After the utter disaster that was (and still is) The Last Jedi, Disney Star Wars had their work cut out for them. That movie fractured the fan base in a way the prequels never quite managed. The Last Jedi sits near the bottom of a lot of people’s rankings. On mine it is dead last, worse even than the Star Wars Holiday Special.
That left The Rise of Skywalker in an ugly spot before a single frame was shot. First it had to walk back some of the more egregious choices Rian Johnson made. The Holdo Maneuver had to be treated as a statistical anomaly because that one stunt quietly invalidated the first seven movies. Then came the 180 on Rey’s parentage. And those are just two of the messes the movie spends its opening stretch trying to mop up.
Don’t get me wrong. The Rise of Skywalker has plenty of problems of its own. Being saddled with the previous film did not help. The final battle, with what feels like fifty billion Star Destroyers sitting in the ocean and needing a single point to launch all of them? Get the hell out of here with that. It is the kind of idea that sounds big in a pitch meeting and falls apart the second you think about it for more than ten seconds.
Some things I did like. The Sith wayfinder worked. The dagger and the callback to the Emperor’s throne room on the Death Star worked too. Some folks will call that “jangling keys.” Fine. At least it felt like a plot trying to move forward instead of the “Gotcha! Subverted expectations!” approach of The Last Jedi. Disney Star Wars looks great and is stunning visually, that is never in doubt but the story is.
In all, The Rise of Skywalker is not so much a bad movie as an uneven one. Its most vehement detractors tend to be the same people who are the most vehement defenders of The Last Jedi. Make of that what you will.
The movie sits in an awkward place. A good chunk of the fan base hates it because it undid so much of The Last Jedi. Another chunk is simply “meh” on it. And some of us (myself included) are still a little confused about what the movie was even trying to accomplish.
No matter how you feel about the film itself, the real problem is the lack of structure across the three sequels. Two different directors who, by all appearances, did not collaborate. An auteur in the middle chapter claiming to be “a fan” when that claim looks shakier the longer you sit with the finished product. There was no shared arc. There was a first movie that set things up, a second movie that knocked most of it over, and a third movie that tried to stand the pieces back up in two hours.
But overall of this the odor of the Last Jedi permeates. I know I keep circling back to this, but the story of this movie can't be told without the mistakes of the prior one taken into account.
Who is to blame for all this? Stops and starts with Disney itself. They could closed out the story with what the fans wanted but apparently let two guys randomly do stuff that looked like Star Wars but felt like something very different.
And there you have it. The main saga of nine films goes out with a whimper in a lot of ways. No real reunion of Luke, Leia, and Han. Rey taking the Skywalker name at the end. It never had the sense of finale that Return of the Jedi managed, hokey spots and all. It never had the tragic weight of Revenge of the Sith. The Rise of Skywalker feels patched together, and it shows.
How about you? Did you come away with the same take?
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