WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, STAR WARS?!
I hate this feeling. I feel empty and heartbroken. Betrayed by a series that I loved for 22 years. I hate that a movie could make me feel this sad. It’s just a movie, right?
Except it feels like more than that. It’s something I’ve loved deeply for so long. The characterization has always been enough to deepen the sometimes shallow stories, particularly in the original trilogy. And in episodes seven and eight. God, did I love episodes seven and eight. We rewatch them this week, and I came to terms with the fact that I love them as much as the original trilogy. Sure, there are some minor flaws, but that’s true of every Star Wars movie. The Dianoga in the trash compactor? A lot of Han and Leia floating in space in Empire? Jabba’s Palace to some extent in Jedi?
But those things are all forgivable. The Rise of Skywalker is not.
(Random grammar note- I apologize now for my bouncing back and forth between tenses. It’s not a problem I usually have, but I’m still coming to terms with much of this, so I’m distracted. I have bigger fish to fry than my verb tense inconsistency. )
The short version – the plot is absolutely absurd, with reveals coming out of nowhere. It tries to be clever, and its tries were extremely obvious and clumsy, reducing it to the level of writing I see in middle school. It didn’t address the vast majority of things I hoped it would.
The characterization is nearly nonexistent. Characters who felt fleshed out and rounded in seven and eight changed basically because the plot required it in this movie. They didn’t do much to earn their changes if they even had any. To me, bad plot and bad characters equal a bad movie. I’m not sure how so many I’ve spoken to agree with me on that front but still enjoyed the show.
A much, much, much more detailed description of my feelings:
Let’s start at the very beginning.
The opening crawl. “The dead speak!” Um, yeah, no shit. This is Star Wars. Force ghosts have been a thing since the first movie in 1977! (Or at least the voice of Obi Wan Kenobi.) Why is this news? Why is this how it started?
The crawl then went on to talk about how Emperor Palpatine was back from the dead and his voice has been broadcast across the galaxy. Um, why didn’t we see this happen? Why did this movie start with just telling us it had happened? It took away what could have been a very dramatic moment. There was almost no tension, and I know we heard the Emperor’s voice in the trailers so ewe knew he’d be in this, but still. When you teach writing, you always tell your students, “Show, don’t tell.” In other words, this movie started with a major rookie mistake. It put a bad taste in my mouth before any act or even appeared on the screen. I leaned over to my husband and asked, “Are we going to need episode 8 1/2 to flesh this out?” (It might have helped some things, but it wouldn’t saved us from the ridiculous plot moves ahead.)
And another thing – why was the Emperor in this at all? He was defeated at the end of episode six, and I was OK with that. My husband pointed out that by having him in this movie, Anaken’s story was completely negated. His redemption at the end of Jedi? Totally undone.
And how did Palpatine even come back? Something something dark side. (“Clones. Dark science. Things only the Sith no.“ Except people besides the Sith can create clones so…) No real explanation. I will give it this – Ian McDiarmid did look pretty awesome, and I enjoyed his acting. I wasn’t sure what was up with the big Matrix style robot arm that was holding him up. But otherwise it was interesting aesthetically.
One of the things I was most looking forward to in this movie was seeing that punk ass bitch Kylo Ren doing a terrible job of being in charge of the first order. However, we barely saw him interact with anyone besides Rey. In fact, he didn’t even have that many lines! It just started with the crawl telling us he was looking for Palpatine to kill him so he could be even more in charge than he already was? And he was looking for a “Sith Wayfinder,“ which is a terrible name for something, and is something we have never heard of. Why would you introduce something stupid and new in the last act of a nine part series? There were enough loose ends to be tied up at the end of episode eight. Why? Just why?
Once the crawl is over, Kylo Ren is on a planet killing a bunch of people, and he finds a prism in a box. (Hey, did anyone know this planet was Mustafar? It says so in the Visual dictionary for this movie. Might have been fun to actually know. Seems like a logical place to hide a prism.) Then he makes his way to Palpatine, who tells him who Rey really is. I can’t lie, I loved Rey being no one. It had a beautiful message that you can rise up from nothing to become good and powerful and important. And now that was about to be undone.
