Thanks to social isolation I’ve gotten around to watching Rise of Skywalker. Look, I'll apologize in advance but I'm that guy. I like to hate on the sequel trilogy. This is an immutable fact that seems to have been sewn into my DNA since I first walked out of the Force Awakens. No offense to those who love it. No offense to those who made it. But, if you don't want to read a surprisingly long rant written by a middle aged man gleefully bashing a movie you enjoyed, please, for both of our sakes, just don't read this post. It's. . . Not something I'm proud of and it's not something you need to subject yourself to.
Still here? Good. Eff this movie. You name it, the Rise of Skywalker does it wrong. Deus ex machina, contrived, video gamey fetch quests, bland characters with no arcs, bland characters who exist to deliver exposition, main characters who exist just to deliver exposition, plot hole, after plot hole, after plot hole. . . But worst of all, there is nothing original or creative about this at all. For all of the convoluted, incoherent nonsense, it’s still just a story about someone killing the Emperor and a bad guy redeeming himself. Except they don’t even know how to do a redemption arc properly.
Let’s just start at the beginning. The Emperor’s back.
Stop.
Six movies have been made about the rise and fall of Emperor Palpatine. He fell down a reactor and was vaporized by the reactor and the thing that reactor was in exploded. The fact that they don’t really explain why he’s back notwithstanding, maybe don’t just bring back the ultimate evil force in the galaxy. Don’t undo the whole plot of the six original movies. Come up with a new threat or just don’t make the movie, how’s that? Or, if they are completely incapable of coming up with one, single original thing in three movies, the very least they could have done is set up his return in Force Awakens instead of dropping him on us at the last minute. But no, he’s back, no explanation. Deal with it!
Moving on. . . The story is that the good guys need to find the Dagger of Destiny so they can find the Triangle of Truth so they can find the Emperor and kill him. The only problem is that the Emperor wants Rey to find him and kill him because somehow if she does that, his spirit will take over her body. But, Palpatine has never heard of reverse psychology so he flat out tells her this. So Rey is basically like, “If I kill you, you’ll possess my body? Okay, I won’t kill you then.”
Smart choice, Rey.
And then she kills him.
Lucky for Rey, I guess the Force is a stickler for semantics because apparently Rey killing Palpatine with his own lightning doesn’t count as Rey killing Palpatine. Forget the fact that leading up to that point he has a fleet of planet destroying ships, now the Emperor’s lightning can now destroy all of the starships in the entire universe! That’s really stupid. Stupider still? Rey can just deflect it! She needs two lightsabers to do it, but she manages. So for the second time in 9 movies the emperor melts his face off with his own Force Lightning. Sheev, if you could stop melting your face off with your own lightning that would be great.
And where does that leave us? Right back where we started. We’re back at the end of Return of the Jedi. The Emperor is dead! We did it! Again! But what if there’s another clone? Maybe there’s an evil Vader clone? Maybe there’s an entire Palpatine Clone army? Nothing matters at this point if you can just undo the consequences of an entire trilogy of movies. This is why the sequels break Star Wars. They establish a universe where there are no consequences, there’s nothing that can’t be undone. So you stop caring about anything.
I could easily go scene by scene and describe how there’s barely one that works. I’ll just pick a few though. Let me start with the infamous, “They can fly now?” scene. It’s a terrible line that’s gotta make you cringe. And as everyone has pointed out already, there is no shortage of jetpacks in the Star Wars galaxy. But fine, putting that aside, the whole sequence plays out like a Looney Tunes cartoon on acid, escalating with the most ludicrous pacing I have ever seen in a movie. Let’s rewind a bit.
- Kylo Ren literally reaches out across the galaxy (????) and grabs Rey’s necklace from around her neck, a necklace she had just been given 7 seconds earlier. A few more seconds and his team has analyzed it and knows what planet it’s from. Cut IMMEDIATELY, to a stormtrooper who pulls a gun on the heroes before Lando appears out of nowhere and shoots said stormtrooper in the eye with an arrow. This happens in the space of like 3 minutes and culminates with exposition. Lando explains something about the Triangle of Truth and how he and Luke were looking for it and eventually they gave up.
