Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

I enjoyed Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi for bringing new things to Star Wars, and for having something interesting to say about how to negotiate the relationship between present and past. While not everything in The Last Jedi worked (particularly the Poe and Finn plots), it excelled in paralleling Rey and Ben, and created an interesting conflict by allowing them to understand each other’s perspectives, which led them to feel a complicated mix of sympathy and antipathy for one another. I left The Last Jedi excited to see how the next film in the series would build off of their conflict.

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.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

One of the criticisms lobbed against The Force Awakens was that it was derivative of the original Star Wars trilogy, repeating many of the plot points and character types from the first film and some of the second. I still enjoyed it because it remixed those elements enough that it felt fresh, and because it was fun to experience a competently written and directed Star Wars film again after the letdown of the prequels. But one of my questions surrounding The Last Jedi concerned whether it too would be a derivative remixing of the original trilogy, or whether it would take Star Wars in new and interesting directions. The answer seems to be both yes and no.

Like The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi repeats many elements from the original trilogy, particularly The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The film begins like Empire, with the villains catching the heroes in the middle of an escape attempt; also like Empire, a pupil seeks out training from a Jedi master, has a reflective experience in an enclosure laden with the dark side of the force, and abandons their training to confront a villain. Like both Empire and Return of the Jedi, villains and heroes attempt to turn one another to their causes, and a villain is betrayed by his apprentice, among many other similarities.

Yet even more than The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi spins this material in new directions, remixing it until it resembles the original trilogy only in passing. The rebels' escape attempt, for instance, is drawn out into an ancillary plot that lasts the length of the film, and the equivalent of the battle for Hoth is moved from the beginning of the film to the end. More than this, however, The Last Jedi goes far beyond The Force Awakens in introducing new and exciting narrative elements. The result is a film that most certainly feels like Star Wars, but one that also revitalizes the series, yielding a largely stellar -- although not unflawed -- entry in the saga.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I'm in awe over how much I enjoyed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I feel awe not because my expectations were low given how bad the three prequels were, and not because I hold the original trilogy in particularly high esteem (I don’t). No, my awe is a product of how impressed I am that the new film managed to be so enjoyable while also being so derivative. The Force Awakens contains so many references, parallels, callbacks, rehashes, and remixes of the first film in the series, and to a lesser extent the second, that it’s not a stretch to say that the plot of The Force Awakens is essentially a (superior) repetition of the plot of A New Hope, but with some of the pieces rearranged, with greater immediate emotional investment courtesy of familiar returning characters, and with some of the best bits of The Empire Strikes Back thrown in for good measure. Yet for all of its repetition, it's still a fun film nonetheless, more so than A New Hope, which has long seemed to me like a rickety bucket of bolts.