Review: Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker
While there will be spoilers for Episodes 7 and 8, I’ll do my best not to spoil this but since a lot of what I disliked about this will spoil it, I apologise if anything slips.
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Since Disney brought in a sequel trilogy to the Star Wars saga the public’s opinion has been mixed, personally I’ve loved what’s been added to the series, Force Awakens was a ton of fun and Last Jedi was amazingly bold in its choices. So I was excited to see where they finished up in Rise Of Skywalker, I knew the backlash to Last Jedi would force them to retcon some story choices but having seen what they’ve changed in order to round out this series and this saga, I can’t help but fear they’ve skimmed by on the seat of their ass and they’re lack of planning has blown up in their face.
The story is the biggest issue and torpedo’s the whole trilogy with ambitious but questionable decisions. It’s been a year since the last film, the rebellion have evaded capture from the First Order with General Leia Organa setting up a spy network to keep on top of their movements. Kylo Ren, now working as Supreme Leader after slicing Snoke in half, receives word that Emperor Palpatine is alive and hiding on the Sith homeworld of Exegol, amassing an immense army called The Final Order which he will give to Kylo Ren after he has killed Rey.
Realising that Palpatine and his army will spell doom for the entire Galaxy, Rey uses the Jedi texts to pick up Luke’s search for Exegol, teaming up with Finn, Poe, Chewie and C3PO to search for clues towards the hidden system. But with a residual force connection still causing Rey and Kylo to see, talk and now feel each other across systems, Rey questions if her inner thoughts are as good as she thinks they are.
For the first third of so, this is a good entry into the Saga, small issues here and there but it’s got an end-goal and a fun way of getting to it. But it doesn’t last, the point where the film turns on itself can be pin-pointed to one reveal about half-way through regarding Rey’s heritage (something I fucking prayed was put to bed with the great Last Jedi reveal that her backstory wasn’t important to her using the Force). And from there the film never recovers; the moment you realise that the film is dredging up the exact same story that Return Of The Jedi finished 30 years ago for no reason other than they had literally no idea what else to do you can’t enjoy it the same way. I forgave Force Awakens for copying New Hope as a way of reintroducing us to old characters in a new setting but this is just uninspired retreading.
Maybe it’s Disney’s fault for not working out a proper storyline for all three films, maybe it’s Abrams fault for not being able to look passed the original trilogy, maybe Rian Johnson’s fault for taking away too so much by looking forward that Abrams had no choice but to look backwards. Whoever’s fault it was, the fact remains that even with a finale that on the surface is a lot of fun, there’s no weight to the actions, nothing feels like it matters anymore and it’s a limp-wristed final act to a 30 year Saga that through it’s ups and downs deserved better.
As flawed as the story is, the rest of the film actually works quite well, the acting is mostly strong with a couple of the main players doing great work. Some of the supporting cast feel a little wasted, for as bad a reception Rose got in Last Jedi it’s a shame that she’s basically sidelined here and her relationship with Finn essentially forgotten. Bigger names like Dominic Monaghan and Keri Russell join the Saga in limited capacity, Monaghan is barely given a name and often disappears into the background, Russell has a little more to do as Poe’s old comrade Zorri Bliss but she seems relegated to flirting with Poe and little else.
Granted there’s decent chemistry between her and Poe but it never goes anywhere.
After 4 years of new movies, the forth musketeer Lando finally returns in the form of Billy Dee Williams, he doesn’t factor heavily into the film but his return is welcome and Williams still has charisma to spare, finding his groove as Lando almost instantly and acting as a voice of hope as the final member of the old guard left standing.
Carrie Fisher does also return as Leia through the use of archive footage following her passing a few years ago. It’s not perfect, you can tell that they’ve worked the script around what she’s already said and it can be a little awkward at times but the fact that they’ve managed to include her in the film at all and give her a dignified finale to her arc is one of the stronger elements of the film.
On the heroes side, John Boyega gets a little shafted as Finn, across all the whole trilogy he’s never really been able to find a voice for himself, often acting in a reactive role to what’s going on around him rather than actively changing things. After his run from the First Order and his near self-sacrifice you’d think that he’d be a more important character to the Rebellion and to Boyega’s credit he has enough charisma to keep Finn at the forefront, but for a vast majority of this film all he does is run after Rey and being told that he shouldn’t run after Rey.
Oscar Isaac does solid work as Poe, finally delving a little more into him as a character, between his outfit and his improvising mannerisms he’s carrying more than a little of Nathan Drake about him but it works, adding a layer of dirt to the Rebellion’s clean-cut pilot through his history with Zorri. He still has a strong love for the Rebels and takes a position as one of the acting leaders during the final battle, having learnt from his mistake of Last Jedi and recognising the need for leadership in times of crisis, it’s easily the best Isaac has been as Poe and makes me sad that it took them this long to reach that.
Daisy Ridley as Rey is a difficult one to talk about, on the one hand she is (through the writing, not through her as a character) at the heart of my biggest problems with the film, but on the other the way she works within those problems is well-handled for the character. Rey is still flirting with the dark side and questioning a lot about herself, frightened by how easy it is for her to tap into that side of her, even without trying to. As much as I dislike what they did with Rey, Ridley still does a great job with the character, bringing the appropriate amount of fear, anger and hate that comes from what happens to her, she pushes away her friends through a combination of not wanting to hurt them and not wanting them anywhere near her, across the film she uses empathy, violence, regret and pride and even though the film does her wrong, Ridley holds Rey together and keeps her as one of the film’s best aspects.
