force-wielders. The Emperor’s plan is even identical: confront the hero in a throne room, goad them with images of a space battle in which the hero’s friends are losing, and urge the hero to strike him down, thus ensuring the Emperor’s victory. This note-for-note repetition of Return of the Jedi is unsurprising, given that The Force Awakens was such an obvious remix of the original Star Wars. However, rather than seeming fresh and revitalizing like in The Force Awakens, here the repetition just feels tired and stagnant, especially considering the gaps in logic that need to be overlooked in order for this climax to make sense.
Finn and Poe’s plotlines in this film also fall flat, magnifying one of the problems of The Last Jedi. The duo tag along with Rey in this installment, which was relieving at first, because it promised that they’d have something interesting or important to do, unlike in the previous film. However, that hope quickly faded when it became clear that neither would receive substantial character arcs, or even character growth. Their goals are the same as Rey’s, but they don’t need to overcome any shortcomings or resolve any internal conflicts to achieve them. Compared to the complexity of Rey and Ben’s character arcs, it’s as though Poe and Finn are appearing in a simplistic and juvenile children’s movie.
Finn spends most of the film pining after Rey, with very little indication that she reciprocates even a modicum of his affection. With good reason, Rey is more interested in the connection she makes with Ben, even kissing him at the end. There’s also no allusion whatsoever to the romantic feelings Rose had for Finn in The Last Jedi. Abrupt as those feelings seemed in that film, it’s even stranger for The Rise of Skywalker not to acknowledge them at all. The film would have benefited from a scene where Finn gently tells Rose how he feels about Rey, and then some resolution to those feelings, one way or another. At the most, we learn a little more about the trauma of storm trooper conscription courtesy of Finn’s scene with newcomer Jannah, but Finn simply reiterates his Rey-induced faith in the force, and his commitment to the Resistance, and the latter is growth we saw him achieve in the previous film.
As for Poe, he begins the film being described by Rey as a “difficult man,” and this remains true from start to finish. Sure, we learn that he used to be a “spice runner,” which judging by Finn’s reaction has some sort of stigma associated with it, and that he has a history with newcomer Zorii, but none of this exposition provides any depth or nuance to his character. Poe is thrust into leadership when Leia dies, but this doesn’t cause any sort of character growth or teach him a valuable lesson. At the most, he seems somewhat despondent over the state of the Resistance, and disillusioned that no one responded to the Resistance’s distress signal in The Last Jedi.
Theoretically, Poe’s character arc involves the reaffirmation of his belief that the Resistance isn’t fighting for a lost cause, and while that does indeed happen, both he and Finn have next to nothing to do with it. It’s Lando and Chewie who do the heavy lifting here. They’re sent by Poe to gather civilian reinforcements for the film’s climactic space battle, and their last-minute arrival to save Finn and Poe’s otherwise doomed attack is intended as an emotional highpoint: it’s accompanied by a sweeping shot of the ships’ arrival and the fanfare of Star Wars’s main musical theme. However, the impact of this moment is thoroughly undermined because the fleet’s assembly takes place entirely off-screen by Lando and Chewie – a pair of depthless minor characters – and because the fleet itself is more or less anonymous (aside from a Wedge cameo and, inexplicably, Zorii).
Lando and Chewie’s arrival is clearly meant to evoke Han’s rescue of Luke in the climax of Star Wars, but it carries none of that scene’s emotional weight. In the original film, Han overcomes his self-interest and grows as a character when he comes to Luke’s aid, but in The Rise of Skywalker, we can only attribute growth and change to this fleet of faceless, nameless starships who have responded to Lando and Chewie’s calls for support. For the most part, we don’t know who these people are, nor why they’re contributing now when they previously ignored Poe's calls for help (perhaps he's a lousy leader?). Rather than an emotional highpoint, instead it just rings false as a clichéd deus ex machina. Even worse, once the battle is over, Finn inexplicably extends the Resistance’s victory at Exegol to other worlds all over the galaxy – accompanied by images of exploding star destroyers at familiar places like Endor and Bespin – even though the film has done nothing to establish that this battle extended anywhere beyond Exegol. In fact, the entire point of this battle was to prevent the Emperor’s fleet from spreading throughout the galaxy. The lapses in narrative logic here are astounding.
