Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker - Disaster Incoming

I actually read all of that Flame, and the most amazing part of it all to me is how you ever had faith that Disney wouldn't ruin it. Disney doesn't have anything it doesn't ruin, and there's very little worthwhile from Disney in the first place in my opinion. I try my best to avoid all things Disney. So Star Wars being bought out by The Disney corporation might as well have meant that it was dead and buried to me because I knew I'd never spend a minute of my life on any of their attempts at Star Wars films.

I dodged a bullet and have to work tonight so I don’t need to watch this shit show.

Ok the Rise of Skywalker. Not really sure how to start this one, but here we go.

I didn't go into this movie wanting to hate it, I really didn't. I was prepared to hate it. I had seen the leaks was sure it was a trash-fire in the making & I'm not even saying that it isn't one, but it's still Star Wars. I still want to love Star Wars even now, so even though I wanted the people responsible in the movie to go down in flames there was part of me that wanted this movie to redeem the franchise so I could go back to feeling good about Star Wars again. And much like that matter my feelings on the Rise of Skywalker are mixed. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a complete disaster, it's in no way a great film. I don't know if it's going to redeem anything, but I didn't walk out of the theater despising it with every fiber of my being I'll give it that much.

I'll start with the good things & yes there are some good things. It felt like I was watching an actual Star Wars movie again which was missing from the last one. The Last Jedi is a very cynical mean-spirited interpretation of Star Wars, this movie just felt like Star Wars so that's a plus. John Williams music is still really beautiful, the acting is generally pretty good. The characters were acting like themselves again so they were back in character for the most part, that was another thing missing from The Last Jedi.

There's been a passage of time in-between movies so the characters have matured and they benefit from that a lot. Rose Tico still exists unfortunately, but frankly her role in this is so small she might as well not exist. She has a few lines, but she's not there long enough to be irritating. The Knights of Ren finally make an appearance, we never really learn what their deal is, who they are or where the hell they've been for the last 2 movies, but at least they show up and do something. They offer up a brief explanation of who the hell Snoke was, it was very brief, but it was better than nothing I guess.

They didn't go out of their way to piss on the legacy characters that are still alive. The respected Lando, they respected Chewie & 3P0 I was not upset with what was done with them. They took a moment to acknowledge Han, storywise the way it happened made absolutely no sense, but emotionally the actors made it work. Luke actually felt like Luke this time, the real Luke which was nice. There's no undoing what The Last Jedi did to him, but there was a sense of the film makers feeling apologetic about that, there's one moment in particular where you can tell the writers were like 'look we know this really should have happened in the last movie under different circumstances & we can't change that, but we can give to you now & hopefully there's no hard feelings' not sure where I stand under the no hard feelings part yet, but the moment did make me smile, even though it does create another big plot hole with the whole Force Ghost thing. The movie feels very apologetic about The Last Jedi in general. There is a big effort to distance this movie from that one as much as possible. They reference the events of The Last Jedi when they absolutely have to, but otherwise they're off on a whole new story here & that is just fine with me.

Then there's Leia. One of the big issues with this movie was how or even if they could cobble together some kind of respectful goodbye for Leia using only unused footage from the previous 2 films. I will say that while it is pretty obvious that while they were struggling to write new scenes around this footage I don't think they did that badly. Yeah the scenes are lacking for things and really needed to be expanded upon, but what do you want Carrie Fisher's dead, they only had so much to work with short of re-creating her with a CG double, but between the unused footage and a body double shown from behind a couple of times I think they just about got away with this. It's not a 100% satisfying goodbye for Leia, but I think it's at least a tasteful one. Yes they had to retcon her character into something else which I'm not happy about, but Rian Johnson left them with pretty much no choice so it's not like they had many options here.

So those were the good things about Rise of Skywalker. Now let's talk about the rest of it.

It has never been more apparent just how much and on every possible level Rian Johnson absolutely screwed this trilogy over with The Last Jedi. I would say that at least half of The Rise of Skywalker is spent with the writers desperately trying to weave around all the plot holes that movie created like their lives depend on it & that makes for an incredibly awkward narrative. For the first 45 minutes to an hour they are just pummeling you with exposition and new twist after new twist as they bend over backwards to set up a whole new foundation to base this movie on & it's rough as hell at the best of times. They have to introduce a ton of new concepts from out of nowhere the plot is all over place as the characters go to a location to find a mcguffin and then go to another location to do a thing and then go to another location to do a different thing all just so they get the story and characters from A to B. Yes, The Last Jedi made it that difficult for them. Fuck you forever Rian Johnson!

