Film Review | Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker directed by J J Abrams

You can’t please everyone, so Disney have decided to let people take it in turns. The Last Jedi’s detractors will no doubt exult in The Rise of Skywalker’s resolute eschewing of almost every single aspect of Rian Johnson’s notorious masterpiece, whereas those who celebrated The Last Jedi’s unique take on the franchise are probably going to feel as furious as their opposite numbers did the last time around. Whichever side of the divide you find yourself on, though, there is no escaping the fact that Disney’s Star Wars trilogy now feels like a contrived and ultimately unsatisfying mess. It is, at best, a strained duology with a largely meaningless side-step in the middle.

When considered separately, each instalment is a phenomenal film in its own right, but taken together they suffer from a lack of cohesion - the blame for which rests squarely on the shoulders of The Rise of Skywalker. A careful play upon nostalgia, The Force Awakens delivered exactly what those who didn’t care for the prequel trilogy wanted: a riff upon the original Star Wars movie. It essentially told the exact same story, but from different angles and with a modern sheen. And for all its controversy, The Last Jedi did much same thing, taking the core elements of The Empire Strikes Back and casting them in a new and excruciatingly beautiful mould; one that, somehow, even managed to replicate Empire’s ability to shock. With different writers and directors at the helm, this trilogy’s first two episodes were like day and night – not unlike the original Star Wars movie and The Empire Strikes Back.

 

This new trilogy’s final instalment, saddled with the awkward (if initially intriguing) title The Rise of Skywalker, is a movie defined by relentless excitement and unremitting spectacle. I found it to be the most visually and aurally impressive of all twelve Star Wars movies, and its beauty wasn’t just skin deep. The performances painted on Abrams’ stunning canvas were fittingly formidable for the final act in an historic ennealogy, with Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver delivering such staggering intensity that they almost papered over the inherent narrative cracks. Certainly the most fascinating and rewarding part of The Rise of Skywalker was its deft handling of its central Rey / Ren relationship, the evolution and inexorable conclusion of which seemed to flow organically. It speaks volumes that the eleventh-hour introduction of a whole new concept in the Force doesn’t feel forced at all – my reaction to it, which I’m sure that many people will share, was simply, “Of course.”

 

Similarly, the much-hyped return of Ian McDiarmid as Sheev Palpatine / Darth Sidious was a coup impossible not to applaud. The very existence of this sequel trilogy destroys the once sacrosanct idea that the episodic Star Wars saga is the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall and redemption, but at least resurrecting his former Sith master and emperor gave this trilogy of trilogies an overarching big bad to tie it all together. It did make a mockery of Snoke, of course (well, fans did clamour for details of his origins...), but this is offset somewhat by the rather neat revelation that Ren’s inferred communion with Darth Vader via his charred helmet was actually with Palpatine – it used to annoy me no end that Anakin died a Jedi, only to then cause ructions from the Netherworld of the Force by whispering iniquitous incitements to his grandson. Furthermore, having Palpatine return using the very power that seduced Anakin to the dark side was a tremendously gratifying stroke; one topped only by basing him on the legendary hidden world of the Sith amongst a whole cadre of Sith Eternal loyalists and a fleet of freshly-minted star destroyers each armed with Death Star tech. Locked in a cadaverous state, the erstwhile emperor’s early scenes fused Hammer horror with shameless fan service in a manner that felt wickedly satisfying, if ultimately a little shallow.

But then that’s Sith for you.
 

The Rise of Skywalker also succeeded in the finest Star Wars tradition of delivering new and exotic locales, from an asteroid of ice through the Bollywood-inspired deserts of Pasaana all the way to the violent seas of Kef Bir in the Endor system. Its centrepiece lightsaber duel broke new ground as Rey and Ren locked laser swords aboard the wreck of a Death Star while a tsunami broke around them. Poe made the Millennium Falcon do shit that makes confusing units of distance and time seem pedestrian in contrast. The Knights of Ren were expectedly awesome, if unexpectedly mute. Charming new characters like the hilarious droidsmith Babu Frik and Poe’s fiery old flame Zorri Bliss stole every scene that they were in, while the oldest of hands were given the send-off that they deserved. Having been kept on the sidelines in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, it was a real joy to see C-3PO not merely back in the thick of things, but driving the plot as his astromech friend so famously did all the way back in 1977. Anthony Daniels’ long-suffering droid drew the biggest laughs of the film both times that I went to see it, yet his role still managed to stand out as one of the most poignant.
 

