Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!***

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and incoherent film that gets the most simple of storytelling basics wrong. A frustrating and irritating way to end the iconic Skywalker Saga.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, written and directed by J.J. Abrams, is the story of Jedi Warrior Rey as she leads the resistance against Kylo Ren and the First Order. Rise of Skywalker is not only the third film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy that began in 2015, but also the final film in the nine part Skywalker Saga that began all the way back in 1977. The film stars Daisy Ridley as Rey with supporting turns from John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fischer, Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams.

While I am not a Star Wars fanatic, I have seen all of the films and thoroughly enjoyed the first three when I was a kid, and even managed to like some of the Lucas helmed prequel trilogy. My feelings about the Star Wars films post-Disney 2012 takeover has been decidedly lukewarm at best.

What appealed to me about the first movies and even the prequels was the mythology and theology at the heart of the story. Lucas is well-known to be a disciple of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung’s ideology regarding myth and heroes, as am I. The Lucas controlled Star Wars universe had a mythological and religious underpinning to it that gave the rather flimsy characters and narrative arcs a profundity that elevated the material.

After Lucas sold Star Wars franchise to Disney, in 2012, the corporate behemoth unabashedly stripped the story of all its mythological and religious power and reduced it a a rather vapid, nostalgia-inducing money making machine devoid of spirit and a soul.

Disney failed to grasp why the Star Wars franchise was so successful in the first place. The franchise succeeded with audiences because its mythological and theological foundation resonated with people on both a conscious and unconscious level. The conscious level was all the cool stuff…like a lovable Bigfoot character, cool light sabers, a rockin’ villain and all of that. The unconscious level was all of the mythological stuff, like Luke’s hero journey, Han’s reluctant hero journey, and the Skywalker family dynamics.

What is so striking about Disney’s failure with Star Wars is that it only more greatly illuminates their success with Marvel. With the just concluded Marvel series of films, Disney stuck to the source material and all of the sacrifices that went with it, and the film’s flourished. I am assuming that a great deal of the credit for Marvel’s success lies with producer Kevin Feige, who navigated the treacherous franchise and corporate waters to successfully bring the Marvel ship to harbor with the ridiculously successful films Infinity War and Endgame.

The Rise of Skywalker’s failure…and it is a massive failure…only elevates Endgame and Feige’s accomplishment all the more. Rise of Skywalker is a perfect embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with the Star Wars franchise over the years, most notably since Mickey Mouse took the reigns.

The film is absolutely dramatically and narratively incoherent. The direction is listless and lazy, and the script is an outright abomination. The most basic fundamentals of storytelling are thrown out the window for this film which ends up being little more than a two hour and twenty minute commercial for itself.

It is difficult to discuss the problems of the film without talking spoilers, so I will add a spoiler section after my review, but suffice it to say that this is a dreadful film that denigrates the entire franchise and could very well scuttle the brand name for years to come.

As stated, the directing and writing are awful, so the cast don’t have much to work with. That said, they do not do much with what they are given.

I have been trying to figure out Daisy Ridley for three films now and I just can’t do it. I mean, I am sure she is a nice person, but she is so lacking in charisma and magnetism it is sort of shocking that she has the lead role in as billion dollar franchise. I will be astounded if Ridley has any success in her career outside of Star Wars as she seems to bring absolutely nothing to the table whatsoever.

To emphasize how charisma free Ridley is, one need look no further than Keri Russell, who plays Zori Bliss, a fringe criminal character in Rise of Skywalker. Russell never shows her face in her performance except to flash her eyes for a brief moment, but even with a mask and helmet covering her she has a palpable magnetism about her that is undeniable. The fact that even with her face covered the whole time she outshines Daisy Ridley is much more an indictment of Ridley than and endorsement of Russell, who is a fine actress but not exactly Meryl Streep.

The men of Rise of Skywalker fare no better. John Boyega consistently underwhelms as Finn, a character so thinly developed he’s nearly transparent. Oscar Isaac proves that he is officially definitely not a good actor once again with his flaccid Poe, which is a second rate Han Solo, which makes Isaac a third rate Harrison Ford. Yikes.