The film also reconfigures another legacy problem from The Last Jedi: much like how that film had too many plots, The Rise of Skywalker has far too many characters. In addition to the core trio and the two antagonists, as well as minor secondary characters like droids and aliens (BB8, Chewie, C3PO, R2D2, and newcomers Babu Frik and D-O), there are also holdovers from the two preceding films (Rose, Maz, and Hux), characters inherited from the original series (Luke, Leia, and Lando), as well as two significant newcomers in Zorii and Jannah, and even a new ancillary villain, Pryde. There are simply far too many characters to make all of them important to the plot, let alone service them with sustained scenes that provide a good sense of who they are, how they’ve changed, or what their relationship with the core trio is like.
Rose is perhaps the most egregious victim of this glut of characters. After being a major character in The Last Jedi, she’s given nothing significant to do here, and is essentially written out of the film when she turns down Finn’s offer to come along with the other heroes. Her sidelining is especially disconcerting given its broader cultural contexts: actress Kelly Marie Tran was the victim of social media harassment after the release of The Last Jedi, and her reduced role in The Rise of Skywalker is like an affirmation of those racists and sexists who would prefer her to be marginalized or made “other” because of her race and appearance.*
* According to co-writer Chris Terrio, they wrote and shot more for Rose to do with Leia, but weren’t satisfied with the CGI of these scenes, and cut them. Shit happens when you try to make a movie, but considering the wider cultural implications of Rose's role in the film, this is a terrible - inexcusable - lack of foresight.
While lacking racist and sexist components, the problems involving Rose’s sidelining extends to other characters as well, like Maz Kanata and Lando, who are grossly underused here. Maz is deployed primarily to explain the plot to viewers, particularly when she turns to camera to explain what’s about to happen as Leia shuffles away to die. Lando is assigned mostly to exposition duty.
The overstuffing of the film also negatively impacts the introduction of new characters. Zorii, played by Kerri Russell, is a good example. She goes from wanting to murder Poe to agreeing to help him in the space of only a few lines of dialogue. A few minutes later she invites him to join her in starting a new life, and shortly after that, she even sacrifices her ticket to that new life to help Poe and company, all in space of only a handful of scenes. Russell is a compelling actor, and her performance and chemistry with Oscar Isaac made me want to learn more about their history, but these factors don’t really offset the rushed execution of their scenes together.
Other nagging issues abound. The film’s pacing is a mess, magnifying a problem that was also evident in The Force Awakens: the film is largely a series of climaxes pushing the characters relentlessly from one fraught situation to another. There are very few quiet moments between characters – and certainly no extended sequences – that would let characters and relationships breathe a little. The incessant nature of the plot is one of the reasons so many of the secondary characters feel underserved - there simply isn't time for them. Zorii’s transition from wanting to kill Poe to sacrificing happiness so he can continue his mission would play a lot better if it took place over, say, thirty minutes of screen time rather than ten.
Another annoyance is the motif the film makes out of characters returning from the dead, literally or figuratively. Most obviously, the Emperor returns from the dead, but so does Chewie, whom Rey thinks she accidentally kills when she blows up his transport. It turns out he was on a different transport. Near the end of the film, Rey dies, but then Ben uses the force to revive her. Leia dies too, but then comes back as a force ghost, as does Luke. Even C3PO “dies” when his memory is wiped, but later R2D2 restores it. It seems like Zorii dies when the Emperor blows up her planet, but no, she shows up in the climax too. And of course there’s also Han. These constant deaths and rebirths seem to put truth to Luke’s line in The Last Jedi about no one really being gone forever, but other than Han, none of these resurrections are put to good dramatic purpose. Chewie’s death gives Rey some cause to doubt herself, but it lasts all of twenty minutes before she’s let off the hook, without any repercussions. These constant deaths and rebirths simply undermine The Rise of Skywalker’s dramatic stakes by making nothing seem to matter.