- Then stormtroopers with jet packs chase after the heroes. Cartoonish explosions abound, most notably, the skiff that our heroes are on explodes, sending them flying into quicksand, which inexplicably levitates over a cave. In the cave they find the Knife of Knowledge that they somehow know will help them on their quest. Rey also gets to show off a new Force power: healing space snakes!
And that’s it. The movie is already broken beyond repair. Our heroes can’t get hurt, the laws of physics, space and time are completely meaningless. I’m not talking about Force powers here, I’m talking about simple cause and effect! The heros’ vehicle explodes and they’re thrown through the sky, carried by a fireball. They sink in quicksand and none of it matters. They’re not hurt, they’re not at risk, it doesn’t change them and the next scene just arbitrarily happens. When something happens in Rise of Skywalker, it’s almost as if nothing happened at all. Or rather, it’s like anything could have happened because there is no logical flow from one plot point to the next. Jetpack chase->explosions ->quicksand ->random knife -> space snake ->force healing ->chewie captured etc, etc, etc…
But think about that space snake for a second. Here was an opportunity to make an actual scene. There should have been a scene where they fight the snake and in fighting this scary monster Rey injures it. She could realize it’s afraid of them and then she heals it after learning a lesson about not being a violent psycho. This ties into the theme they were so pitifully trying to set up which is that Rey is afraid of her powers and afraid she might turn evil. Instead, this snake shows up out of nowhere, stares at them for twenty seconds and then Rey heals a wound it had, presumably for years.
Back to the theme about Rey being afraid that she’ll turn evil. There’s two scenes leading up to that. 1) While she’s training she chops down a tree and it falls on BB-8 and damages him. 2)
Wait… Let’s talk about 2. There’s a scene where they’re repairing a space ship. It plays out like this.
Poe: “Finn, come over here and help me play with these props.”
Finn: “Chewie, go tell Rey to stop putzing around in the desert, staring at nothing!”
Chewie walks out into the desert. Cut to Rey destroying Kylo Ren’s TIE fighter. Cut to Chewie in handcuffs (all of a sudden!) and being flown off in a transport. Cut to Rey trying to use the Force to pull the ship Chewie’s on back to the ground. Cut to Kylo Ren walking away from the flaming wreckage of his ship (completely unscathed, of course). There’s a comical Force tug of war where Rey and Kylo fight over the ship that Chewie is supposedly in. Then suddenly Rey accidentally shoots lightning from her hands and the ship explodes.
What the actual f**k????
From this we’re supposed to understand that Rey is afraid of turning evil. But, there’s nothing evil about what she’s doing. She’s just a clumsy moron. I guess impaling Kylo Ren is kind of evil but she heals him right away. It’s example 177 of how this movie shameless lifts themes and plot points from the original trilogy, only to completely miss the point and produce something meaningless and idiotic. Luke had a moral dilemma. The evil warlord of the trilogy who he had been told murdered by his father, actually was his father. How do you beat him? By redeeming him. Rey’s reveal which clearly was a last minute decision, is that she’s the daughter of one of Palpatine’s clones. At no point does she seem conflicted about killing the Emperor (who is an evil clone of the Emperor?) She is however, bafflingly, conflicted about killing Kylo Ren who is just as evil.
Back to Chewie, 5 minutes after Rey kills him it’s revealed that Chewie is actually still alive! There were two ships and Finn just… I don’t know. Stopped paying attention? And even though both Finn and Rey can sense when they’ll need a knife for their fetch quest, or when other characters are alive in the movie, somehow when Chewie blew up their Force sense didn’t kick in.
