Movie Review: "Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker" (Spoiler Alert)
Yet, for some reason, I was in no rush to own a version of episode nine, "The Rise of Skywalker." Rather, I was very much content to wait until episode nine was available through Disney+ before I watched it again.
This is not to say that I think episode nine is the worst in the series. That honor goes to episode eight, "The Last Jedi." It's just that I was in the hospital for an extended time recovering from surgery when "The Last Jedi" was released, and the fastest way for me to watch the movie was to purchase the online digital version. If you could return a movie to get a refund, believe me, I'd want my money back.
Which brings me to the main point of this review. J.J. Abrams deserves some credit. I found "The Force Awakens" to be an engaging and fun movie. It had its flaws. It raised a few perplexing questions. But, at the tie of its release,we had every reason to hope that some of those questions, such as the origin of Snoke and the First Order, would be answered in the sequels. I mean, Disney went into this venture knowing they were going to film a new trilogy. Surely they had a plan or at least an outline of where they wanted to go, right? Right?
Well, no. Once Abrams did a decent job setting up things for a compelling sequel, Rian Johnson came along, and ruined everything. He took the Star Wars universe in a completely different direction, ruining the characterization of the saga's main hero, and presented an incomprehensible pile of garbage for "The Last Jedi."
And that's why I believe J.J. Abrams deserves some credit. When he returned to the Star Wars saga, he first had to undo all of the crap that Johnson had done. He had to undo Rey's disappointing back story. He had to find a new head villain, since the main villain had been killed off by Johnson. He had to fix the disappointing character arc of the main hero, Luke Skywalker. And then he had to resolve an entirely new plot, all in one movie. It was a monumental task.
This is not to say that Abrams was successful in this endeavor. After I saw "The Rise of Skywalker" in the theater, I complained that I felt like I watched two different movies. The first part of the movie I felt moved way too fast. It was as if Abrams was ticking off the boxes in addressing all the points in Rian Johnson's movie that needed to be undone. Once he had accomplished much of that goal, then the movie felt more like a Star Wars movie. Only, Abrams then exhibited his oft-criticized lazy writing.
Let's begin with the corrections Abrams made to Johnson's garbage. Many people have criticized the reappearance of Emperor Palpatine as the main villain, claiming it was as if the first two movies were pointless, since Palpatine was the guy pulling the strings all along.
But Abrams was painted into a corner. He had built up Snoke as the villain, who was not a Sith, and left questions about his background and rise to power that were to be answered in following movies. Then Johnson summarily killed him off, without even acknowledging those questions. What was going to drive the conflict now? How was Kylo Ren supposed to redeem himself?
Reviving Emperor Palpatine provided a convenient solution to that problem. Now we had an evil protagonist that Rey and Kylo Ren could work against. That conflict could redeem Ren.
Palpatine also gave Abrams a convenient way to resolve the questions about Snoke. Now Snoke was a mere clone, who served as a puppet for Palpatine. The First Order was all part of larger plot orchestrated by Palpatine to return to power.
The problem, however, is that by bringing Palpatine back, Abrams cheapened the original trilogy. The victory over the Emperor was merely an illusion. While the rest of the galaxy moved on, and created a new republic, the Emperor was in the background making more star destroyers and gathering more followers by the thousands. The adventures of Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie were all for naught.
Using Palpatine as the behind the scenes villain also raises a plausibility question. How exactly could he gather thousands of supporters, who apparently had nothing better to do but sit in an arena waiting for Palpatine to spring his trap, as well as build these thousands of star destroyers with the personnel needed to operate them, all without anyone noticing. The way Abrams resurrected Palpatine was just not plausible.
Next, Arbams had to address Rey's training as a Jedi. Johnson had killed off Luke Skywalker, and in the process ruined his prior characterization as the hero of the galaxy. Luke is the same hero who never gave up on his father who had turned to the dark side, despite his teachers' insistence that this was impossible. Yet, when his nephew Kylo Ren turned to the dark side, he just gave up, and became a jaded hermit.
At any rate, Abrams had to establish some kind of training, to fend off accusations that Rey was a "Mary Sue." The only other option Abrams had was to turn to Leia. Unfortunately, the way Abrams implemented this took away from the earlier characterization of Leia. In "The Force Awakens," we learn that Leia concentrated on politics, which put her in position to lead the Resistance when the First Order became a threat to galactic democracy. If she had developed her Force ability, while she was leading a paramilitary operation would have been a convenient time to use it. We had no indication that she had (well, not until the now infamous "Mary Poppins" moment from "The Last Jedi"). Rather, she left it to Luke to train her Force sensitive son. Somehow, while concentrating her efforts on rebuilding a republic out of the chaos that resulted from toppling the Empire, Leia also had time to train as a Jedi. Moreover, she had advanced far enough to become a competent teacher. Again, Abrams chose a course that was implausible.
