Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Review

 
PG13: For sci-fi violence and actionRuntime: 2 Hrs and 22 MinutesProduction Companies: Lucasfilm Ltd., Bad Robot ProductionsDistributor: Walt Disney Motion PicturesDirectors: J. J. AbramWriters: J. J. Abrams, Chris TerrioCast: Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Anthony Daniels, Naomi Ackie, Domhnall Gleeson, Richard E. Grant, Lupita Nyong'o, Keri Russell, Joonas Suotamo, Kelly Marie Tran, Ian McDiarmid, Billy Dee WilliamsRelease Date: December 20, 2019These past few weeks I’ve been cramming in final papers and final exams, which ate up all of my time. The day that I was supposed to attend the press screening of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, I had to take my final exam for film class. Plus, it was screening on the same day as Cats, so I ended up seeing Cats instead. It wasn’t until Thursday’s opening night that I ended up seeing TROS with a packed audience. Let me be the 13959778th person to say:
Rian Johnson, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I was extremely judgmental or negative towards The Last Jedi. I’ve matured since then and can now fully comprehend and appreciate the bold choices you made in order to change the trajectory of the trilogy. I appreciated the incredibly stunning imagery you incorporated into your art direction. If you’re reading this, next time I see ya (which might be in a few weeks at the Critics’ Choice Awards) I’m giving you a hug and telling you I’m sorry.
I’ll admit it. Rian Johnson and I are friends now... or acquaintances, I guess. I mean, we met at TIFF, spoke during the after-party for Knives Out, and I saw him a few weeks ago after a guild and reception screening of Knives Out. He remembered me and I told him I was running off to see 1917, which he responded to with: “*gasp* LUCKY!”I’m still reeling from the fact that Rian Johnson was envious of me seeing 1917, but that’s beside the point. The Rise of Skywalker is a completely ham-fisted retcon of everything Rian built, only to be the most forced and underdeveloped conclusion to a movie that relies so much on its prior entries (besides Episode 8). I bet JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson are friends and they clearly share a mutual respect for each other. I don’t want to pit them against each other in any way. That said, this movie feels like a middle finger to the work Rian Johnson did in 2017. SPOILERS BELOW (It’s Tuesday, you’ve seen it. Let me just vent, please.)
It’s a Star Wars movie. The visual effects are fantastic. At this point, it’s kind of redundant to comment on that, so I will go more in-depth with what struck me as positive.Given the limited resources they had to use Carrie Fisher’s presence in this entry, I think they did rather a good job. Because of her death occurring so long ago, it’s nice to see Leia still have a prominent presence throughout this entry even though she speaks more like an NPC than a human being. Abrams did a good job doing her character justice. The scene where she passes is emotional in whatever context you put it, but the moment where Chewie yells in despair over the loss of his final living friends brought genuine tears to my eyes. Out of EVERYTHING this film has to “offer” that moment is completely earned. 
Where do we begin? *Sigh* If I had to choose two words to describe The Rise of Skywalker, they would be “lazy” and “hollow”.To better organize my thoughts, I’ll separate these two words and expand on why I feel that way.LAZYJJ Abrams is the perfect guy to go to if you specifically need to get an old, dead franchise that hasn’t worked in a long time off the ground. Now, he may pump the reboot with a ton of nostalgia, but he still channels the key components that make that franchise fun. I will go on the record and say that The Force Awakens is a great movie. I am not proud of having been so enthusiastic at the time of its release when I named it my #3 best film of my 2015… but I was a CHILD (okay, I was 17 but you get the gist). Now, give a mouse a cookie — or, in this case, give an Abrams a sequel — he wouldn’t know what to do with it because his immediate response is nostalgia. He’s like SpongeBob when he’s put behind the wheel, but instead of screaming “FLOOR IT!”, he screams “NOSTALGIA!” 