Director J J Abrams (Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness) and his co-writer Chris Terrio’s (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League) story was also notable for its adherence to George Lucas’s original themes. There was a palpable nature versus industry vibe with wild warriors galloping across the surface of star destroyers mounted on horse-like beasts as the saga’s grand showdown pitted the galaxy’s greatest-ever navy against an overwhelming mass of “Just people” (just as in merely, just as in righteous). The magnitude of such moments was emphasised magnificently by what will probably be John Williams’ final Star Wars score, which for the first time incorporated the saga’s signature theme within the main body of the movie, the emotional impact of which can’t be overstated. It was hard not to punch the air repeatedly as Lando’s cavalry arrived to the sound of those grand, immortal notes. Like a lot of us, I’m sure that Lucas will have major reservations about The Rise of Skywalker, but I still can’t help but feel that he would give his blessing to its spirit, if not its letter.
 

The First Order turned Sith Final Order (Palpatine had clearly given up on his “I’m just an old politician...” propaganda by 35ABY) dextrously walks the tightrope between comic relief and credible threat. I was particularly pleased with the payoff to General Hux’s long-running feud with his supreme leader – there really was no other way to square that circle – and Richard E Grant’s Allegiant General Pryde did a terrific job of usurping his place as the face of the First Order’s military. He was no Wilfhuff Tarkin, mind, and especially given the movie’s setting in the Unknown Regions I would have much preferred to see a live-action Grand Admiral Thrawn feature in the place of Grant’s new character. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, given the history of service to Palpatine that’s alluded to in the dialogue, but I suppose that Abrams did have to draw a line somewhere when it came to fan service. A conspicuously left-handed Force ghost who’d finally learned how to raise his X-Wing up from the water and a ghostly, arrogant voice urging Rey to, “Bring back the balance as I did,” (the cheeky fucker) was probably enough fanwank for one movie.
 

All the same, at times Abrams’ devotion to what had come before crossed the line from homage to barefaced plagiarism – the scene in which Kylo Ren attacked one of his command officers caused my friend to throw a hand in the air in defeat and proclaim, “It’s just a fucking remake!” I still took guilty pleasure in such scenes, especially when viewed through the prism of Kylo Ren’s evident success, which as a huge fan of the character I have a vested interest in. When Darth Vader Force-choked Admiral Motti on board the first Death Star, he had Tarkin holding his leash. Ren, however, achieved what his grandfather could not by becoming supreme leader of the galaxy’s most dominant force, beholden to no-one. This only served to make his ultimate redemption all the more extraordinary, given the extent of the power that he had to surrender – all Vader was really giving up to save his son was work as a high-profile enforcer, and even that role was precarious as his boss had been actively looking to replace him.
 

Ren’s brief dominion over the galaxy, when measured against Vader’s subservience to his master, is quite emblematic of Ren’s character, both within the fiction and without. Whilst Ren will never be the cinematic icon that Darth Vader is, in-universe he is a much greater success, first rising to rule and later attaining the power over life and death that Vader so tragically sought. Conceptually, he is a character with much greater depth than Vader, and moreover it is much easier for an audience to identify with him. Abrams struck gold with the notion that Ren’s mask should be just a façade, allowing us to see the character’s conflict writ across his face in all the scenes that counted.
 

The apotheosis of these was, without doubt, the moment on the wreck of the second Death Star where, in the aftermath of his mother’s death, Kylo Ren faced Ben Solo’s memory of his father, and the weight of it crushed him. It managed to call back to two defining scenes in the saga (Han’s “I know” in Empire and Ren’s “I know what I have to do...” in The Force Awakens), and serve as a beautiful coda to both, as well as Leia’s immediately preceding sacrifice, all the while setting the stage for the inevitable Team: Skywalker vs Emperor Palpatine showdown. It’s hands-down the greatest scene in the sequel trilogy, and one of the most memorable of the entire saga. The script was exquisite, and Harrison Ford and Adam Driver’s performances were simply transcendent.

Unfortunately though, at its core The Rise of Skywalker is a piece of work as insidious and manipulative as Palpatine himself. Whereas Lucas was able to oversee all three films in his original trilogy, ensuring that its ever-evolving and self-contradicting narrative at least built upon what had come before, here Disney allowed two very different artists with clearly very different visions to play tennis with their billion-dollar franchise. Rian Johnson knocked back Abrams’ opening serve with The Last Jedi, and this film is Abrams’ over-egged and overpowering response.

Not content with flying in the face of The Last Jedi’s quiet beauty and more meditative tone, The Rise of Skywalker made it its mission to completely retcon its divisive predecessor - sadly to the cost of its own credibility. After the pains that Johnson went to to emphasise Rey’s lack of Force pedigree, the reveal that she’s actually Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter simply doesn’t ring true. Even within the context of the film, the logistics didn’t work – the implication was that Rey having Palpatine’s blood in her veins automatically conferred colossal Force powers upon her, despite her father (whose inheritance from his own father should surely have made him even more powerful than Rey?) not even being able to muster enough strength to keep his wife and child safe. Worse, it flew in the face of the well-established conceit that Palpatine’s power isn’t purely innate, but earned through decades of dedication to mastery of the dark side of the Force. This guy wasn’t born with the power to bring himself back from the dead – he studied under Darth Plagueis, the Wise.

