Cowardly & Desperate: 'The Rise Of Skywalker' Ends 'Star Wars' On A Dud Note

WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead, so be cautious... and may be the Force be with you.

There’s fan service, there’s shameless fan service, then there’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. The final film in this latest trilogy —and thirteenth-ish in the expanded franchise — is a grab bag of references, run backs, and callbacks to the other films of the Star Wars-verse.

Its own narrative is messy, muddled, nonsensical, lacking in any real clarity or motivation. We’re set on a race-against-the-clock from the start, but the persistent pace just makes it all feel rushed, and, worse, that nothing really matters. As we hurry here and there, there’s no moment where real tension gathers, or real gravity starts to set in. The action sequences are incoherent, often feeling like demo reels for video games. The cutting is restless, disorienting; in the era of the ambitious tracking shot, I can’t recall a single shot in The Rise Of Skywalker being held for more than a few seconds. And there’s certainly not a memorable sustained sequence anywhere in its 135 minutes.

The dialogue — penned by director JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, the latter coming off penning genuine pieces-of-shit Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice and Justice League — is either rote exposition, simple instruction, generic turn of phrase, or just deeply stupid. Seriously, there’s not an interesting spoken line in the whole thing (one of my least favourite tropes is a character’s name being yelled out when they’ve just been wounded or are in danger; here, the cries of “Poe!” and “Rey!” are plentiful). Arriving on the back of The Mandalorian — Disney’s spaghetti Western-aping Star Wars TV series — makes this all seem worse; instead of being one thing, this is a movie trying to be all things to all people.

The fact that The Rise Of Skywalker fails, completely, to be a coherent, singular story is seemingly of little concern to Abrams, and, moreso, to the spooked Disney suits burnt by the failure of 2018’s Solo. After pleasing fans — and healing the George Lucas-administered wounds of the prequels — with 2015’s The Force Awakens, Abrams returns to Star Wars like a band coming back out for an encore, ready to play the old hits. Though, if we want to take this analogy to its logical conclusion, Abrams is more like a cover band, playing someone else’s old hits.

As announced in its slanted introductory crawl, and then confirmed in the first scene, Emperor Palpatine, the OG big bad of those first three movies, is back. “The dead speak!” pronounces that bizarrely shaped text, with the death of this wizened old wretch 36 years and eight (or so) movies ago apparently being greatly exaggerated (which means that Darth Vader’s heroic crisis-of-conscience act of sacrifice at the end of Return Of The Jedi actually, um, meant nothing much). The Big Palp has apparently been hiding out on some off the grid planet with the Stonecutter Sith for decades, chanting mystical mumbo jumbo and building a fleet of warships so big as to wipe out the whole galaxy, or control it, or something.

In short: rather than the antagonist continuing to be the morally conflicted Kylo Ren — a great character brilliantly played, when given the chance, by Adam Driver — we’re instead served up a generic-as-all-fuck villain, saying evil things in his evil voice and cackling that no one can stop him. Which means, in turn, that we’re watching a tale of black and white morality, unclouded by any complexity. And when it’s good vs evil, there’s not much suspense in who is going to come out on top.

After Abrams essentially re-wrote A New Hope with The Force Awakens, now he’s raiding Return Of The Jedi for ideas, spare parts, villains, and Lando Calrissian. Oh, and fucking ewoks. Daisy Ridley, the hero of this new trilogy, is the one pulling the narrative along, but, then, near the end, her quest is suddenly reduced to revivalism, too: her character undertaking an elaborate act of Luke Skywalker cosplay.

And if you think ol’ Palperz is the only character brought back from the dead, hold onto your collectible Episode IX cup. Befitting a series whose initial trilogy ended with Jedi ghosts chilling in the sky, death clearly doesn’t have much sway in a galaxy far, far away.

Anyone you feared lost is wheeled back out to say hi, whether by ghostly cameo or spectral, creepy CGI-ification. Here, every face is familiar, in a fan-sating fashion that feels meek and craven. Or, to borrow a Baby Yoda-lovin’ sentiment from Werner Herzog: cowardly.

This shameless acquiescence and desperate desire to be liked symbolises The Rise Of Skywalker’s great, singular flaw. After mobilised alt-right trolls fomented their online outrage over Rian Johnson daring to kill the past in 2017’s The Last Jedi — essentially staging a textbook worthy exemplar of toxic masculinity in the guise of fan entitlement — this film is an obvious apology, a desperate attempt to placate people petrified by a franchise being shaken from its ossified state. Here, there’s nothing to worry about, because there’s nothing even remotely challenging. In fact The Rise Of Skywalker seems like it’s out to be completely and utterly non-threatening.

But the great horror of this undertaking isn’t how safe it is, how it’s taken a giant CTRL-Z to The Last Jedi’s attempt to distance itself from the past. It’s not even the gormless fashion with which Abrams has chosen to embrace the past; effectively doubling down on it, blindly lionising anything associated with the original three films (seriously: ewoks). It’s that, beyond this mimickry, The Rise Of Skywalker has nothing new to say. Or anything to say at all, really.

★1/2