Oh, and we got a fleeting shot of a bunch of Snokes in a tank, implying he was a clone of… Someone? OK, the Emperor created him and put him in charge, but I wasn’t sure why there had to be clones of him? All of whom had scars on their faces? Unlike a lot of people, I had no problem not knowing his background when he died in episode eight. He was the bad guy, end of. We didn’t know much about the Emperor when we saw the original trilogy. He was just a guy in charge. And, as I said before, I thought by Kylo killing him, the movie left us in a much more interesting place for the next one. But no. Just a clone in a tube.
Then Palpatine gives Kylo a giant fleet of star destroyers that were just hanging out beneath the surface of the Sith planet. Sith planet equals stupid. It feels like something a 14-year-old boy wrote on the Internet. And why did the First Order need a bunch of star destroyers? They already outnumber the resistance about 1,000,000 to 1. Unnecessary. I guess it was supposed to look cool, but it just felt over the top big for no apparent reason. I don’t mind some great special effects, but I would like them to be warranted. Everything on the Planet Sith (I know, Exegol, but even that name is terrible) was just navy blue and lightning. No real atmosphere. Just, “Ooooh, this place is bad.”
It Hass to be said that I thought to myself, this movie can’t get any worse than this, right? This absurdity distracted me for the rest of the movie until it actually did get worse. I found it hard to enjoy anything on the first viewing.
Then we got a pointless action scene with Finn and Poe. I like Finn and Poe. They are my favorite couple in the new Star Wars universe! And their Bromance was stronger than ever in this film. So that was one positive. But the only point of this scene was to establish a mole in the first order, which was established a little later when they got back to the resistance base. I mean, I get it – there should be some good action in Star Wars. But I would’ve rather seen it somewhere else that had actual meaning rather than for no reason off the bat. A lot of things in this movie were under developed or unexplained, which means the pacing was just not right.
And then Rey was training with Leia. She looked kind of weird sitting crosslegged floating in mid air to be honest. And if Leia was never actually a fully trained Jedi, how could she be training Rey? (There’s an answer to this later.) I liked the training course that Rey ran. I liked that Kylo Ren could still connect with her. But did he have to touch his effed up Darth Vader mask to do it? He didn’t need that in the last movie. I was glad that Snoke lied about being the reason they could connect, though. I felt there was a deep connection between these two, not a romantic one, but something we had never seen before in the Force. I was glad the writers of this thought so, too.
I really liked the scene where Poe and Finn returned to the resistance base and had that great banter with Rey. Snarky back-and-forth is one of the things I’ve always loved about Star Wars, so this might have actually been my favorite scene in the entire movie.
Anyway, Poe and Finn relay the information about the Sith prism, and Ray decides she needs to go looking for it. (I swear every time Oscar Isaac had to say something about the Emperor or the Sith, a clouded look of, “I can’t believe I’m saying this shit,“ came over his face. Also, I always find it weird when characters who aren’t Sith or Jedi mention the Sith. Weren’t they gone from the galaxy for millennia by the time of the prequels? So a lot of people thought they were just a myth? I can’t imagine the Emperor going around claiming to everyone, “Hey, not only am I the big cheese around here, but I’m also a Sith Lord!“ So why did everyone in this movie know he was a Sith? It doesn’t seem like it would’ve come up at any point.) Poe and Finn decide they are coming with her, along with C-3PO and BB-8. And for some reason R2-D2 can’t go. Shrug. OK. Oh, and neither can Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico. I think JJ just didn’t care about her since he didn’t create her as a character. So she was left around to do pretty much nothing. What a waste. her sense of pure joy and fun livened up the last movie for me.
Not to mention every time she was in a scene, so was Dominic Monaghan, playing Beaumont. Anyone hear his name used in the movie? No, but you heard his voice an awful lot because he had a lot of weird exposition lines. Why couldn’t Rose have just had those lines? Or Lieutenant Connix for that matter? Connix was in all three new movies, and yet her name is never used, either. And she’s Carrie Fisher’s daughter for goodness sake! Using her more would have been a lovely tribute.
The trio arrive on Pasaana (a much better name for a planet than Exegol) in the middle of a cool looking festival, which kind of felt like some cultural appropriation of India, but Star Wars has never been particularly sensitive towards other cultures. Not that I’m making excuses for it, it just shouldn’t be a surprise. Turns out Luke knew about the Sith triangles and had gone looking for them once himself. (When I don’t know… Maybe before he went to Ahch-To feeling like a failure? That doesn’t seem like the right time. Nor does it seem like the right time before he started training Jedi because he probably would’ve felt like a failure after not finding a Sith triangle.) Rey read about it in his notebooks (which I thought were the sacred Jedi texts, but whatever - I guess they were the texts he made notes in), so they followed his trail.