Every scene is like this. Every. Single. One. We’re presented with some absurd premise, the premise is ignored and we’re awkwardly forced into the next plot point. Example: C3P0 needs to have his memory erased so that he can tell the protagonists what was written on the magic Knife. But he also says in that very scene that R2D2 has a copy of his memory on a hard drive somewhere. Okay so, the idea that he needs a factory reset to speak the knowledge in his brain is already stupid and makes no sense. The fact that there is no consequence to him having his memory wiped neuters what little story there was left in that already idiotic plot point. Why is it in the movie?
Another example. Poe meets Felicity. Felicity is like, “I”m going to kill you!” Two seconds later Rey pulls out her lightsaber. Felicity says: “I like you. Here’s a magical coin that can get you onto any imperial ship in the galaxy.” Wait… what??? Ooops, we’re onto the next plot point!
They find the location of the Triangle of Truth, rescue Chewie, Poe gets shot, Kylo Ren fights Rey, blablablabla. Suddenly they’re on a new planet. The trianble of truth is on the wreckage of the Death Star for some reason out in the middle of an ocean. I was infuriated when the reveal is that the serrations in the knife are the same shape as the jagged wreckage of the Death Star. That is layer upon layer upon layer of stupid. But, we’re not done! A new character with a potentially interesting background says, “You can’t go out there! The water is too rough!” Rey just goes anyway. Finn follows. No consequences. Was the water rough or wasn’t it? Nothing happens! Again!
But the worst sin of the movie, nay, of the entire trilogy. Rey impales Kylo Ren with a lightsaber. Then she heals him. Kylo Ren has a hallucination of Han Solo and suddenly he’s redeemed.
I was so naive. I thought at some point this trilogy would tell me WHY IS KYLO REN WAS SO EVIL IN THE FIRST PLACE????? And don’t tell me we didn’t know why Vader was evil either. We didn’t know anything about Vader. Kylo Ren is Han and Leia’s son. And for some reason this entire trilogy is about how he’s so evil, he’ll just murder his father. And that’s bad enough, but his redemption is one million times dumber than his turn to the dark side. It just happens. I mean… Leia dies suddenly. Is it her Force magic that redeems him? I don’t know. And I’ve seen people argue again and again that Kylo Ren is a complex character. He isn’t. Stop saying that he is. He has no motivations, no background and they don’t resolve his arc at all. Adam Driver is a good actor but Kylo Ren is a trash character.
Here’s another nerd argument for the ages and I’ve chosen my side. The prequels are better than these shitty movies. Remember Palpatine’s plan to use the war to gain political leverage to take over the galaxy? Well, now his plan is to put a Death Star laser canon on thousands of Star Destroyers and shoot the good guy ships with Force lightning. Soooooo much Force Lightning! I guess he’ll rule over the space debris.
Just one thing. The Star Destroyers can blow up planets but they can’t navigate out of the atmosphere. Kind of important, no? You give each ship a planet destroying canon but they all have to share one navigation system? A navigation system that when destroyed strands the entire fleet?
Me: “I invented a car that has guns on it! It can blow up entire buildings!”
Some guy: “Where are the wheels?”
Me:
Leading to more nonsense where the good guys have to blow up a tower with space horses to…..
UUUUUUHHHHHHGGGGGGG!!!!!
Let’s talk about Finn for a second. Potentially the best, if not the only, character in the entire trilogy. A reformed stormtrooper! Wow! They do nothing with it for 3 movies. Fine. I’m over it. But here’s Finn’s role in this movie. “Wow, Poe, how did you do that? Rey, what’s wrong? We have to find a thing. How do we find the thing? Where’s the thing? They can fly now? I have a feeling we have to do a thing.”
I like how they half-assed a little conflict between him and Poe toward the end of the second act because you have to. The writers seem to understand that much. But the conflict is stupid. Poe very reasonably points out that Rey just went out into dangerous waters and will probably die. And Finn is like, “Yeah, but… Don’t criticize her! How will we get to the next plot point?” And ten minutes later they’re friends again. Careful Abrams/Terrio. You almost had conflict in your movie!
