Star Wars Saturdays: "The Rise of Skywalker" scrapes below the bottom of the barrel
Genuinely one of the worst movies ever made, full stop
On Saturdays, we’re going through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We conclude today with the worst film in this or any other franchise, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. Enjoy…
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
2019, Dir. J.J. Abrams
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2019 and excerpts from a 2020 essay
At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker lays down his lightsaber. It is a radical act of pacifism, one which finally turns his father Darth Vader back to the light, allowing for the defeat of Emperor Palpatine and the long-prophesied balancing of the Force. For the first time in thousands of years, the standard-bearer of the Jedi Order is not a hypocrite, choosing to live up to the highest ideals of the Jedi at the ultimate moment of challenge, rather than compromise them for immediate gain. And for the first time in centuries of scheming, Darth Sidious is presented with a situation he cannot predict, and therefore cannot manipulate, because Skywalker has done something that goes again his understanding of his enemies’ flaws. Thusly are the Sith defeated, because a Jedi chooses to let go of tradition and do what he knows in his heart is right.
At the climax of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey picks up a second lightsaber. Struggling against her grandfather Palpatine – miraculously revived without on-screen explanation – she hears the voices of all the Jedi throughout the franchise, stressing the importance of their legacy and how it has been entrusted to her. “Every Jedi who ever lived, lives in you,” says the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn. Emboldened, she fights back against Grandpa’s Force lightning, first with one lightsaber. “I am all the Sith!” sneers her Space Granddad, seemingly getting the upper hand. “And I…am all the Jedi!” Rey retorts, summoning a second lightsaber with the Force, crossing the two blades in front of her, and using their power to do exactly what her wicked grandpappy wanted her to do all along (and what Luke Skywalker once avoided by tossing his blade aside). She forces his lightning back upon him and strikes the Emperor down in fury. Imbued with legacy and history, trusted to keep a tradition alive, Rey does exactly what Gramps wanted, because she is told she is special, that the Jedi are a perfect goal to which one aspires, that lightsabers are cool and righteous, and that believing in all these things hard enough, rather than questioning what one is taught and trying to grow beyond it, is the ultimate path to victory.
Perhaps no moment in the blockbuster cinema of the 2010s is more emblematic of American mass media’s fixation on nostalgia, not just as a tool for commerce or as a fun wink and nod, but as a way tentpole films coddle their fanbase by reassuring the audience that their lifelong obsessions are not only valid, but of paramount importance. These films render viewers not merely consumers, but children, children in need of reassurance and affirmation, living in a space where fantasy reigns supreme. Like Peter Pan and the lost boys, they never have to grow up, are able to claim any figure one wants as our parents and guardians, never responsible for having to face or claim a larger or more complicated reality. Rey’s identity is never significantly challenged, and she is ultimately able to self-actualize on the exact fantasy path she, as the stand-in for Star Wars fanboys and fangirls the world over, might imagine in her dreams: Claim every major character from the classic films as her Space Parents, and then, at the end, adopt their identity as hers and conflate the two as a permanent piece of her final, ‘resolved’ self-image. Want and need never have to be rectified, because in the end, her want is her need: She saves the day by embracing the Jedi lineage and grabbing extra lightsabers for maximum power. And when that is done, she joins want and need together seamlessly by declaring herself ‘Rey Skywalker’ in front of Luke’s boyhood homestead on Tatooine.
This moment, where a random passerby demands to know Rey’s full first and last name as if they are filling out a Galactic Census, has been roundly and deservingly mocked on the internet since the film’s release, perhaps most famously in this tweet posted December 22nd, 2019 by Chris Evangelista of Slash Film:
In a reply, Evangelista noted that “this is no less stupid than the actual ending,” and he is absolutely right. If Rey represents fan desire to go on their own Star Wars adventure, then what better way to end her journey than by having her adopt the last name synonymous with the franchise and literally make herself part of the family she always longed for?
The Rise of Skywalker is, in every way, rancid. It is perhaps one of the five worst movies I have ever paid to see in a theater, absolute bottom-of-the-barrel Hollywood dreck sitting on the lowest shelf next to Suicide Squad or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It is an almost impossibly bad movie, squandering an outstanding cast and near-bottomless resources on a flagrantly unfinished script that is structurally nightmarish, obsessively pandering, and filled to the brim with detestably terrible ideas. To top it all off, the entire thing is grossly homophobic, in ways that betray an obvious contempt for large swaths of its audience.
The first hour in particular is just an ungodly mess, with a much-too-brief, 10-minute-or-so first act, and then the most whiplash-inducing death march of a MacGuffin quest imaginable. The film leaps and lurches awkwardly from location to location, mission to mission, never stopping to breathe; it feels like a bunch of video game cutscenes, the beginnings and ends of scenes with everything in the middle carved out. It is all starts and stops.
For an idea of how structurally broken the film is, consider this: The original Star Wars from 1977 has three major locations: Tatooine, the Death Star, and Yavin. All of the George Lucas-led sequels and prequels kept things similarly pared down, and very much to their benefit; even Revenge of the Sith, which feels like the most sprawling of Lucas’ entries, is actually limited to just four major locations (Coruscant, Kashyyyk, Utapau, and Mustafar). The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are a little less clean in their location-based structuring, but basically understand this principle too. The first eight ‘episodes’ each feature between 3 and 5 major locations at most.