While at the festival, stormtroopers arrive to capture them, and they are saved by a man in a mysterious mask who was obviously Lando. I thought the way he was brought in was pretty organic. I didn’t really understand why he of all people would have been looking for the Sith triangle with Luke, but somebody had to be able to fill our heroes in on some info.
Then off the heroes went in search of Ochi’s ship. Who was Ochi? Lando mentioned him being a Jedi hunter, but he was in possession of a Sith dagger… And later, the crew finds a speeder with a Sith symbol on it that they assume was Ochi’s… So was he a Sith? Was he just tooling around with these things because Palpatine give them to him? Extremely unclear.
Also note: there has been a Sith symbol in Star Wars canon for quite some time now. And this is not the symbol they chose to use in this movie. They designed a whole new one, and I’m not sure why. Yay for consistency.
The stormtroopers chasing the heroes through the desert was another decent part of the movie. It felt relatively Star Warsy. It should be mentioned that Anthony Daniels really got a chance to shine as C-3PO in this movie in a way he hasn’t in about 35 years. His humor started when the crew landed on Pasaana, and it continued wonderfully throughout.
While this was occurring, Kylo Ren and Rey had one of their joint force visions, which I appreciated continuing, and Ren was able to figure out where Rey was. So off he and the Knights of Ren went to find the rebels.
Oh, the Knights of Ren. When they were mentioned in Episode 7, they peaked my interest. I was so excited to see them in this movie! Except they turned out to be a big, fat nothing! No explanation, nothing special about them, and then they all got dead in the end. That was a waste of my wondering.
After being chased by flying stormtroopers, our heroes end up falling through sinking fields into some underground tunnels. Just before sinking through the sand, Finn starts to tell Rey something. He doesn’t get to finish before they are silenced. Later, he won’t tell her what it was in front of Poe. Even later, Poe asks Finn about it again, and he still won’t tell him. AND WE NEVER FIND OUT WHAT IT IS!!! WHY SET THIS UP TWICE WITH NO PAY OFF?!
(Yeah, I know. Finn is Force sensitive. This become slightly apparent without his not telling Rey. JJ has now come out and said this is what fin was going to tell Ray, but how did this get left out of the movie? What a major oversight by editors! Star Wars is supposed to have an entire story group to focus on continuity. Major sloppy mistake.)
There is some more fun banter here. Then Ochi’s speeder is found, and they know it was Ochi’s speeder because there is a Sith symbol on it. Nothing like advertising your evil...
Near the speeder is a Sith dagger on which is inscribed the location of the Sith triangle. Why? Why put that on a dagger? Because it looks cool? Which it did, but it was again pointless. (I mean, except it had a point because it was a dagger… Ha ha…)
Before they can escape from the tunnels, the heroes encounter a giant snake. Suddenly, Rey can speak Parseltongue and communicates with the snake. She finds a giant wound on him that she’s able to heal using the Force. This was a cool new power, but giant snake? It didn’t read right to me. Yes, Star Wars always has bizarre creatures, and some of them are really awesome, and some of them are really stupid. This one kind of fell in the stupid category at least for me. A snake is not a space creature. Ewoks? Space creature. Dianoga? Space creature. All those stupid things in the arena in episode two? They looked like space creatures to me. Giant snake? No.
Back in daylight, the heroes board Ochi’s ship, but Rey feels Ren’s presence and wanders off to confront him. When she doesn’t get back to the ship in a timely fashion, Finn sends Chewie out to get her. He is subsequently captured by those dastardly Knights of Ren.
Cue a cool scene from the trailer with Rey back flipping over Kylo Ren‘s TIE fighter and cutting off a wing. OK, that looked cool. I had no issue with that or the subsequent Ren/Rey force fight over the transport which resulted in Rey using force lightning and blowing it up. For the few minutes I did think Chewie was dead though, I was amazed I didn’t feel anything. I guess the action rushed on so quickly I didn’t have time to digest the loss of a major beloved character. Oscar Isaac literally came out of the ship to hurry the plot along, waving frantically to the other two to get on board. “Don’t stop to think about your dead friend! This movie doesn’t have time for that!“
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