“My mother was the daughter of Vader. Your father was the son of the Emperor. What Palpatine doesn’t know is we’re a dyad in the Force, Rey. Two that are one.”

Admittedly, the original trilogy wasn’t technically any better in this regard. Despite his protestations otherwise, Lucas’s decision to recast Darth Vader as Luke Skywalker’s father in The Empire Strikes Back was clearly an afterthought, as was the concept of Leia being Luke’s twin sister that was belatedly introduced in Return of the Jedi – a couple of make-outs too late for most people’s sensibilities (this was in the days before Game of Thrones, remember). Haven’t you ever wondered why Luke retained the dead-giveaway name “Skywalker” after Obi-Wan left him with the Lars family on Tatooine, while Leia took her adoptive parents’ surname? Or why Obi-Wan doesn’t call Vader “Anakin” when they finally meet again on the Death Star? And that’s before we even consider Obi-Wan’s seemingly out-of-character lies (sorry - truths “from a certain point of view”) and Luke and Leia’s snogging. In contrast, The Rise of Skywalker’s backtracking is positively polished.
 

For all their clumsiness, though, the twists and turns of original trilogy worked unbeatably on a character level. The Rise of Skywalker’s didn’t. Revealing Palpatine as the killer of Rey’s parents would have been sufficient for this film’s purposes, but making her his blood relative added nothing to her character – quite the opposite, in fact.  I loved the idea of Rey being the Force’s natural response to the growing strength of Kylo Ren, just as I did the core underlying theme that anyone could become a Jedi, no matter what their background. Both ideas were killed stone dead by The Rise of Skywalker, and all because Abrams sought to replicate The Empire Strikes Back’s defining twist – which was, of course, exactly what cinemagoers expected him to do. Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips hit the nail on the head when he coined the phrase, “soothingly predictable.” At its worst, The Rise of Skywalker is a balm for those burned by The Last Jedi; a comfort blanket for the half of fandom who wanted a modern reimagining of the original trilogy, and no more.
 

However, as much as the Rey retcon vexed me, its impact was lessened by the fact that I was expecting that particular “twist” – or at least one very much like it. What I wasn’t expecting was for other principal characters to also be given a needless, last-minute reboot. I watched agog as Poe was suddenly turned into a poor man’s Han Solo, with a suitably chequered past to boot. Whilst Abrams and Terrio broadly honoured the character’s journey from recklessness to responsibility, it was tarnished by both a tardy and ill-fitting revelation about his drug-running past and a frankly unfathomable interpersonal three-way dance with Rey and Finn. At the start of the movie, Abrams was doing his best Irvin Kershner impression as Rey and Poe sparred just like Han Solo and the princess, sparks flying everywhere as they bravely flouted their dirty hands, only for their budding sexual tension to collapse into a bizarre sort of threeism with Finn, whose own feelings for Rey have been left curiously ambiguous (which on reflection is probably the film’s sole original move, and one of the better things about it as a result).
 

Indeed, John Boyega’s Finn was a raucous pleasure throughout, just as he was in his first two outings. One of The Rise of Skywalker’s greatest strengths was its razor-sharp running banter, most of which had the stormtrooper-turned-freedom fighter at its centre. Unfortunately for him, though, his character was ultimately diluted to the point of dissolution by the arrival of an entire legion of his former comrades, who we learn shared in his not-wanting-to-kill-for-the-First-Order epiphany. Instead of one brave and unique individual who bucked the trend, a man we can champion, we find out that they’re all at it. It left me feeling foolish, as if I’d just wasted two movies clapping a dog who’s learned not to bite.

 

Still, Finn could have fared worse – in an apparent endorsement of toxic fandom and casual racism, his Last Jedi companion, Rose Tico, was relegated to a humiliating walk-on part. If I were a Disney executive, I’d have been very concerned about the optics on this film. Whilst some of the new characters are black, they only seem to have meaningful interaction with existing black characters, and the entire saga’s only same-sex kiss lasts for less than a few seconds (in the territories that were allowed to keep that bit in, anyway). Particularly when taken together with The Rise of Skywalker’s thematic shift from meritocracy back to aristocracy, it feels like a surrender to the misogyny and racism that formed much of the social media reaction to The Last Jedi. Populism strikes again.