Adam Driver plays bad guy Kylo Ren. Driver is another great mystery of life. For some reason I cannot quite grasp, Driver has become the “it” guy in Hollywood. People think he is amazing. I do not think he is amazing. In fact, I think he is an actively shitty actor. The Driver adoration reminds me of another quirky, weird looking actor who everyone in the late 80’s and 90’s thought was astonishing but who I always thought was a poseur and clown. That actor was Nicholas Cage. Cage won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and everyone thought I was proven wrong…but I was playing the long game…and in the end cinema history has proven me right about Cage and I think I’ll be proven right about Driver too.

As for the action and all of that…I found none of it compelling in the least. The action sequences seemed derivative and contrived and like the storytelling, painfully boring and redundant.

Obviously, I found Rise of Skywalker to be a frustrating and irritating mess and major disappointment. There is no reason, even for huge Star Wars fans, to ever see this movie as it doesn’t wrap up the Skywalker Saga so much as to cancel it due to lack of interest. Of course, most everyone will go see it because Disney controls the universe, but if you do go see it realize that you will never think of it again after the leaving the theatre. Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, was so bad it made me desperately want to commit light saber supukku while watching it. Seeing J.J. Abrams and Mickey Mouse take a dump on George Lucas’s creative vision simply is not entertaining in the least.

SPOILERS!!

Out of narrative incompetence and an impotent attempt at fan service, Rise of Skywalker does away with death. I know that sounds weird but it is true. The movie opens with the signature scroll to get us up to date on the happenings in Star Wars world and it tells us that for some reason Emperor Palpatine, who was supposed to have died in Return of the Jedi, is back and is the main plot point in Rise of Skywalker.

Palpatine’s resurrection is absurd, but the film continues this theme throughout. Chewbacca is killed right before our eyes…and then in the very next scene, there he is alive and well. C3PO goes through a similar “death” when his memory is wiped clean but then miraculously his memory is restored by R2D2.

The whole gang, Rey, Poe, Finn and company get sucked under into quicksand…which usually results in death but for them it results in falling into a cave that hides the exact thing for which they are looking. (The physics of quicksand that sucks people in but empties them out into a cave is dubious at best, but that is the least of the logic issues in this movie)

Luke died in The Last Jedi but his “force ghost” shows up in Rise of Skywalker and he isn’t just placidly looking on from the heavens, he is actively helping Rey by grabbing light sabers and raising x-wing fighters out of the ocean.

Han Solo died in The Force Awakens but his ghost/presence also makes an appearance in Rise of Skywalker to chat with Kylo Ren.

Carrie Fischer actually did die during the making of The Last Jedi, but she is resurrected by editors with some terrible scenes deservedly left on the cutting room floor a few years ago. Fischer was a terrible actress when alive…dead she fares considerably worse. In Rise of Skywalker Leia does die…but then she too returns as force ghost to wink and nod her approval.

Ben/Kylo is thrown into a crevasse and could have died but not surprisingly he doesn’t die either.

And finally, Rey dies too…but only for a few seconds. And then she wakes up and kisses Ben/Kylo Ren…and all is well…until Ben drops dead for some reason.

Here is the basic problem…when death does not exist, then neither does drama. Death, be it in the movies or in real life, raises the stakes of everything it goes near. If there is no death then there is no life. If there is no death there is no drama. By raising Palpatine, Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy and C3Po from the dead, Rise of Skywalker removes all stakes from the movie and thus everything is reduced to simple play acting. Nothing matters at all. Death does not exist and therefore the world the film exists in is fraudluent as the characters are never in peril and are always and every time safe. When Rey dies at the end it means nothing because death doesn’t exist…and same with Ben/Kylo.

Contrast this with Avengers Endgame…Iron Man fucking dies in that movie. Iron Man…the heart and soul of the franchise…drops dead. Yes…the deaths in Infinity War were reversed…but Endgame didn’t just say, “hey, just kidding”, they went about unraveling those deaths and atoning for them…and part of the penance for bringing those characters back was killing Iron Man and getting rid of Captain America. Iron Man and Captain America are payment for the narrative twist of reversing the deaths in Infinity War.

In Rise of Skywalker…they literally do not give a shit as they never earn Palpatine’s return..which opens the movie. Nor do they earn Chewie’s fake death, or C3PO’s, or Luke’s, or Leia’s or Han’s or Rey’s.

Anyway…the bottom line is that Rise of Skywalker makes such egregious errors in its storytelling that it is simply stunning. For the franchise to do this in this “last chapter” is a cinematic crime of epic proportions.

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