Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

It almost goes without saying that producer and Star Wars head Kathleen Kennedy, director J.J. Abrams, and the rest of Disney/Lucasfilm had their work cut out for them with The Rise of Skywalker.

Hell, they've had their work cut out for them with this entire trilogy. But Skywalker in particular has the complicated and terrifying task of not only continuing and expanding on the story of this much-beloved (and much-debated) franchise, but also concluding it in a satisfying way.

No, that doesn't mean there will be no more Star Wars; Disney CEO Bob Iger has even claimed that they will still be making franchise entries 50 years from now.

For now, however, the media giant is pushing the idea that this is, at the very least, the end of the 9-movie "Skywalker Saga," more widely recognized as the films that are ascribed the term "Episode" followed by a Roman numeral. Rise of Skywalker is Episode IX, and serves as the third and final entry in the third and final trilogy of said Saga.

Skywalker, then, has, essentially, two critical tasks to fulfill: firstly, to be a relatively entertaining blockbuster spectacle, as all of the others have been, regardless of artistic merit or quality; secondly, to be a satisfying conclusion to this trilogy and to the greater saga overall.

Its solution to the first task is mostly successful. Rise of Skywalker is mostly entertaining.

I have a hard time being as kind in regards to its answer to the second problem. In short, Rise of Skywalker is stimulating and entertaining more than it is satisfying or moving.

The film begins some time after the events of The Last Jedi, and from the outset, things are moving quickly. After perhaps the most expository Star Wars opening text crawl in franchise history, we find our familiar faces, Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) on the hunt for important information and artifacts in a scavenger hunt/race to beat the villainous Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his First Order army to unlocking his final and most terrifying secret weapon.

I'm being deliberately vague, as one is wont to do surrounding such massive pop-culture events, but the above synopsis pretty well sums up the first third or half of the film. It's the "fun adventure" portion before the emotions and doom-and-gloom melodrama of the latter portion of the film.

For the first time, really, Rey, Finn, and Poe are together as a trio, and we are expected to understand that they have bonded and become close since the events of The Last Jedi. What results is a lot of bickering and jabbing at one another, which is mostly fun until it's grating. Admittedly, it's nice to see them all together, but one can't help but feel reminded of the "told, not shown" approach that the prequel films employed in an attempt to convince us that Anakin and Obi-Wan were best friends, despite their seeming never to get along. As such, the more tender moments of sentiment, while performed with conviction by the film's leads, never feel particularly earned. I'd have rather seen them become (or at least act like) friends throughout the early portions of the film.

There's plenty of fun to be had in these first-act adventures, however. Skywalker takes us to a handful of new, vibrantly designed (and gorgeously shot) locales, and puts the characters in never-quite-before-seen scenarios through which they have to navigate. It's Star Wars-y fun in the way that almost every film has begun. New creatures, tech, and Force powers are put on display in intriguing, and even, at times, exhilarating ways.

But the film's aggressive pace never ceases; it's not just the early, MacGuffin-y portions that fly by. Skywalker hits the ground running and literally never stops. I don't feel any sense of hyperbole in saying that almost every single moment — be it comic relief, cathartic action, or emotional character progression — feels too short and/or not as impactful as it ought to. There's simply so much plot packed into this film. Thematically significant conversations, like one character paying a visit to teach another an important lesson, in classic Star Wars fashion, are reduced to a couple of lines back and forth, with hardly an extra second spared for the performances.

On a related note, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker is woefully underused here. I am fully aware and appreciative of the significant and emotionally gratifying role he played in The Last Jedi, and the limitations on his character's – er, availability – as a result of the events of that film. But even still, Star Wars is no stranger to characters reaching from beyond the grave to lend a helping hand in some form or another, and Hamill's clearly retained (and evolved) talent in the role of Luke is a missed opportunity this time around.

The storytelling overall is a far cry from The Last Jedi's patient, lengthy sequences in which one character sits another down and challenges their understanding of what's going on around them. That film was especially clever about using such scenes to not only highlight the themes and interesting ideas that it was trying to explore, but to flesh out the characters and move them along in their well-constructed arcs. In Skywalker, there's a pervasive feeling of, "Okay, we checked that moment off the list. Next."