The Rise of Skywalker, on the other hand, has Passanna, Endor, Exegol, Kijimi, the First Order’s Star Destroyer, the rebel base on Ajan Kloss, the Millennium Falcon, Anch-to, and more. And the viewer definitely feels the rapidity with which the movie introduces and abandons settings, none of them – save those recycled from previous films – coming to feel anywhere near as lived in or vivid as prior Star Wars locations. It is no coincidence that the most competent stretch of the film by far is the third act on Exegol, which, while still terrible and bad and stupid, is at least the one time the movie picks a location and sticks to it, letting a visual language and an overall sense of atmosphere develop amidst the surroundings.
The story is, of course, utter nonsense at every turn. We are told and shown over and over again that the First Order is ‘everywhere,’ its violent arms pervasively reaching every corner of the galaxy. But the central plot – the thing our heroes are trying to stop – is Palpatine wanting to give the First Order a bunch of new ships he seemingly conjured out of thin air so they can be more everywhere and have an even bigger empire. The film even gives our heroes a sixteen-hour time limit at the beginning before this plan will come to fruition, and then literally never mentions that ticking clock again; it can’t, given that the distances the characters are travelling, zig-zagging back and forth across space, would make that time limit impossible. Kylo Ren is both antagonist and deuteragonist here, the co-lead with Rey, but I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in his head for most of the film, his motivations for the first half left 100% unclear while Adam Driver is hidden behind the dumb mask for way too long, and after his ‘return to the light’ moment with the ghost of Han Solo, he doesn’t get even a single line of dialogue for the rest of the run-time.
It’s all gibberish – A script scrambled together from barely-formed idea scribbled on napkins, edited haphazardly into a final product that both looks very expensive and feels like it’s being barely held together by scotch tape and glue sticks. And it cannot be overstated how deeply derivative the movie is. In the absence of originality or coherence, nearly every scene is in some way a callback to the Original Trilogy; those few that aren’t are ripping off, at turns: The Matrix Revolutions, Harry Potter, Mobile Suit Gundam (ZZ in particular) and Pokémon the First Movie, from which the film borrows its emotional climax; all of these, Pokémon included, are works of art with infinitely more value than anything The Rise of Skywalker has to offer.
What I hate most about this film, by far, is its grotesque heteronormativity. To be clear, I don’t think any of us really expected Disney, of all companies, to let Oscar Isaac’s Poe and John Boyega’s Finn be gay lovers in canonical on-screen material. But there is a difference between not going all the way with the obvious extension of your male co-leads’ searing chemistry, and aggressively shutting off every door to that chemistry even existing, let alone being paid off. The Rise of Skywalker does the latter, going full ‘No Homo’ with the characters; they are much more hostile and competitive towards each other, constantly needling one another and avoiding physical contact like men in a Michael Bay film. It’s gross, and it’s all incredibly obvious, like if there was a fourth Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam always stood two feet apart, mocked each other endlessly, and would only touch hands after rolling their eyes.
Then the film forces all three leads – Finn, Poe, and Rey – into contrived heterosexual romances, not because there are good stories to be told with these relationships – two of which involve new characters clumsily introduced for this sole purpose – but just to make sure everyone is shoved into a heteronormative box before the trilogy is over. If they had to do it with Finn, Rian Johnson had at least teed them up here with Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose in The Last Jedi – but The Rise of Skywalker sidelines her immediately, and never gives her another significant moment with Finn. It is probably not a coincidence that she is the trilogy’s only major character of Asian descent – miscegenation is off limits too.
During the closing celebrations, there is a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where two unnamed female characters kiss in the background of a shot. In the lead-up to the film’s release, Abrams hyped this up as the film’s moment of ‘gay representation.’ In truth, it is the film’s final spiteful insult to its queer viewers. “NO, the characters you all want to be gay HAVE to be straight, but you can have ONE kiss in the background between unnamed characters.”
There is a world in which The Rise of Skywalker never explicitly let Finn and Poe be ‘together,’ but basically maintained the dynamic from the last two films and let fans continue to imagine the two were queer. Instead, the film forces a canonical shut-down of that dynamic, actively making itself worse – giving itself additional characters and subplots it cannot support, while erasing a chemistry between lead actors fans responded glowingly to in the last two entries – in the name of heteronormativity. It is the ‘drained-pool politics’ of Hollywood homophobia: We will burn this film to the ground before we allow for the mere possibility of gay leading men.
There are a lot of possibilities The Rise of Skywalker exists for the sole purpose of negating, of course. Its core reason for being is to close the doors Rian Johnson opened in The Last Jedi, to take anything surprising, compelling, or challenging Johnson suggested in that film and either retcon, roll back, or shit all over it. This is most obvious with Rey herself, who must be made to have magical, special space blood, even if it involves the horrible narrative contrivances of bringing back Palpatine and making him her Granddad, but it speaks to so much more than just her character. If The Last Jedi did nothing else right, it at least told us, in so many ways, that The Force is, can, and should be for everyone. The Rise of Skywalker tells us, through just as many means, that The Force is exclusive, that it is for two people at most at any given time, and that their blood must be special, and that destiny and prophecy is real and unchangeable, and that the promised heroes must be white, and that absolutely no one gets to be gay. This is a film that hates its audience, detests its characters, and resents the franchise it is a part of, to the extent that it would limit its imagination to the narrowest point possible before giving an inch to anyone who might ever want Star Wars to be anything more than what a white, straight child saw in it 40-some years ago. I hate this movie, and I hate every terrible impulse that animates it.
We also devoted an entire episode to THE RISE OF SKYWALKER on The Weekly Stuff Podcast when the film first came out, so here is that episode again for posterity’s sake:
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