How do you review something like The Rise of Skywalker? That was the initial thought I had after exiting the theater. By critical standards, it was a mess. As an ending (hah) to the nine film saga, it was unsatisfying. As a piece of pop entertainment, it was perfectly fine. Just like The Force Awakens, Abrams' film speeds along at a breakneck pace, one action sequence after another. Mounds of exposition are expounded; really, Rise of Skywalker almost seems like a sequel to itself rather than The Last Jedi. This is a conservative movie, in many ways a rebuttal of its predecessor, a mixed film that found itself mired in controversy I'm not sure it deserved. But what did you expect? Disney paid billions of dollars for Star Wars, and they are going to milk it for everything that it's worth. Star Wars is brainless entertainment. In the whole saga, we have only one truly great film in The Empire Strikes back, which is so good that I think it's carried the franchise the past forty years. Star Wars is just knights and space wizards and simplistic struggles between good and evil. It's really hard for me to make a big deal about it. So that's my anti-review. I will now proceed to random musings.
1) So the Force is basically just magic now, huh? Sure, it was always magic, but in the original trilogy it was subtle. Luke lifted some rocks and pulled his lightsaber to him, and talked to Obi-Wan when nobody was looking. In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey pulls spaceships from the sky, and Palpatine shoots lightning into space to disable the Resistance fleet. Force healing I didn't have much of a problem with, since that's been a power of the old expanded universe for some time now, but there's a contrast between what jedi and sith do with the Force in the Rise of Skywalker and what they were able to do in previous films.
2) Disney listened to racist internet nerds and dropped Rose Tico as a major character. I wasn't a huge fan of her role in The Last Jedi, but it's disconcerting to see loud assholes have so much influence, especially after the extended harassment of Kelly Marie Tran.
3) So how exactly did Palpatine come back? One of the Hobbits from Lord of the Rings (Dominic Monaghan) hypothesizes that he cloned himself or used space magic. That's all the explanation we get. Somehow, Palps was controlling Snoke and the First Order from behind the scenes ("I made Snoke," he says to Kylo Ren after the camera pans on tanks filled with Snoke bodyparts). This shit don't make any sense. What happened, I think, was that after Rian Johnson killed Snoke, Palps had to be written in as an eleventh hour antagonist, which is incredibly jarring, since there was no hint of Palpatine being back in The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. It's almost like someone should have written a complete story for this trilogy rather than leaving it up to Rian Johnson (who, while talented, clearly wasn't interested in making a coherent sequel) or J.J. Abrams, who has always been style over substance.
4) Have those star destroyers that break through the crust of Exogol in the opening sequence been there for thirty years? I swear some character says that Palpatine has been "conjuring star destroyers." Like, did he build them with the Force? Where did he find all the people to man them? Are they supposed to be old Imperial troops? I thought the First Order was made up of the old Empire.
5) I don't mean to be cruel, but I really think Billy Dee Williams had no idea what was going on. At one point Poe tells him that the Resistance needs pilots, and I thought "He's one-hundred years old and clearly suffering from dementia. Don't put that man in a cockpit unless you want people to die."
6) Adam Driver carried these movies. When Han Solo shows up as a vision to turn Ren back to the lightside, Driver's face becomes wracked with emotion, and I may have shed a tear.
7) Clearly the thing Finn wanted to tell Rey was that he was Force sensitive. Why there's no payoff to this, I'm not sure. Surely they'll never make another Star Wars movie. I guess we'll never know for sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment