The Rise Of Skywalker Review [SPOILERICIOUS]

=0=

I’m going to post all the SPOILER stuff way below in section 3, so as not to ruin anything for anybody who hasn’t seen the movie yet.

You’ll get plenty of warnings.

=1=

In my old age I’m starting to divide creative works into three groups:  Good, bad, and not-so-good.

A good creative work is any where the strengths overwhelmingly outweigh the weaknesses; a bad one is the obverse.

A not-so-good work is one where the strengths and weaknesses balance each other out.

It’s the kind of a work that will doubtless please those audience members who really enjoy the strengths in it, and equally irritate those annoyed by the weaknesses.

In my estimation, a not-so-good work is one done with straight forward intent and as often as not, a fair degree of technical and aesthetic competency, but fails to jell as a cohesive whole.  

No one need feel ashamed for enjoying a not-so-good work, and no one involved in the making of a not-so-good work should feel bad about their contribution (unless, of course, their contribution turns out to be one of the weaknesses that should have been avoided).

Theodore Sturgeon famously observed “90% of everything is crap.”

I think that’s a little harsh.

I agree with him that only 10% of anything is good, but think only 40% falls into the crap bin.

Most stuff falls in the 50% I call not-so-good.

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker is in that 50%.

. . .

The good stuff is really good.

Elsewhere I’ve posted my enthusiasm for Star Wars Episode VII:  The Force Awakens and Star Wars Episode VIII:  The Last Jedi hinge in no small part on just how emo Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) could get, and holy cow, does he ever deliver in The Rise Of Skywalker.

Easily my favorite parts of the picture.

Doesn’t really mesh with anything else in the movie but, hey, ya can’t have everything, right?  (I’ll discuss his performance in a little more detail in section =3=.)

Other performances range from adequate to doing-the-best-they-can-with-the-material to okay-smartass-you-try-recreating-a-dead-actress-via-CGI.

The dialog in The Rise Of Skywalker is the worst of any film in the series, with the possible exception Star Wars Episode III:  The Revenge Of The Sith, which I haven’t seen and have no intention of seeing (but more on that below…).

It’s not an attempt to depict characters talking, it’s a series of shouted declarative sentences.

Elsewhere I’ve referred to The Rise Of Skywalker as the best Jason Of Star Command episode ever made.

For those who don’t get the reference, Jason Of Star Command was a low budget albeit imaginative Saturday morning kid-vid Star Wars rip off by Filmation Studios.

To make sure the youngest kids in the audience understood what was going on, they tended to hammer home plot points repeatedly.

DRAGOS
Jason!  In just sixteen hours my space fleet
will destroy Star Command!

STAR COMMAND
Jason!  Dragos is going to destroy us with his
space fleet in just sixteen hours!

JASON
Don’t worry, Star Command!  I’ll stop Dragos from
destroying you with his space fleet in sixteen hours.

NARRATOR
(i.e., Norm Prescott)
Jason has only sixteen hours to stop Dragos from
destroying Star Command with his space fleet!

There is far too much of that in The Rise Of Skywalker.

Ten minutes into the movie, and there was already far too much of that…

The opening credit crawl reveals an off camera plot development that literally deserved an entire film of its own to fully explore.

There is no sustained coherent plot to The Rise Of Skywalker:  

Well, we gotta do this,

now we gotta do that,

first we gotta find this thing,

then we gotta find that thing,

now I’m feeling blue,

now I’m gonna get encouraged,

etc., etc., and of course, etc.

Everything feels frenetic, not fast paced.

There are far too many scenes that exist just to sell action figures and toy vehicles.

There was a desire to tie off loose ends and say good-bye to favorite characters and that was a mistake.

It undercuts the urgency of the story (or rather, the desired urgency; the fact the film is called The Rise Of Skywalker means everybody in the freakin’ audience ALREADY KNOWS HOW THE DAMN THING IS GONNA END!

(This is not a problem unique to Star Wars.  Gene Siskell famously upbraided Roger Ebert for spoiling the ending to the third Star Trek movie, to which Ebert retorted, “Oh, come on!  They’re going to call a forty million dollar movie The Search For Spock and not find him?!?!?”)

There is one nice little breather scene (“little” only in screen time; visually it’s pretty big and impressive):  The Festival of the Ancestors on the desert world Pasaana that gives a nice touch of exotic space opera flavor to the proceedings.

All of the Star Wars movies offer really great art direction and visual design, and The Rise Of Skywalker certainly delivers in that category.

Which makes the occasional mediocre special effects shots all the more obvious.

The Rise Of Skywalker has a few painfully obvious matte shots, a few shots obviously composed in post-production, and a few shots where the audience becomes aware the actors are performing in front of a greenscreen. 

You can get away with mediocre visuals so long as there is consistency in their mediocrity.  

If everything else consistently looks great, a so-so shot spoils the illusion; if everything consistently looks so-so, it’s simply part of the work’s look.

Indeed, you’re better off with consistently mediocre work highlighted by a few great shots than consistently great stuff undercut by a few mediocre ones.

Best thing about the movie is the complete lack of Jar Jar Binks.

=2=

Before diving deeper in The Rise Of Skywalker, let’s look at the series as a whole (just the numbered theatrical episodes, not standalone films, TV series, video games, comics, novels, etc.).

I’ve said the original Star Wars was the movie an entire generation had been waiting all their lives to see.

George Lucas wanted to do Flash Gordon but when Universal turned him down, created his own space opera.

Lucas, it needs be noted, is not a good writer.

Whatever visual talents he has, they don’t extend to telling a good story.

One can easily find early drafts of Star Wars online, and while they all share certain elements, they’re all pretty bad.

The development of Star Wars the movie grew organically with storyboard and production art, characters and incidents changing and evolving along the way.

It’s long been rumored that a more skilled writer than Lucas came in to do the final draft; one thing’s for sure, the shooting script is head and shoulders above the earlier drafts.

Star Wars the original Han-shoots-first-dammit theatrical release is very much a product of the 1970s.

20th Century Fox thought they had a good enough kiddee matinee movie for summer release; they expected their big sci-fi blockbuster of the year to be Damnation Alley.

Instead, they hit a nerve and found themselves with a blockbuster on their hands.

Lucas did show one great example of foresight:  He trademarked all the names / characters / vehicles and held the licenses on them, not 20th Century Fox.

This gave him the war chest he needed to build the Lucasfilm empire.

And let’s give Lucas and his crew their due:  They added immeasurably to the technical art of film making, as well as making several entertaining films.

What Lucas did not fully envision was how to mold his Star Wars material into a coherent and thematically cohesive saga.

He started out with grandiose plans -- four trilogies with a standalone film connecting each for a total of 15 movies -- but that gradually got whittled down to 12, then 9.

After Star Wars Episode VI:  The Return Of The Jedi, Lucas put the Star Wars movie series on hold, waiting for film making technology to develop to the point where he could tell the stories the way he wanted to tell them.

Okay, fair enough.

But the problem is that while the film making technology improved, the technology of the Star Wars universe didn’t.

As I said, the original Star Wars is very much a 70s movie in taste / tone / style / sensibility.

While the designs look sufficiently sci-fi, they reflect robots and spacecraft designs of the 1970s -- in fact, even earlier in many cases.

That fit in with Lucas’ “used universe” look and the tag line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”

But compare the original Star Wars with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick spent a lot of time researching where technology was heading.

Long before visual displays and vector graphics became commonplace in real world aircraft, he showed them being used in the future.

The first example of what we refer to today as a computer tablet appeared in 2001 as a throwaway background detail.

Kubrick’s next film was A Clockwork Orange and he successfully predicted punk culture a decade ahead of reality (his only mistake being the assumption white, not black, would be the base color).

Star Wars Eps I - III take place a generation before the original Star Wars movie.

Star Wars Eps VII - IX take place a generation after.

Name a two generation span since the start of the industrial age that is not marked by radical technological change that produces an ensuing change in the social order.

Now I grant you, the Star Wars universe isn’t trying to tell that kind of story, but the story it is telling is static.

Characters in The Rise Of Skywalker talk about cloning as if it were A Really Big Deal.

Cloning today is cutting edge bio-tech, to be sure, but it’s already common place.

It’s as if the Star Wars characters were getting worked up over steam engines.

One can intercut scenes from the movies and, unless one is a familiar with each movie, it’s impossible to tell one film from another.

Lucas’ financial success enabled him to issue edicts re Star Wars (and other Lucasfilm projects) that undercut the strengths of his projects.

Lucas is a technological guru and a savvy businessman, but he really struggles to tell a story.

Frankly, I think he would have been a better film maker if he’d spent a decade or so making American Graffiti scale movies, not space operas and epic fantasies and adventure movies.

His decision to make the original Star Wars the fourth episode in his saga and going back to start his story with his villain was fatally flawed.

I grant following the Skywalker saga from Anakin to Luke to Rey could work if it started with Anakin.

But what he did was the equivalent of the James Bond movies jumping back in time to follow the pre-Bond career of Ernst Stavo Blofeld.

(And the Bond movies, at least up until the Daniel Craig era, are all standalone films insofar as one does not have to see any of the previous films to understand and enjoy the one being watched, nor does the sequence they’re viewed in matter.  And the Craig films were conceived from the beginning as having a coherent overall arc, so in that case they are the exception to the rule.)

The joyous whiz-bang space opera of the original Star Wars got bogged down in a lot of meaningless politics and talks of trade treaties, none of which explained why anyone would want to conquer the universe in order to rule it as a decrepit, diseased dictator in a dark hole.

Look at Hitler and Stalin and Castro and Mao and the Kim family in North Korea.

These guys enjoyed themselves (well, Hitler did until things went south for him).  They loved the attention and went around preening themselves in public.

The off screen Empire (and implied Emperor) of the original Star Wars served that film well:  It was a story about a tactical conflict, not a treatise on the philosophy of governance.

Lucas’ universe does not make sense even in its own context.

And because of that, it becomes harder and harder to fully engage with it.

A sci-fi movie doesn’t have to explain everything, but it has to at least imply there is an underlying order that links up.

Lucas began subverting his own universe almost immediately.

The Force was originally presented as a spiritual discipline that any sufficiently dedicated intelligent being could gain access to.  (Robots seem to be specifically excluded from The Force, implying it needs a biological connection.  But that would seem to exclude intelligences that may not be organic in the commonly accepted sense of the word, which means such beings cannot appear in the Star Wars universe, which means…well, I digress…)

That was a big hunk of the original Star Wars’ appeal, the thought that literally anybody could become a Jedi if they so desired.

It speaks to a religious bent in audiences from many different cultures around the world, and it offers up an egalitarian hope that allows everyone access to the Star Wars fantasy (“fantasy” in this context meaning the shared ideal).

But already in Star Wars Episode V:  The Empire Strikes Back Lucas began betraying his original concept, sowing the seeds for self-serving deception and innate superiority as endemic in The Force.

By the time he got around to Star Wars Episode I:  The Phantom Menace, Lucas abandoned the hope established in the original Star Wars movie.

Now one has to be a special somebody, not just dedicated.

Mind you, that sort of story has its adherents, too.

Way back in the 1940s sci-fi fans were saying “Fans are slans” in order to claim superiority over “mundanes”.  Today many Harry Potter fans like to think of themselves as inherently superior to “Muggles”. 

It’s a very appealing idea, so appealing that the United States of America is based on it, the assumption being that white people are endowed with more blessings -- and therefore more rights -- than non-white people (add force multipliers such as “rich” / “male” / “Christian” / “straight” and you get to lord it over everybody).

Lucas with his stupid midichlorians robbed audiences of their healthy egalitarian fantasy and replaced it with a far more toxic elitism.

It appeals to the narcissistic stain in the human soul, and encourages dominance and bullying and cruelty and harm as a result.

It’s an elitism that requires a technologically and sociologically stagnant society, one where clones and robots and slaves can all co-exist and nobody points out they are all essentially the same thing.

A progressive society -- and here I use “progressive” strictly in a scientific and technological sense (though as stated above, advances in scientific fields invariably lead to changes elsewhere) -- does not let such conditions exist unchanged for generations.

As technology changes and improves, the culture/s around it change (and hopefully improve, too).

As I mentioned above, I’ve never seen Star Wars Episode III:  Revenge Of The Sith.

My reason for not seeing it?  Star Wars Episode II:  Attack Of The Clones.

Little Anakin Skywalker and his mom are slaves in The Phantom Menace.

He saves the Jedis’ and Princess Padame’s collective asses in that movie.

Okay, you’d think at the end of the movie that Padame would hand Qui-gon her ATM card and say, “Here, go back to Tatooine and bail the kid’s mom out.  He did a solid for us, it’s the least we can do for him.”

No, they leave her there because there is no desire to change the underlying social order of their universe.

There can be no changes in Lucas’ bleak, barren moral universe.

There can be no help, no hope, no improvement.

When an edict is issued -- be it Jedi council or Emperor (or president of Lucasfilm) -- it is to be obeyed without question or pause.

Daring to say one can change their status -- change their destiny -- results in tragedy (and ironically, proof that is their destiny).