To put things rather bluntly, nobody really matters in this film besides Rey and Kylo. And I am glad those two get, for the most part, the material they need to reach a satisfying conclusion to their shared arc, which has served as the core of this trilogy. The film might be unwatchable had they not mostly landed that dynamic. How their individual paths are brought to a close is a tad more shaky and inconsistent, but their duality as principal figures on opposing sides of the Force is used and completed in natural and at least mildly interesting ways.

Poe and Finn are relegated to the sidelines, as far as the film's themes and emotional core go. Poe gets his biggest role yet, but it's all in the name of fun, rather than fulfillment. Finn is kind of just "Diet Poe" here, though he does get an intriguing-in-concept-if-not-in-execution comrade in the form of Naomi Ackie's Jannah. Poe and Finn both are mostly here to shoot things and complain — which, in fairness, they have always done, though sometimes with a little more going on under the hood.

The runtime feels like the ultimate issue here. Either some of the "fun" adventure stuff ought to have been cut to make room for the important stuff to be more properly expounded upon, or — more preferably — Disney/Lucasfilm/Abrams should have just committed to the two-and-a-half or three-hour mark and kept the fun stuff while letting the important breathe. They put mainstream audiences through such an affair with Avengers: Endgame earlier this year (a surprisingly slow, quiet, and careful film at times), and that movie is now the highest grossing of all time. Surely Star Wars, the only other property that could readily beat the Marvel Cinematic Universe on sheer ubiquity and widespread admiration, could withstand putting audiences through the same treatment and come out unscathed, if not better for it.

My better senses are telling me to check my inner Marvel nerd at the door and stop the Endgame references there, but I'm going to ignore them and make another point: without giving too much away, Skywalker's finale is, like, way too similar to Endgame to feel comfortable seeing it in a Star Wars film mere months apart. Endgame is great, but there were some hilariously rehashed moments thrown into the final setpieces of Skywalker, and it feels cheaper for it. There is a readily detectable difference in the emotional impact of how each film goes about its climax, and I feel confident saying Skywalker is not the winner here.

This film is also bound to draw comparisons to Return of the Jedi, the only previous film in the saga with the same responsibility of drawing everything to a close at its time of release. Return, similarly, has issues with pacing and the general frivolity of many characters' roles in the film (Han Solo is infamously useless to most of the story). But Return largely succeeds because its emotional core does get its proper time and care, in spite of and interspersed between the silly action. Rey's and Kylo's threads are touched upon and resolved, but I can't overstate how literally every single piece of this film feels underwritten, unearned, and/or altogether cut short.

Even the lightsaber duels — which come in droves this time, at least in comparison to the rest of the trilogy — are either too short, poorly shot, or ineffectually constructed. I don't want to disaparage any performers or choreographers who designed the fights, as they are about as impressive as any from a technical standpoint. But Abrams seems to be taking the lightsaber duel, as a concept, for granted here. The fights lack moments of either emotional progress or riveting conflict. Sure, they swing their swords at one another and make lots of faces, but between the excessive use of close-ups and lack of overall rhythm, the fights feel more like filler than critical manifestations of the characters' internal and external struggles, as they are in the best Star Wars films.

Skywalker is a surprisingly – disappointingly – easy and obligatory crossing of the finish line. Lots of the "final touches," in which characters have their personal sendoffs, felt straightforward and obvious. The final scene was what just about anyone could approximate it would be, down to the tacky dialogue clichés.

I came out of the theater having enjoyed myself, at least superficially. At the same time, however, I felt very little. I can't quite grasp that that was meant to be the end of this long and detailed saga that I and millions of others have come to love. The magical, almost indescribable sentiments and charms that we have come to associate with even the most maligned entries in the saga just weren't there. The rushed and bursting story feels all-too processed, from beginning to end.

I almost miss life a few days ago when The Last Jedi was the closest thing I had to a concrete conclusion to this story, and all I was left with was that simple suggestion of hope that the good guys would win and all would be right, as that child on Canto Bight looked up to the stars and saw the Millennium Falcon jump to hyperspace. Having now watched the stimulating, stuffed, and stale conclusion in the form of Rise of Skywalker, I don't feel more resolved on the saga — I actually feel less so.

It's not a bad film outright — as I said, I enjoyed my time in the theater — and it's far from the worst in the series. But it might be the first Star Wars film that I feel such minimal compulsion to watch again, and that feels incredibly exhausting — and defeating — to say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adzYW5DZoWs&w=585