Also I totally believe all the stories about all the re-shoots because there's a very modular feeling to the story where a lot of these scenes could just have easily been switched around or swapped out with other things so my guess is there was a crazy amount of re-jiggering in the editing bay. I can't even imagine how many different cuts of this thing there were, but it definitely has the feeling of a script that went through countless re-writes because there are bits and pieces of different drafts littered throughout the entire thing. There's this new sub-plot about a spy in The First Order that comes right to hell out of nowhere and ends just as quickly. It was clearly only added in the first place to get the characters out of a corner they'd been written into because the writers had no other way to do it. Then brand new characters start showing up for no real reason even though that's the last thing this story had time for.

We meet a former love interest of Poe's who shows up for a few minutes does nothing then disappears, then comes back later and still does nothing. She must have been the part of some sub-plot that didn't make the final cut as it is you could remove her from the movie altogether and not lose a thing. Then we meet another new character Jannah and she does stuff, but not enough to justify creating a whole new character for it. Both these women seem like they were intended to give more layers to Poe & Finn in a previous draft of the script, but it all just feels very clumsy and tacked on at the last minute and neither character really amounts to anything. My guess is these characters were in JJ Abrams original plan for Episode VIII and were probably supposed to have more fleshed out roles before Rian Johnson happened, but who the hell even knows at this point. And a lot of the other character beats feel the same way.

There's this new dynamic where Rey & Poe bicker like a dysfunctional brother and sister, that's another one that just materializes out of thin air. And at first made me wonder like woah when did this become a thing. Where did this come from? And I had to remind myself nowhere. It literally came from nowhere because those characters interacted a total of 5 seconds for the last 2 movies combined and now the writers are grasping at straws to manufacture some kind of relationship between these 2 and between this trio that the audience was never privy to before and just pretending that it's been there the whole time. It feels very awkwardly shoehorned in & it was just a huge missed opportunity there. So that was another way The Last Jedi dug them into a hole they had to climb out of.

But the biggest problem by far was Snoke being dead because the ripple effect that causes absolutely cripples this movie creatively. It is painfully obvious that JJ Abrams intended Snoke to be the big bad when he made The Force Awakens. Snoke could've been revealed to be Darth Plagueis or something and it would've made sense, but then Rian Johnson killed him off so what the hell do we do now. Bringing back Palpatine was a last minute hail mary & it feels like it. So much of the movie is devoted to just setting up that 11th hour twist, so much of the movie hinges on the simple fact that Palpatine is alive without providing any kind of explanation whatsoever for how in god's name that's even possible, how this situation came about or how they can resolve it. And the end result is a climax that seems to have virtually no idea what the story is anymore.

How is Palpatine alive after he died in Return of the Jedi? No idea, they never tell us. Why doesn't Force Ghost Luke or Anakin or Yoda or Obi-Wan show up to blast Palpatine with lightning bolts or hurl debris at him with the Force because they can affect the physical environment now? Beats me, they just don't. Why the hell has Palpatine just been hiding out for nearly 40 years until the day came when he could magically pull this massive new fleet out of his ass? No one even bothers to ask. One minutes Palpatine is generating Force Lightning powerful enough to destroy entire ships the next Rey is blocking that same Force Lightning with just a lightsaber. Why is there such a crazy inconsistency in his power level? I have no idea there's no answers for that either.

The one thing they do make an effort to answer is who Rey is and where she came from & I honestly wish they hadn't. Because the revelation about that especially how it ties her to another character is so stupid, so implausible, so under-developed, so out of left field, so out of character to the person it ties her to & felt so much like bad fan fiction that I laughed out loud when they revealed it. There is not one single doubt in my mind that none of that, none of it, was planned when they made The Force Awakens, but then The Last Jedi happened and left the narrative fumbling around in the dark without a flashlight so they had to come up with a whole new ending for this thing that ties the entire series together & it's every bit as shoddy or haphazard as you can imagine.

And the final battle is pretty weak too, Rey just basically overpowers Palpatine and that's it, pretty much cementing Rey as one of the biggest most overpowered Mary Sue characters in the history of the cinema, there's no getting around that. And this is what they tarnished Return of the Jedi for. They took away Luke & Vader's greatest accomplishment, they took away Anakin's role as the one to bring balance to the Force, they took away everything Return of the Jedi meant and they gave it to Rey just so she could be the one to defeat Palpatine in a way that was frankly incredibly lame by comparison. I'm never going to be ok with this, but I've had months to get used to the idea. We all knew it was going to happen the second it was confirmed that Palpatine was back, so it's not like I didn't see it coming. That doesn't make it sting any less, but at least I was bracing myself for the gut punch this time.