Likewise, Adam Driver delivers a great performance as Kylo Ren, but I think the film isn’t sure what to do with him, the duality between Kylo Ren and Ben Solo still exists and as Kylo keeps committing horrendous atrocities, Ben just wants to return to the last family he has left. But where the film falls flat is there’s too much of a distance between the two sides, Kylo is genocidal and Ben is self-less, Force Awakens showed the dichotomy better and even Last Jedi had moments where you could tell that Kylo wasn’t the dark-lord he saw himself as but here it’s too clean cut which makes elements of his character feel undercooked. But like Ridley, Driver carries the material he’s given and acts the hell out of both sides, more so Kylo than Ben, but Ben gets his moments to shine in the finale.
An interesting new element that Abrams introduces is a lingering Force connection between Rey and Kylo that allows them to not only converse, but also see, feel and interact with each other’s environments up to and including fighting – for example, when Rey is inside on a starship and Kylo is outside on a planet, when they fight and knock over a jar of beads on Kylo’s side, the beads spill onto Rey’s floor as well. It’s something that I think the film should’ve utilised more, especially when it comes to the lightsabre battles because so many new doors were opened but using it to connect the characters (often against their wills) and the way it moved the plot along was unique and I liked its inclusion.
The other villains aren’t given much to do, General Hux finally gets something of a character arc but is promptly forgotten about, Richard E Grant joins the cast as General Pryde who seems to have some back history with Palpatine that’s never expanded upon, Grant sneers with the best of them but this is a pretty thankless role. Speaking of, Ian McDiarmid returns to the franchise as Emperor Palpatine once more, still has campy fun as ever but definitely lacking as this film’s main villain, maybe it was the fact that Snoke died earlier than expected that made Disney retcon Palpatine into being the puppet master behind it all (and why there was no hints of him leading into this film) but the Emperor enters this film from the first line of the opening crawl and never justifies his existence through the entire runtime, he’s there and doing evil things because that’s what he does.
And before anyone says ‘Well that’s just what Snoke was doing’, Snoke wasn’t a character, he was a chess piece to move Kylo Ren into position as Supreme Leader, The Emperor is an established Star Wars character and to bring him back for no reason other than ‘we had no-one else to be the big baddie’ is weaksauce.
As much as I’m ragging on the writing, as a director Abrams still does a lot of great work, the Sith Planet of Exegol is as dark and dreary as you’d expect the home of the Dark Side to be, the desert planet of Pasaana keeps things light and fun to start off with as the heroes are chased on speeders by The First Order using jet-packs, it’s a small but exciting first action scene that has some good humour to it with the ways Rey, Finn and BB-8 take out the storm-troopers. New planet Kijimi was an interesting place, Poe’s old training grounds filled with back-alley dealings and shady characters, it was a place I’d hoped to see more of, even just to take the edge off the rest of the film.
Things start getting darker once the remains of The Death Star are found, with Rey facing some ugly history and culminating in a fight with Kylo across broken metal and immense, stormy waves, it’s a wild fight and one that carries more emotional weight behind it than you’d expect, especially with how it ends. Sadly that weight can’t carry itself into the finale on Exegol with the face-off against The Emperor severely lacking, unlike the original trilogy fight between Vader and Luke which had been sown since Obi-Wan’s death and built upon with the Father reveal or the Prequel fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin which we all knew was coming and understood the friendship between the two when it did, there’s no history here, there’s no build-up, the little animosity they try to build between Rey and Palpatine is bullshit because it comes from nothing and hasn’t had any time to build into anything, it’s such a disappointing finale for not only the trilogy but the Saga as a whole.
That’s not to say that the final act is a complete waste, in fact everything away from The Emperor is some of the film’s best moments with Poe leading an assault on The Final Order which allows Abrams to absolutely nail the hopelessness of fighting a superior force. It is relentless how viciously the Rebellion are massacred, but it means that when hope does come, it comes in a big way and you can’t help but smile at the sight. Call it fan-service but between that and one moment with Rey calling on Jedi spirits I definitely felt myself warming to the film with those scenes and made me wish that Abrams did more like that, using the old to enhance the new, rather than dredging up the bottom of the barrel to repeat with a new polish.
Rise Of Skywalkers reminds me a lot of the final season of Game Of Thrones, the acting is great, Isaac, Ridley and Driver all do fantastic work with Rey and Kylo especially being able to rise above the film’s level and Abrams’ direction still bringing new worlds to the Star Wars lore amongst fun set-piece, good humour and really dark and grim situations. But it’s all let down by the writing which just feels like its grasping at straws and not even good ones at that, there’s a way to make this film work with where the sequel trilogy has taken it but they fucked it up by not having any plan on what to do with the whole thing and making it up as they went along.
I’ve been debating whether to give Rise Of Skywalker a 6 or a 7, because I am heavily disappointed by it, especially after I loved Force Awakens and Last Jedi, but it’s not a bad film and there’s still enough good work surrounding the writing to at least make the meat of the film stand up, even if the bones are a bit flimsy. In any case this trilogy should be a cautionary tale not only for Disney, but for everyone, to tackle 3 films as 1 project, not focus on 1 separate film 3 different times.
7/10 but do take that with a little bit of bias.