The Force is not Strong with Rise of Skywalker

Faced with the daunting task of ending the entire series, this one plays it safe but boring.

by Jacob Schermerhorn

(Reading this leads to spoilers, spoilers lead to frustration, frustration leads to the dark side!)

This film was saddled with an impossible task straight out of the gate. The ninth and final (for now) movie in the main Star Wars canon had to, just to name a few expectations: give a fitting send off to Carrie Fisher, find a place for Kylo Ren’s character arc to land, deal with the homoerotic tension between Finn and Poe for once and all, give Rey some more jedi training, present a suitable threat to the scrappy heroes, close up storylines and plot arcs, be a satisfying conclusion to a four-year trilogy not to mention a forty-year long non(is that nine?)-ogy, as well as be an enjoyable movie. I get that it would have been hard for any single movie to pull off, the reality is not lost on me. Even grading it on that curve however, The Rise of Skywalker was a disappointment.

The events begin some time after The Last Jedi with characters realizing they need to access another map McGuffin now that a mysterious message proclaims the return of Emperor Palpatine. From there, the plucky jedi-in-training Rey (Daisy Ridley), trooper-turned-rebel Finn (John Boyega), hotshot pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac), along with Chewbacca, C-3P0, and BB8, (No Kelly Marie Tran as Rose much to my chagrin) go planet hopping, swashbuckle some stormtroopers, fight some space battles, all normal fare for this genre, and some of it quite enjoyable.

However, the inexplicable pacing of said events took away a lot of that enjoyment. For example, the introduction of the Emperor is the cold open of the film and takes maybe seven minutes. That is a short amount of time for what fundamentally changes this universe with no foreshadowing in the other two films.

For a movie with a runtime close to two and a half hours, it felt like they were rushing to cram as much as possible in. Which is a shame because I like the new cast. I’d love to dig into what makes any of them tick: character motivation, their relationship to others, hopes, dreams, fear, and so on. But the times we do get that it usually feels too shallow to be interesting.

While the pacing kept this from being a good movie, the story decisions kept this from being a good Star Wars movie. Or at least, an engaging one. Emperor Palpatine is back and was behind everything apparently, Rey is his granddaughter, and every star destroyer in the ridiculously large Final Order fleet is armed with “a planet-blowing-up gun” like the Death Star.

Time to come clean to anyone reading, I stan The Last Jedi. I loved that it told a tight, thematically complete story with satisfying metacommentary and a fun experience to boot. It also was finally a movie that challenged the narrative of Star Wars. In the requisite Joseph Campbell’s “Belly of the Beast” scene of that movie, Rey discovered that her parentage was not significant. When she looked in the mirror, she saw only her own reflection. Rey raised herself.

Which is cool. The message that greatness can come from anywhere and anyone is an important one for people to hear and for Star Wars to evolve. The choice Rise of Skywalker made to make her descended from the powerful Palpatine line is what an old Star Wars story would do, not what The Last Jedi seemed to be setting up.

Whereas I walked out of that movie excited to see the possibilities of this universe, Rise of Skywalker reminds me more of that Hans Gruber quote from Die Hard: “He wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.” With the conclusion of this movie, I really can’t imagine any other worlds to conquer in Star Wars. Well, until the inevitable reboot in ten years.

Still, I don’t want to end this off on such a depressing note so instead I will say this to conclude. There is an undeniable magic in Star Wars. Not in the single through-line of canon movies (If that were true, it would have died with the prequels). Instead the magic of Star Wars is the mythic scale and the expansive, unapologetically weird, joyfully adventurous, imaginative universe that inspired so many others to make great things from it. Ever since its inception, good and bad, people have created books, art, tv shows, graphic novels, video games, and most importantly, stories from Star Wars. And that gives me hope for this franchise.

May the Force be with y’all.