A final nagging issue suggested by the problems with the film’s climax: The Rise of Skywalker’s attempts to repeat, remix, or pay homage to previous entries in the series often fall flat because it misunderstands what made the original moments compelling, or fails to integrate them in a way that makes sense for this new story. Aside from the climax's attempt to repeat Han's rescue, Ben’s revelation that Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter is clearly meant to echo Darth Vader’s revelation that he is Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back. However, the surprise is disappointing this time around, because questions about Rey’s ancestry were satisfactorily answered in The Last Jedi.
The same is true of the scene where Luke fishes his X-Wing out of the water for Rey, which is clearly meant to evoke Yoda doing the same for Luke in The Empire Strikes Back (it’s even accompanied by the same musical motif). In Empire, it’s a powerful moment of awe and wonder because it proves Yoda correct that size does not matter in the ways of the force. It also shows us that Yoda really is a master Jedi, and Luke still a novice, since Luke thought raising the X-Wing was impossible. It also makes us fret over Luke’s coming confrontation with Vader – if he can’t do what Yoda could here, what chance does he have against Vader? However, mapping this scene onto Luke and Rey in The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t really work, because it loses all of these contexts. We already know Luke is a master, courtesy of his mental projection in The Last Jedi. Moreover, Rey isn’t a novice like Luke was in Empire. Raising the ship seems like something she is more than capable of doing herself, thus the look of wonder on her face doesn’t make any sense, and Luke’s act of raising it reads more as favor than a revelation. Like much of this film, its heart is in the right place, but it simply doesn’t scan with what’s happening in the plot.
While there are a lot of large things that don’t work about this film, there are also quite a few small things that do work. The film retains the humor of the first two installments, and a lot of the comedy lands. C3PO is a great example: once his memory is wiped, he spends a lengthy section of the film reacting apoplectically to characters who have already built up annoyance and/or disdain for his baseline personality. Likewise, Babu Frik, the diminutive black market droidsmith who performs the memory wipe on C3PO, is a nonstop delight – I enjoyed everything from his alien language sounding like a drunk version of Huttese to his clearly not caring about the drama in which the heroes are embroiled. Even Ben gets a funny moment of humanity, grunting “Ow” after leaping onto a large edifice on his way to the film’s climax.
While The Rise of Skywalker has many faults and is easily the weakest film in this new trilogy, many of its problems can likely be attributed to inconsistent creative leadership. J.J. Abrams set up conflicts and character arcs that Rian Johnson took in imaginative and unexpected directions, but this left Abrams with the difficult task of concluding the trilogy in a way that reconciled the two films. He seems to have opted to try to return, as best he could, to the kind of conclusion to which the first film lent itself, but this conclusion is weakened by the second film’s wild (and often successful) departures from convention. Perhaps it would have been better to go with the flow, and make the third film into something wildly different as well. Regardless, the failings of The Rise of Skywalker haven’t tarnished the franchise so much that I’m disinterested in subsequent films. I remained very intrigued by what Rian Johnson would do with a trilogy all his own, and I would even be open to checking in on Rey at some point down the line – even if this film stumbled with Ben, Poe, and Finn, everything she was involved in remained compelling from start to finish, based partly on the strength of Daisy Ridley’s performance. Finally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that as disappointing as parts of The Rise of Skywalker are, it’s still vastly superior to the awful prequels.
Other thoughts:
- Ultimately, the film likely would have been better had it allowed for a resolution to Rey’s feelings about her ancestry another way aside from making her a Palpatine. Perhaps she could have been conflicted over the revelation that she has no significant ancestry; she could have felt unmoored, and thus fear the allure of the dark side of the force. Given all of the problems that arise from the Emperor’s poor fit into this film’s plot, something clearly needed to change.
- I thought one of the film’s most emotional affecting moments involved Chewie’s reaction to Leia’s death. When he breaks down sobbing, I sympathized with how much he’s lost over the course of these three films. Although I suppose this speaks to the film's larger problems; if the most powerful moment involves the reaction of a character who can only growl and wail, you might want to take a crack at a few more script revisions.
- Someone in my screening exclaimed with glee when Rey kissed Ben. At least someone was compelled by the climax of this movie.
- Another new addition to the Star Wars universe: when Rey and company land on a planet early on, they discover themselves in the midst of the Star Wars equivalent of Burning Man.