 

Ultimately the thing that annoyed me most about The Rise of Skywalker though was that it wasn’t content with just retconning The Last Jedi – it had to retcon itself too, using visual sleight-of-hand and outright Ctrl + Z to roll back some of its boldest moves. Chewbacca’s death was devastating, glorious and gut-punchingly perfect. It gave one of the saga’s most celebrated heroes an appallingly unforgettable end, while at the same time making the audience really start to fear their own heroine. It was such an audacious move that, obviously, it lasted for all of ten minutes – after all, Chewie had to survive to get his old medal back. Frozen II had more gumption.
 

Rey’s resurrection was even more exasperating. She gave her life to destroy Palpatine once and for all (or until Episode X eventually drops...), leading to the most beautiful and unexpected inversion of Return of the Jedi. I found it profoundly affecting to see Ben Solo survive, cradling the body of the woman with whom he’d shared a unique bond, and perhaps even loved - only for Abrams and Terrio to then pull a clichéd double flip and have Ben literally exchange his life for Rey’s. Instead of exploring the difficult questions of accountability and duality that Anakin’s death dodged back in ’83, The Rise of Skywalker served up an apparently fire-retardant homestead and what may be the most unsafe instance of weapons disposal in any universe, fictional or otherwise. I’m still not sure which is harder to swallow – Rey’s painfully manufactured adoption of the Skywalker surname (which obviously has none of the negative connotations of Palpatine. Hang on, wasn’t Darth Vader a...?), or the fact that she’s buried two lethal laser swords in an area home to a primitive race who literally style themselves as Tusken Raiders.
 

I have more sympathy when it comes to Abrams and Terrio’s reimagining of Leia as a fully-fledged Jedi master, given that they faced the apparently insurmountable obstacle of losing the actress whose character was planned to be at the heart of the movie before they’d even put pen to paper. Building a story that was both suitably reverential and practically achievable was inevitably going to involve some rather radical storytelling, and so the fact that Leia’s arc in The Rise of Skywalker worked at all, let alone worked as well as it did, is a near miraculous achievement for all those involved in delivering Carrie Fisher’s final performance. Watch the film once, and I dare say that you’ll be hard pressed to notice anything amiss. Plot-serving and character-sensitive scenes have been extrapolated from often the most bizarre snippets salvaged from the cutting room floor. Yes, the blocking was weird and the camera angles were odd; sometimes the CG outfits didn’t even fit quite right, but overall the result was unbelievable in its believability. Even as the film progressed and the useable footage ran out, Maz Kanata became a narrator for the audience in all but name, which, given her quasi-mystical background, seemed to flow quite naturally. Some of Leia’s most affecting scenes saw her being ushered out of the room in the corner of a frame as Maz spoke to the camera, lying alone in near darkness, or even beneath a shroud. Leia’s sacrifice, and its significance, was just about the only part of the film’s plot that felt right to me.
 

It’s not clear whether Abrams made this film in answer to The Last Jedi’s critics, with a Disney to-do list in hand, or simply to reassert his own vision for the sequel trilogy, but the resultant mess has made a mockery of Disney’s handling of what was, less than a decade ago, its most promising acquisition. To think that Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm’s fellow House of Mouse subsidiary, plan entire phases of movies years in advance - and reap all of the resultant rewards - really brings into sharp focus the executive failings that we’ve witnessed here. In the end, the best thing that I can say about this new Star Wars trilogy is that it’s been so slavishly faithful to George Lucas’s original trilogy that it’s unwittingly inherited its made-up-on-the-fly inconsistencies. Colin Trevorrow, it seems, has had a lucky escape.
 

On its own, however, The Rise of Skywalker is a rampant juggernaut of feature that starts better than any other Star Wars film and holds you rapt from there until those twin suns soar. For every hole in its plot, there’s a silver lining lurking; for every badly-drawn character, there’s a heart-rending, rip-roaring performance. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you might even leap up in triumph before going home with your face looking a bit like Kryten’s when he’s trying to lie, before finally coming to the realisation that Star Wars was only ever meant to be the new Flash Gordon – a pulp-fiction, Saturday-morning serial to be enjoyed with a mouthful of popcorn instead of a throatful of bile.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 4K UHD steelbook is available to pre-order from Zavvi for £32.99 plus £0.99 delivery, and a limited edition 4K UHD box set of the entire “Skywalker Saga” is available to pre-order from Amazon for £180.00.

The Disney+ streaming service launches in the UK on 31st March and will be home to the first eight movies in the saga, with The Rise of Skywalker to follow later in the year (once its theatrical run is complete). The Clone Wars and Rogue One movies are also available, with Solo scheduled to follow in July, in addition to a wide collection of Star Wars TV shows including the exclusive Mandalorian and every episode of both The Clone Wars and Rebels.