The movie really feels the weight of all of the characters on screen. Rise of Skywalker spends so much time over compensating for fan complaints that they make baffling decisions. We all wanted to see the characters in the Last Jedi interact more. Why wouldn’t we? It’s supposed to be a movie. The main characters should interact! So in this movie, they take all of the characters and put them on the Falcon. Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewie, 3P0, BB8 and hair dryer droid. And they’re all just there. They deliver these shitty lines that are supposed to convince us that they’re friends. It’s awkward, it’s annoying and it’s two movies too late!
This movie could have easily been just Rey. Don’t get me wrong they do find stuff for the characters to do. Chewie just gets captured. 3P0 literally says he’s useless every other scene. BB8 is… there. Which is sad, because there’s a wonderful moment at the beginning of the movie where Poe is fretting over the fact that Rey damaged BB8. Oscar Isaac is such a good actor he made me love that little moment. I also loved the moment where Poe, Finn and Chewie are playing chess. I really like these actors. JJ Abrams is a veteran film maker. Everyone involved is better than this and I can’t figure out what happened to this trilogy.
Doesn’t stop them from sniffing their own farts, though. They visit a festival and C-3P0 says the festival only happens once very 42 years. Oh wow! That’s how old A New Hope is! And I guess this festival is a celebration of the conclusion of that story that started all of those years before. Except it doesn’t feel like a celebration but more like a funeral. The universe that almost felt so real 42 years ago, hey even 20 years ago is a hollow grave of bad ideas or old ideas that used to be great but make no sense in this new contrived context.
And as a grim finale, Rey goes back to Luke’s old home. Why? Well, to bury his old lightsaber and the one that belonged to Princess Leia of course. (By the way, Leia is a Jedi too, now). Why would Rey bury a lightsaber at all? Why would she go back to Tatooine to bury it? Leia never lived on Tatooine. Anyway, she buries them and then it is revealed that Rey, at long last, made her own lightsaber out of the staff she had been carrying around for 3 movies. I guess it’s a symbol that she’s grown into her own, she doesn’t need to exist in the shadow of what happened before her. So someone asks her what her name is and she just lies. “My name is Rey Skywalker.”
Why? How? What is that supposed to mean? Leia trained her, not Luke and Leia has never gone by the name Skywalker. I daresay the Skywalker legacy is more bad than good.
Old lady: “Skywalker? You mean the evil warlord who killed all those kids in the Jedi temple years ago? And who killed thousands of people since then?”
Rey: “No! Not him! Luke Skywalker! The Skywalker who trolled me for a few days before I got trained by Leia Organa!”
I guess she didn't want people to think she was the granddaughter of Sheev Palpatine, an evil warlord responsible for the death of millions. So she pretends she's the granddaughter of Anakin Skywalker, an evil warlord responsible for the death of millions. Smart!
Look, any answer would have been better than, “My last name is the name you know from all the other movies!” I’d have preferred if she said: “Just Rey.” And what a slap in the face to her parents who literally died to save her life!
People, stop making excuses for these shitty, non-movies. This thing I watched is insulting by any standard and listening to people defend it is mind-boggling. Can we at least agree that a movie should make sense in the context of its own mythology, rules that they conjure ad-hoc every ten minutes? No? Well, then, there are no more standards and there is no point to movie criticism anymore. Michael Bay? The Transformers movies were genius! Justice League? Amazing super-hero movie! Ignore the haters! Twilight Saga? Work of art! Because if Rise of Skywalker isn’t a bad movie, nothing is.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy was a hot mess from the word go but each movie got worse and worse until you’re left with this. Incoherent, illogical, no stakes, no characters, no themes, no plot. It’s non-sequitirs chained together in sequence with occasional nods to a movie franchise called Star Wars. Sorry to everyone involved in this. They’re better than this and I suspect this trilogy is an example of corporate meddling. They know its bad and at least half of the fans do too.
3 Triangles of Destiny out of 10. I hate this “movie”. A lot. I bumped it up to a 3 because at least there's some hilarious things to talk about here.
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