- The mad scientist vibes of the Emperor’s lair are also enhanced by the flashes of lightning that illuminate the Emperor, as though he were Frankenstein himself. Maybe Dr. Frankenstein would have made a better villain.
- The well-shot lightsaber fighting of The Last Jedi has vanished in The Rise of Skywalker – the clashes between Ben and Rey are a mess, often framed too close to register the moves, with too much camera movement, and with no sense of pace.
- The Rise of Skywalker seems disinterested in martial combat in general. The Knights of Ren are built up as an imposing menace, but Ben dispatches them easily on the way to Palpatine’s throne room. It’s a shame, because they represent a chance for Rey and Ben to reprise what was one of the most exhilarating scenes in The Last Jedi. Instead, it’s is passed over for some nonsense involving the Emperor sucking away Ben and Rey’s life essence. I’d interrogate the mechanics of this confrontation more, but find it difficult to muster the effort when it's in the service of such an underwhelming scene.
- The climax with the Emperor did have one nice beat: Rey summoning the spirits of heroes past in her time of need, which worked because it is the epitome of Rey’s approach of taking the best of the past and using it for good. Roll call: I heard Luke, Leia, Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, and even Qui-Gon and Mace. A few others I didn’t recognize were probably from the animated series.
- Another problem from The Force Awakens magnified by The Rise of Skywalker: lightsaber fetishization. The Force Awakens treated Luke’s lightsaber like some sort of holy weapon rather than the simple tool that it actually is, and the same is true here, with Rey telling Leia she’ll earn Luke’s lightsaber one day, and with Luke later telling Rey to take both his and Leia’s sabers to her confrontation with the Emperor. Both of Abrams’s entries in this series fail to understand that the lightsabers matter much less than the characters that wield them. Johnson’s film gets this, beginning with Luke tossing away the lightsaber Rey hands him, and ending with Leia telling Rey that her now-broken lightsaber doesn’t matter because they have everything they really need inside themselves.
- This film has at least one moment of hilariously bad blocking: when the trio of heroes searches for Chewie aboard Ben’s star destroyer, they hide from some passing storm troopers by pressing against the side of the hallway, in full view of the troopers walking past them. It’s masked slightly because we can’t see where the trio is when the shot begins, but once you realize where they are, their “stealth” turns into pure nonsense. Or maybe it’s the force. Whatever.
- Aside from retconning much of what was good about The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker also pays homage to it: Luke’s fear caused him to burn the Jedi temple, and here Rey’s fear causes her to burn the ship she uses to fly to Luke’s island, and both she and Luke are given pep talks from their former masters in front of the fire. Of course, Abrams can't resist gilding this lily either, having Rey explicitly tell Luke she's doing exactly the same thing he did.
- J.J. Abrams’s penchant for homage also leads to one of the stupidest plot contrivances in The Rise of Skywalker, when Rey holds up the Sith knife to match its contours to the façade of the fallen Death Star, thus revealing the location of the device that will lead her to Exegol. It’s a Goonies reference, but it’s incredibly dumb in both films, since it would only work by standing at the exact vantage point where Rey happens to be when it occurs to her to try it.
- One bit of retconning I actually liked: the flashback to Luke completing Leia’s training. Sure, it’s a superfluous explanation for why Leia never wielded a lightsaber (I’d prefer it if we could simply accept that some Jedi don’t use them, instead relying on other skills). Still, it’s retconning that actually makes sense. Of course Luke would train his sister. Doing so ensures that there’s one more force-trained hero just as capable as him out there in the galaxy, relieving him of the burden of carrying on the Jedi legacy alone, even if he would still need to do most of the work, given Leia’s leadership role. Moreover, it also explains Leia using the force to survive being jettisoned into space in The Last Jedi. Plus, the brief, CGI-enhanced glimpses we get of the young versions of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher look pretty good, although it probably helps that they’re being lit primarily through the glow of lightsabers. Regardless, it’s much more convincing than the glimpse we saw of young Leia in Rogue One.