So to wrap this whole thing up. Ultimately what we have with The Rise of Skywalker is half a movie that is desperately scrambling to pick up as many of the pieces as it can after The Last Jedi fiasco and the other half desperately scrambling to build something new out of what's left while at the same time trying to pacify the audience with as much crowd-pleasing nostalgia as they can shake a stick at. And admittedly it does try very hard with that last part & I will admit there are moments of greatness in this film that comes out of that. Seeing Lando & Chewie flying The Falcon that gave me a nice feeling, The Wedge cameo gave me a nice feeling, when the cavalry showed up at the final battle and Star Wars theme played that gave me a nice feeling, there's a scene with Chewie where he gets something that he's been due for a long time that gave me a nice feeling, the apology for what happened to Luke in Episode VIII that gave me a nice feeling. There are feel-good moments here, moments that had The Last Jedi not fundamentally fucked this trilogy in every conceivable way would've had the audience in my theater cheering and applauding, as it is no one made a peep, but the moments were not lost on me & after the movie was over those were the things that stuck with me the most.

Because despite the problems with the film and there are plenty of them, despite it having the impossible task of winning back the fans good will after Lucas Films spent the last several years driving them away. At least it felt like it was made by someone with good intentions who generally loves Star Wars. Now was that person creatively misguided in a lot of ways. Oh hell yeah. You can criticize the creative aspects of this thing until you're blue in the face & I would probably agree with most of it, but if nothing else I thought the love of Star Wars was evident on the screen, it was no where to be found in The Last Jedi, but it was back in The Rise of Skywalker & damn it that's something.

So those are my thoughts don't take this as a recommend I'm extremely mixed on the film which I suppose is a lot better that what I thought I'd feel about it. I'm sure many fans are going to absolutely hate this movie and I don't blame them at all, but personally I didn't quite get there.

The perversion of the Star Wars mythology and canon is still present. Luke & Anakin's story is forever tarnished, but taken on it's own it is a more enjoyable film then The Last Jedi. Maybe it's just because my expectations were so low, but at the end of the day I feel that it was a more positive experience then a negative one and I didn't regret watching it like I did that thing Rian Johnson made. The Rise of Skywalker wasn't nearly enough to dig this trilogy out of the hole it was in, hell it might have actually dug that hole deeper, but maybe it expunged a little bit of the poison left by The Last Jedi & I can be thankful for that.

What I am not thankful for is the absolute train wreck that Kathleen Kennedy & Lucas Film made of the Disney Trilogy and the Star Wars franchise overall. They had every possible opportunity to make something amazing handed to them on a silver platter. They had one of the most beloved IPs in fiction & pop-culture of all time, unlimited resources, the full backing of Disney, the original cast all still alive and ready to go, George Lucas' outline for the Sequel Trilogy which it might not have been good, but at least it would've been what the creator intended & this mess is what they produced. When it's all said and done this will go down as probably the most colossal blunder in the history of film. That's going to be your legacy Kathleen. What a disgrace.

So now that the Disney Trilogy is finally finished let's all take a step back and hope & pray that the next regime that takes over Lucas Film does a better job than this because they couldn't possibly do a worse one.

Thanks for the well worded review Flame. I’ll still watch it but I am disappointed with everything that I’ve heard.

Consider this a 24 hour warning. Tomorrow the spoilers are coming, if you wish to avoid them don't click on this after tomorrow as I'm going to spoil the fuck out of this movie.

When asked about future movies, K2 said they would focus on single movies and no more trilogies, Iger then corrected her, no more trilogies right now. So it appears that after she let this whole trilogy fall into a mess she's being reigned in, also with any luck no more trilogies right now will mean the Rian Johnson Trilogy will never see the light of day (why the hell you'd even give this hack his own trilogy of movies after he killed this trilogy dead I have no idea, hell this joke should be lucky to get a job directing an elementary school play, much less another Star Wars movie).

The speculation is that due to the positive fan feedback from The Mandalorian, that Jon Favreau is the most likely candidate to be put in charge of Lucas Films. Also the overseer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kevin Feige is also doing something and having already shown he can run one franchise (making the MCU the most profitable movie franchise ever) could be another candidate they could look to right the ship.