Abrams also had to quickly rewrite Rey's backstory, correcting Johnon's insistence that her parents were nobodies. Now she was Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter. It certainly raised the question of whether this was what Abrams had planned all along. This, in and of itself, was not a bad choice. But it did create another eye rolling moment where a line from a previous movie now seemingly became a lie that required more retconning.
Abrams also came back to a theme he had started in "The Force Awakens." That theme is what exactly the "awakening" that Snoke and Ren both felt. A key piece of evidence was that Snoke's line regarding the "awakening" took place before Rey had her introduction to her own Force powers. Between "The Force Awakens" and "The Last Jedi," there had been discussion that this awakening had been the moment Finn decided he had a moral problem with being a stormtrooper. That is, there was a hint that Finn was somewhat Force sensitive.
"The Rise of Skywalker" confirmed this. Finn now met a group of former stormtroopers, led by Jannah, who all felt this awakening around the same time. We also saw a few instances where Finn could sense things that happened to Rey, despite being light years away.
There were a few amusing moments when Abrams broke the fourth wall, and clearly criticized the direction Johnson had taken. When Rey runs away from the battle, and tries to destroy any way that she would have to find Exegol and defeat the Emperor, she tries to throw Anakin's lightsaber into the fire (And yes, I get pretty annoyed every time someone refers to this as Luke's lightsaber. Luke made his own lightsaber. It was green. This blue lightsaber was Anakin's.). Luke appears as a force ghost, catches the lightsaber and tells us that a Jedi's weapon deserves more respect. This was a direct criticism of Johnson's plot device of having Luke toss the lightsaber away at the beginning of "The Last Jedi," and undoing all of the character development of Luke as paragon hero who redeemed defeated an evil empire and redeemed his father who had turned to the dark side. Abrams was clearly telling the audience that Johnson had failed to respect the original Star Wars trilogy.
In another veiled critique of Johnson, Luke, as a Force ghost, lifted his x-wing fighter out of the ocean to allow Rey a way back to the battle. When he does, Luke smiles to the audience, as if to acknowledge, we're back on track. Star Wars was once again a story about good versus evil, and not the incomprehensible story line Johnson had created.
Another breaking of the fourth wall moment came when Maz Kanata gave Chewie Han's medal. This was meant to correct two problems of which the fans complained. The first was the failure of Leia to give Chewie a medal along with Luke and Han at the end of "Star Wars." The second was the way Leia ignored Chewie when he returned from Starkiller Base, right after Chewie witnessed the murder of a person both he and Leia loved, Han.
But Abrams engaged in more lazy writing to resolve the plot. This should not be surprising. He did the exact same thing in "The Force Awakens."
Many had rightfully criticized "The Force Awakens" as merely a retread of the original "Star Wars." A droid traveled through a wilderness possessing information that both sides in a grander conflict wanted. The villains possessed a super weapon, capable of destroying an entire planet. Only, in "The Force Awakens," this super weapon was now capable of destroying an entire solar system. A small group of resistance fighters need to figure out how to destroy the weapon. But, where the information on how to destroy the Death Star was the MacGuffin that drove the plot in "Star Wars," in "The Force Awakens," the way to destroy Starkiller Base basically came from nowhere. Having conveniently created the rule that destroying an oscillator, whatever that is, would destroy the weapon, Starkiller Base just conveniently had an oscillator. Instead of taking the time to develop the idea that the protagonists needed to discover a way to defeat this new super weapon, the Resistance just figured out a way to do it late in the plot, and five minutes later, the Resistance fleet did it. Lazy.
This laziness bled into "The Rise of Skywalker." Having created a new overwhelming threat in the form of thousands of star destroyers with planet killing weapons, there had to be a way to defeat them. Surely, it couldn't be a ship to ship battle, that would take too long, and we only had one movie left in the trilogy. So, just before the battle of Exegol, we're given a brand new rule: star destroyers need a signal from some kind of transmission tower in order to get the coordinates they need. Now, the key to destroying thousands of dangerous star destroyers has been boiled down to blowing up one thing: the navigation tower. OK, it was made a little more difficult when Allegiant General Pryde transferred the tower's functions to his control ship. But yet again, lazy writing. No one knew this was even possible until Abrams needed a tiny twist to create more drama.
Which leads us to another question. Just who is Allegiant General Pryde? In the first two films of this trilogy, we were only ever introduced to General Hux. We were left with the clear impression that Hux was the young general that Snoke had chosen to lead his entire army. Now, again conveniently, we find out that the First Order had an entirely new structure of leadership, to which no one was privy before "The Rise of Skywalker," that allowed Abrams to throw in the tiresome trope that someone from the bad guys had become a spy, and was now feeding information to our heroes. Ans that turncoat was, conveniently, the only surviving villain the audience had any connection to, General Hux.