- Speaking of Leia, it’s remarkable that there was so much excess Carrie Fisher footage from the first two films that they were able to cobble together usable scenes for this film. The eyelines weren’t always perfect, and the CGI was ineffective in some places, but at least the scenes made sense. If only my knowledge of Fisher’s death didn’t keep throwing me out of the story every time she appeared on screen.
- Retrospectively, Abrams might not have been the best choice for co-writing and directing this film, given his track record of slavish devotion to past ideas and filmmakers (Spielberg homage in nearly all of his films, his remaking of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and so on). Better might have been someone able to push the series in another direction, like Johnson did.
Described abstractly like this, it’s a story that could work, even if it’s pretty familiar. However, its execution leaves a lot to be desired. Most obviously, Rey’s doubts about herself are largely a product of her learning she’s Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter, and Palpatine himself is literally resurrected here to play the boogeyman once again. The Emperor’s return and his familial relation to Rey are the film’s most egregious acts of retroactive continuity, and while they offer some interesting material for Rey and Ben, their impact is far more negative than positive.
However, these positives are small compensation for the negative repercussions of the Emperor’s return. For one, making Rey into Palpatine’s granddaughter completely negates some of the most vital and refreshing aspects of The Last Jedi, like Rey’s independent ancestry. Making Rey unrelated to any of the other Star Wars families was a surprising storytelling maneuver, but it made this universe feel bigger and more robust. Retconning her into a Palpatine contracts it again, and turns this story into yet another family squabble. Moreover, ending the film with Rey embracing the Skywalker lineage tarnishes one of the more winning ideas of The Last Jedi, that even if you come from nothing, you can still carve out a significant role for yourself in the world.
More significantly, the Emperor’s return makes The Rise of Skywalker into a derivative retread of Return of the Jedi, while also negating the most wonderfully shocking aspect of The Last Jedi: Ben’s unceremonious dispatching of Snoke. Snoke’s murder was a brutally effective way of freeing The Last Jedi from uninteresting expositional baggage, and of advancing Rey and Ben’s relationship by briefly turning them into uneasy allies. However, by resurrecting the Emperor, Abrams has frustratingly gone back to retrieve the baggage Johnson cut loose, making the Emperor the literal power behind Snoke all along: when we’re first introduced to the Emperor’s mad scientist-like lair, it’s decked out with vats of unused Snoke clones.
* Co-writer Chris Terrio more or less confirms that this line of thinking lead to the resurrection of the Emperor.
However, I’m not entirely convinced Ben even needed to have a redemption arc. A tragic rather than redemptive fate could have been just as dramatically satisfying, and redeeming Ben also turns his trilogy-spanning arc into a weak imitation of Anakin’s downfall and redemption (one of many unsuccessful attempts to repeat elements of original trilogy). Ben even re-forges his Kylo Ren mask, seemingly negating the character growth he underwent in The Last Jedi by returning him to his immature Darth Vader worship.
Really, Ben’s redemption is yet another retconning of The Last Jedi. The previous film tried – successfully – to move past all of this by taking us through the paces of a redemption arc, it’s just that this arc failed. Ben already turned on a greater malevolent force (Snoke), and it did cause him to join forces with Rey. However, rather than redeeming him, it simply reaffirmed the ethos that drew him to the dark side in the first place (tear down/kill the past), and thus he and Rey were unable to reconcile. The Rise of Skywalker tries to walk back this really interesting and original narrative direction, instead reverting Ben back into refried Vader.
Like with much of this film, there are glimmers of something interesting in Ben’s redemption. His desire to return to the light side is motivated partly by his attraction to Rey, which itself is motivated by the duo being “dyad” in the force, or, as Ben explains, their being “two that are one.” It’s a slight case of gilding the lily since it literalizes the character parallels that have been implicit up to this point, but ultimately it’s a welcome addition to Star Wars since it’s one of The Rise of Skywalker’s few new ideas. By itself, his attraction to Rey isn’t quite enough for him to renounce the dark side, even after Rey more or less tells him that’s what she needs in order to trust him. To fully reform, Ben needs to repent for his cardinal sin: murdering Han. Thankfully, Leia is able to facilitate his repentance through her tremendous, fatal effort to summon Han through the force.