It’s dismaying enough that a large number of people enjoy cosplaying Star Wars villains, especially storm troopers, as that seems to indicate they’re missing the whole point of why the rebels were striving against the Empire in the first place.

Originally that could be written off as (at best) just enjoying the cool costumes and props or (at worst) finding an excuse for bad behavior (i.e., “I vuz only followink orders”).

But Lucas’ tacitly endorsing a sense of innate superiority pretty much destroys everything about The Force that the original Star Wars audience found enlightening and ennobling.

The Star Wars universe has become at its core a very ugly thing, and The Rise Of Skywalker doesn’t really clean it up.

SPOILERS ahead.

=3= 

Seriously, SPOILERS follow.

Holy crap, The Rise Of Skywalker is a damn mess.

Nice eye candy, but a mess.

It pretty much undoes everything good in the previous two episodes.

I’m glad it’s the “official” end of the original saga because now I never need to see another Star Wars movie ever again.

(Oh, I’ll keep my DVD of the original Star Wars and if I find Solo in a bargain bin somewhere I might pick that up, but as far as the rest of Star Wars goes, I am D.O.N.E.)

The series stopped making sense long ago, so I’m really in no mood to analyze why nothing links up or really works.

It’s full of absurd, stupid ideas, such as space barbarians galloping across the deck of a star destroyer on their space horsies.

The whole back and forth between among Palpatine / Kylo / Rey goes on for too long.  If hating somebody is bad because it sucks you over to the Dark Side, then why doesn’t somebody start building Terminators that can track down beings with midichlorians and kill them?  (They’ve got the technology to detect midichlorians, that’s canon.)

It’s not anywhere near a good movie.  It’s not as bad as George Lucas’ Star Wars Episodes I - III, but it’s clearly the worst of the last trilogy.

The scene where Rey gets off camera encouragement from all the dead Jedi?  It seemed awfully familiar to me, as if the writers were consciously or unconsciously channeling the John Wilkes Booth / Lee Harvey Oswald scene in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins where all the presidential assassins and would-be assassins past and future encourage him to plug Kennedy.

Not what I want in a Star Wars movie.

I think we may be seeing the end of Star Wars.  It’s been crammed down our throats for too long.  I’m aware of The Mandalorian series and how insanely popular it is, but y’know, sooner or later every pop culture craze dies out.

Star Wars has nowhere to go.  Star Trek is hemmed in, too, but nowhere nearly as bad as Star Wars.

We’re about to enter a generational shift in America, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a badly dated 1970s sci-fi concept fails to make the cut.

It ends on a frustrating note, taking much too long to come to a close, far too much self-congratulatory bullshit, and the deliberate planting of clues for a future set of sequels should the Mouse start jonesin’ for that sweet, sweet Star Wars franchise money fix.

It’s a really bad script, and dragging Carrie Fisher’s digitally reanimated corpse into it and then killing her off by suicide is a damned stupid / offensive idea.

Mark Hamill’s ghost walking out of the flames of Jedi hell (thank you for that analogy, David Brin)?  Wow, who didn’t see that one marching down the avenue?

Harrison Ford coming back as a memory / hallucination to tell Kylo to do the right thing?  Skrue dat noiz.

(Though I have to say Kylo Ren is the best thing about the movie and his character turn parallels both Luke’s and Vader’s in The Return Of The Jedi only his is much more believable and poignant so dammit, Disney, you could have done a much better job with this movie than you did.)

The plot and pacing is straight out of a video game.  First do this, then do that, now ya gotta do another thing -- feh!

And unless I misheard the dialog, this whole film supposedly takes place over a span of sixteen hours!!! 

They visit a half dozen worlds, crash and repair spaceships, go undercover, get captured and escape, fight duels to the deal -- all in sixteen hours?!?!?

Yeesh.

And I’ll say this, the last line is wrong wrong WRONG.

If the Star Wars saga has taught us anything, it’s that Force users are a threat to everything.

They should be eliminated for the good of the universe.

Rey shouldn’t have buried the Skywalker lightsabers.

She should have destroyed them -- and the one she made, and any others she found lying around.

And when she’s asked at the very end what her name is, the answer should have been:  “Rey…just Rey.”

I know I put The Rise Of Skywalker in the not-so-good bin, but truth be told, that’s the nostalgia talking; it’s only an eyelash away from being bad.

The whole epic saga is a failure as far as I’m concerned.  One and done is the way to go; the moment it started making money as a toy franchise it went south.

© Buzz Dixon