And then we had those new Force abilities. Force healing was introduced for the first time. This was an interesting time to introduce such a powerful new ability. It could have come in quite handy for the Jedi during the Clone Wars. At any rate, once this ability was introduced, it was used in a compelling fashion in "The Mandalorian." At least Abrams set up the successful Disney+ series.
But then there is the strange way Rey and Kylo Ren were able to talk to each other and even battle as if they were in the same room, even though they were light years away from each other. If that weren't bad enough, now a Force user could grab something either on the other Force users immediate person or relatively close to him or her. Twice, Kylo Ren used this Force ability to figure out where Rey was. Rey was later able to use this ability, conveniently, to help Ren defeat the Knights of Ren, when he had chucked his own lightsaber.
These conversations and battles from star systems away -- suddenly, not only can you have a battle, even though you are lightyears away. Not only that, you can grb stuff from around the other person. Another convenient way to help Kylo Ren, who has no lightsaber, to defeat the Knights of Ren. Conveniently, she had two since Force ghost Luke just so happened to have kept Leia's old lightsaber.
And what exactly is a dyad in the Force? I never heard this term before. Now, it was a convenient way to build drama by restoring the walking corpse Emperor to a full bodied Emperor, who can now freely use Force lightening without hindrance.
One new aspect of the Force revealed in this movie actually worked out well, and helped explain the Rule of Two. That was the idea that all former Sith lords get reincarnated in the new Sith lord, after he or she has murdered the old Sith lord. Remember, in "The Phantom Menance," we were introduced to the Rule of Two. There are only ever two Sith at the same time, a master and an apprentice. Sooner or later, the apprentice becomes power enough to murder the master, and become the new master. Now, it became understandable why the Sith master tolerated this rule, since they all survived by sharing the body of the new Sith master. Otherwise, I can't see why a Sith lord would voluntarily choose to train an apprentice.
But then Abram continued with one of George Lucas' most annoying habits. That is, introducing a compelling new villian, only to kill him off before he actually does anything. Boba Fett was introduced after a huge promotional campaign between "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back," when he was offered as an action figure sent to children for free who collected the right amount of proof of purchase seals. He even made a guest appearance in the Star Wars holiday special in 1978, the only redeeming part of that endeavor. Well, besides the introduction of Lumpy.
Lucas did it again before "The Phantom Menace." This tie with the introduction of Darth Maul. He was featured in the release of toys before the movie premiered. There were Darth Maul toys available from restaurants like Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. He was beautifully designed. The perfect use of red and black, those horns on his head, all made him marvelously terrifying. And then he had, what, twelve minutes of screen time? Only to be summarily cut in two by a Padawan. A Padawan.
Yeah, I know "The Clone Wars" fixed all of that. But your average casual Star Wars fan only watched the movies.
At any rate, Abrams introduced us to the idea of the Knights of Ren in "The Force Awakens." They only had one mention and a few seconds of screen time. But then, they were shown in the opening of "The Rise of Skywalker." And Kylo Ren had to defeat them near the end of the movie. There was only one problem. They still had only a few moments of screen time with no real explanations. Who were they? Where did they come from? What was their purpose? Were they part of the First Order? Or were they something separate? Now we'll never know.
I did like the return of Lando Calrissian. Here was 80 year old Billy Dee Williams, sporting a wig. And he's still a lady's man. At the end of the movie, he flirts it up with new character, Jannah, the attractive, young former stormtrooper we thought could have been a love interest for Finn (who obviously still has a thing for Rey). Now Lando's charmed his way into helping her find out more about her past. "Colt 45. Works every time."
I also liked ending the saga at the moisture farm on Tatooine. Although, why Rey chose to adopt the Skywalker surname was inexplicable and insulting to the fan base.
For nostalgia sage, it was satisfying to see so many people who had roles in the Star Wars films given a final cameo. I understood Dennis Lawson, the actor who played Wedge in the first trilogy, turned down the opportunity to reprise Wedge in all of the final trilogy. But it was nice to see him in the final battle. Likewise, composer John Williams had a nice cameo. That was heart-warming.
I have a habit of dropping everything, and watching the original trilogy every time its on TV, even though I own online versions of them. I do the same thing for "Rogue One." In fact, I like to play the last fifteen minutes of "Rogue One" and seamlessly blend it into the beginning of "Star Wars." I just don't see myself doing the same thing with the final trilogy.
The video version of this critique can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DM6jI30hmkM
Look for the Dantooine Free Press on Twitter (@DantooineP), Instagram and YouTube!
References
"Enric Pryde," Wookieepedia.
Overly Sarcastic Productions, "Trope Talk: Sequels," YouTube Video (May 1, 2020).
"Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker," Internet Movie Database.
"Star Wars: Expidoe IX The Rise of Skywalker," Wookieepedia.
Comments
Post a Comment