For a moment, Han’s reappearance is one of the bright spots in the film. Here, he’s finally able to do what he couldn’t in The Force Awakens, and helps Ben turn back from the dark side by forgiving his past transgressions. If Ben is going to be redeemed, then it’s a necessary scene, not only because it allows Ben to forgive himself, but also because it allows viewers to forgive him too. It’s also a powerfully sentimental scene, right until the moment where the two repeat verbatim their exchange from The Force Awakens. Even by Hollywood standards, this is so excessively obvious that it instantly soured my good will. It’s as though Abrams simply doesn’t trust viewers to understand the emotional beats of this and other scenes without such heavy-handedness, and they suffer for it. The same is true of Leia’s decision to reach out to Ben this way, which is narrated by Maz Kanata, who practically turns to camera and explains to us what’s about to happen (and even then, it’s still unclear initially what Leia does that takes all of her remaining strength, because she says Ben’s name and seems to die before Han appears).*
* Yes, Abrams might have been hamstrung here by Carrie Fisher’s unfortunate death prior to shooting, but there are other ways Leia’s final act of heroism could have been portrayed that wouldn’t have necessitated such clumsy storytelling.
Finn and Poe’s plotlines in this film also fall flat, magnifying one of the problems of The Last Jedi. The duo tag along with Rey in this installment, which was relieving at first, because it promised that they’d have something interesting or important to do, unlike in the previous film. However, that hope quickly faded when it became clear that neither would receive substantial character arcs, or even character growth. Their goals are the same as Rey’s, but they don’t need to overcome any shortcomings or resolve any internal conflicts to achieve them. Compared to the complexity of Rey and Ben’s character arcs, it’s as though Poe and Finn are appearing in a simplistic and juvenile children’s movie.
Theoretically, Poe’s character arc involves the reaffirmation of his belief that the Resistance isn’t fighting for a lost cause, and while that does indeed happen, both he and Finn have next to nothing to do with it. It’s Lando and Chewie who do the heavy lifting here. They’re sent by Poe to gather civilian reinforcements for the film’s climactic space battle, and their last-minute arrival to save Finn and Poe’s otherwise doomed attack is intended as an emotional highpoint: it’s accompanied by a sweeping shot of the ships’ arrival and the fanfare of Star Wars’s main musical theme. However, the impact of this moment is thoroughly undermined because the fleet’s assembly takes place entirely off-screen by Lando and Chewie – a pair of depthless minor characters – and because the fleet itself is more or less anonymous (aside from a Wedge cameo and, inexplicably, Zorii).
The film also reconfigures another legacy problem from The Last Jedi: much like how that film had too many plots, The Rise of Skywalker has far too many characters. In addition to the core trio and the two antagonists, as well as minor secondary characters like droids and aliens (BB8, Chewie, C3PO, R2D2, and newcomers Babu Frik and D-O), there are also holdovers from the two preceding films (Rose, Maz, and Hux), characters inherited from the original series (Luke, Leia, and Lando), as well as two significant newcomers in Zorii and Jannah, and even a new ancillary villain, Pryde. There are simply far too many characters to make all of them important to the plot, let alone service them with sustained scenes that provide a good sense of who they are, how they’ve changed, or what their relationship with the core trio is like.
* According to co-writer Chris Terrio, they wrote and shot more for Rose to do with Leia, but weren’t satisfied with the CGI of these scenes, and cut them. Shit happens when you try to make a movie, but considering the wider cultural implications of Rose's role in the film, this is a terrible - inexcusable - lack of foresight.
The overstuffing of the film also negatively impacts the introduction of new characters. Zorii, played by Kerri Russell, is a good example. She goes from wanting to murder Poe to agreeing to help him in the space of only a few lines of dialogue. A few minutes later she invites him to join her in starting a new life, and shortly after that, she even sacrifices her ticket to that new life to help Poe and company, all in space of only a handful of scenes. Russell is a compelling actor, and her performance and chemistry with Oscar Isaac made me want to learn more about their history, but these factors don’t really offset the rushed execution of their scenes together.
Another annoyance is the motif the film makes out of characters returning from the dead, literally or figuratively. Most obviously, the Emperor returns from the dead, but so does Chewie, whom Rey thinks she accidentally kills when she blows up his transport. It turns out he was on a different transport. Near the end of the film, Rey dies, but then Ben uses the force to revive her. Leia dies too, but then comes back as a force ghost, as does Luke. Even C3PO “dies” when his memory is wiped, but later R2D2 restores it. It seems like Zorii dies when the Emperor blows up her planet, but no, she shows up in the climax too. And of course there’s also Han. These constant deaths and rebirths seem to put truth to Luke’s line in The Last Jedi about no one really being gone forever, but other than Han, none of these resurrections are put to good dramatic purpose. Chewie’s death gives Rey some cause to doubt herself, but it lasts all of twenty minutes before she’s let off the hook, without any repercussions. These constant deaths and rebirths simply undermine The Rise of Skywalker’s dramatic stakes by making nothing seem to matter.
A final nagging issue suggested by the problems with the film’s climax: The Rise of Skywalker’s attempts to repeat, remix, or pay homage to previous entries in the series often fall flat because it misunderstands what made the original moments compelling, or fails to integrate them in a way that makes sense for this new story. Aside from the climax's attempt to repeat Han's rescue, Ben’s revelation that Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter is clearly meant to echo Darth Vader’s revelation that he is Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back. However, the surprise is disappointing this time around, because questions about Rey’s ancestry were satisfactorily answered in The Last Jedi.
The same is true of the scene where Luke fishes his X-Wing out of the water for Rey, which is clearly meant to evoke Yoda doing the same for Luke in The Empire Strikes Back (it’s even accompanied by the same musical motif). In Empire, it’s a powerful moment of awe and wonder because it proves Yoda correct that size does not matter in the ways of the force. It also shows us that Yoda really is a master Jedi, and Luke still a novice, since Luke thought raising the X-Wing was impossible. It also makes us fret over Luke’s coming confrontation with Vader – if he can’t do what Yoda could here, what chance does he have against Vader? However, mapping this scene onto Luke and Rey in The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t really work, because it loses all of these contexts. We already know Luke is a master, courtesy of his mental projection in The Last Jedi. Moreover, Rey isn’t a novice like Luke was in Empire. Raising the ship seems like something she is more than capable of doing herself, thus the look of wonder on her face doesn’t make any sense, and Luke’s act of raising it reads more as favor than a revelation. Like much of this film, its heart is in the right place, but it simply doesn’t scan with what’s happening in the plot.
While The Rise of Skywalker has many faults and is easily the weakest film in this new trilogy, many of its problems can likely be attributed to inconsistent creative leadership. J.J. Abrams set up conflicts and character arcs that Rian Johnson took in imaginative and unexpected directions, but this left Abrams with the difficult task of concluding the trilogy in a way that reconciled the two films. He seems to have opted to try to return, as best he could, to the kind of conclusion to which the first film lent itself, but this conclusion is weakened by the second film’s wild (and often successful) departures from convention. Perhaps it would have been better to go with the flow, and make the third film into something wildly different as well. Regardless, the failings of The Rise of Skywalker haven’t tarnished the franchise so much that I’m disinterested in subsequent films. I remained very intrigued by what Rian Johnson would do with a trilogy all his own, and I would even be open to checking in on Rey at some point down the line – even if this film stumbled with Ben, Poe, and Finn, everything she was involved in remained compelling from start to finish, based partly on the strength of Daisy Ridley’s performance. Finally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that as disappointing as parts of The Rise of Skywalker are, it’s still vastly superior to the awful prequels.
Other thoughts:
- Ultimately, the film likely would have been better had it allowed for a resolution to Rey’s feelings about her ancestry another way aside from making her a Palpatine. Perhaps she could have been conflicted over the revelation that she has no significant ancestry; she could have felt unmoored, and thus fear the allure of the dark side of the force. Given all of the problems that arise from the Emperor’s poor fit into this film’s plot, something clearly needed to change.
- I thought one of the film’s most emotional affecting moments involved Chewie’s reaction to Leia’s death. When he breaks down sobbing, I sympathized with how much he’s lost over the course of these three films. Although I suppose this speaks to the film's larger problems; if the most powerful moment involves the reaction of a character who can only growl and wail, you might want to take a crack at a few more script revisions.
- Someone in my screening exclaimed with glee when Rey kissed Ben. At least someone was compelled by the climax of this movie.
- The mad scientist vibes of the Emperor’s lair are also enhanced by the flashes of lightning that illuminate the Emperor, as though he were Frankenstein himself. Maybe Dr. Frankenstein would have made a better villain.
- The well-shot lightsaber fighting of The Last Jedi has vanished in The Rise of Skywalker – the clashes between Ben and Rey are a mess, often framed too close to register the moves, with too much camera movement, and with no sense of pace.
- The Rise of Skywalker seems disinterested in martial combat in general. The Knights of Ren are built up as an imposing menace, but Ben dispatches them easily on the way to Palpatine’s throne room. It’s a shame, because they represent a chance for Rey and Ben to reprise what was one of the most exhilarating scenes in The Last Jedi. Instead, it’s is passed over for some nonsense involving the Emperor sucking away Ben and Rey’s life essence. I’d interrogate the mechanics of this confrontation more, but find it difficult to muster the effort when it's in the service of such an underwhelming scene.
- The climax with the Emperor did have one nice beat: Rey summoning the spirits of heroes past in her time of need, which worked because it is the epitome of Rey’s approach of taking the best of the past and using it for good. Roll call: I heard Luke, Leia, Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, and even Qui-Gon and Mace. A few others I didn’t recognize were probably from the animated series.
- Another problem from The Force Awakens magnified by The Rise of Skywalker: lightsaber fetishization. The Force Awakens treated Luke’s lightsaber like some sort of holy weapon rather than the simple tool that it actually is, and the same is true here, with Rey telling Leia she’ll earn Luke’s lightsaber one day, and with Luke later telling Rey to take both his and Leia’s sabers to her confrontation with the Emperor. Both of Abrams’s entries in this series fail to understand that the lightsabers matter much less than the characters that wield them. Johnson’s film gets this, beginning with Luke tossing away the lightsaber Rey hands him, and ending with Leia telling Rey that her now-broken lightsaber doesn’t matter because they have everything they really need inside themselves.
- This film has at least one moment of hilariously bad blocking: when the trio of heroes searches for Chewie aboard Ben’s star destroyer, they hide from some passing storm troopers by pressing against the side of the hallway, in full view of the troopers walking past them. It’s masked slightly because we can’t see where the trio is when the shot begins, but once you realize where they are, their “stealth” turns into pure nonsense. Or maybe it’s the force. Whatever.
- Aside from retconning much of what was good about The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker also pays homage to it: Luke’s fear caused him to burn the Jedi temple, and here Rey’s fear causes her to burn the ship she uses to fly to Luke’s island, and both she and Luke are given pep talks from their former masters in front of the fire. Of course, Abrams can't resist gilding this lily either, having Rey explicitly tell Luke she's doing exactly the same thing he did.
- One bit of retconning I actually liked: the flashback to Luke completing Leia’s training. Sure, it’s a superfluous explanation for why Leia never wielded a lightsaber (I’d prefer it if we could simply accept that some Jedi don’t use them, instead relying on other skills). Still, it’s retconning that actually makes sense. Of course Luke would train his sister. Doing so ensures that there’s one more force-trained hero just as capable as him out there in the galaxy, relieving him of the burden of carrying on the Jedi legacy alone, even if he would still need to do most of the work, given Leia’s leadership role. Moreover, it also explains Leia using the force to survive being jettisoned into space in The Last Jedi. Plus, the brief, CGI-enhanced glimpses we get of the young versions of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher look pretty good, although it probably helps that they’re being lit primarily through the glow of lightsabers. Regardless, it’s much more convincing than the glimpse we saw of young Leia in Rogue One.
- Retrospectively, Abrams might not have been the best choice for co-writing and directing this film, given his track record of slavish devotion to past ideas and filmmakers (Spielberg homage in nearly all of his films, his remaking of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and so on). Better might have been someone able to push the series in another direction, like Johnson did.
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