Many can attest to how nostalgia-heavy this entry is. Without any fucking mention of Palpatine in any of the previous movies, not even a cameo, Palpatine is suddenly back without any rhyme or reason except for the fact that Johnson killed off JJ’s guy in the chair and he had to resurrect the original guy in the chair so he can get killed all over again, along with retconning so much of Rey’s arc. If there was any way that Palpatine could’ve been reintroduced in the first act instead of that crawl or a fucking FORTNITE EVENT, then I would’ve at least felt invested rather than feeling like I’m forced into this situation because you had no idea how to pull together a genuine, thorough, conscious, original concept. LAZY!Now, so much of Johnson’s meticulous crafting of TLJ was how he openly made clear through Rey’s story arc, “Hey, not everybody in this large expansive universe needs to be interconnected. You don’t need to be a Skywalker or a Kenobi or a Palpatine in order to be a Jedi. ANYBODY can be a Jedi.” And that was the end of Rey’s constant search of herself and her powers. By the end of TLJ, we saw Rey come to her full realization of self. In TROS, Rey goes back to square fucking one where she keeps questioning, “WHO ARE MY PARENTS?!” I was cringing right off the bat because that question should’ve been nipped in the bud. But since Abrams is so heavy on intertwining everything because he doesn’t know how to challenge his audience instead of giving in to what the “fans”, or — let me be honest — trolls of r/Movies or r/Star Wars want, the reveal just so happened to be: “Oh, your parents were nothing, but your granddaddy is PALPATINE which explains why you’re so OP.” Ugh, now I’m reliving the audible groans I made while watching this, but yeah. LAZY!I really don’t want to make this review feel like a string of TLJ comparisons, but because this adds so much emphasis on undoing nearly everything before it, it’s difficult for me to do otherwise. Regarding cameos, TLJ only had ONE. ONE major cameo which I felt — nearly most people felt — was earned. The appearance of Yoda was so well-timed and served an actual purpose to Luke’s arc that by the time he appeared and destroyed the teaching grounds, Johnson’s main idea was clear. Cameos served a purpose for both the character’s arc and the filmmaker. The cameos in TROS are here for the sake of nostalgia and nothing else. Abrams handed you fuckers a plate of member berries because he and Chris Terrio snorted a line of them as they penned the script. It makes the arcs of the characters feel rushed and muddled, especially when it came to Kylo Ren. When Lando was introduced, we just went, “Okay, so what?” Like, IMMEDIATELY after Kylo Ren sees his daddy and we see Rey on Luke’s hideout planet, you can just FEEL the heavy reek of Abrams’ pathetic pandering breathing down your neck while Luke appears as a force ghost. I predicted the appearance like, “Okay and Luke is going to come out in three… two… please prove me wrong, JJ… one.
I believe that when you have a cameo in your movie it should serve one or more of these three purposes: to garner a laugh out of the audience if it’s a comedy movie (i.e.: Zoolander), trigger your nostalgia, or further the plot and/or character arcs of the film’s lead. The only movie aside from TLJ that I can think of that pulled a perfect reversal and combination of the last two is 21 Jump Street. That’s a perfect blueprint of how to execute a cameo. When Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise showed up and were immediately killed off, it was a funny yet endearing moment that inspired Hill and Tatum’s characters to bond. That was a fully realized cameo that surprisingly served a fucking purpose. This is the absolute antithesis of that. I don’t give a damn how this was meant for “true fans” because relying so heavily on the cameos, Easter eggs, and the presence of old trilogy characters to progress the story of the new one doesn’t give your narrative any weight. True fans can criticize when they’re being blatantly pandered to by the content they’re given. A Star Wars fan will always be a Star Wars fan. The higher the level of one fan’s knowledge shouldn’t discredit your status of being a fan. That said — and I don’t want to come off as condescending at all when I say this — but if you are a fan that is okay with the regurgitation of the same exact formula that we’ve already been presented with in the past, but in a lesser, unexciting, and more convoluted manner, then does that really make you a fan of the franchise or a fan of something that used to be around in “the good ole’ days”? HOLLOWSomething that I astounded nonetheless with the previous entries was that there were so many incredibly specular shots that were unforgettable (huh?). Nothing of genuine excitement or positive expression given all the action set pieces. You could only go so long until you’d get exhausted by the 27th desert terrain planet the leads travel to only to engage in a pointless battle with Stormtroopers where they, as usual, do nothing of value and pose no threat whatsoever. Friggin’ Minions are more villainous, accomplished henchmen than Stormtroopers. At least those fuckers have personalities. It doesn’t take that much to impress me, yet I felt absolutely nothing aside from the moment where Chewie mourned Leia’s passing. Everything else was just a poor imitation of sequences from any of the previous episodes. HOLLOW!
None of the characters — as long as we’ve known them and bonded with them and their personalities — are pushed further to their realized extent. I mentioned how Rey was retconned, but Kylo is barely much of a threat or a fully conceived person, especially for someone who has such an interesting arc that could’ve been fully explored. The character had so much potential and Johnson did everything in his power to place him in a spot where he could’ve been furthered by whoever took the reins next. That or rip out from the pages of Zuko’s book and apply it to him. A friend mine, Hoai-Tran Bui, wrote an entire piece that complements that. The keys were right in front of you and you decided to do nothing with them. Then, Finn and Poe… you could’ve just made them gay. Oscar Isaac was even down for making them gay. Hell, you can find him at your local café working on a fanfiction for the two right now! Nope, you just had to give Poe a love interest played by Keri Russell, who you won’t even recognize because all that’s visible are her eyes. Does she serve a purpose to the story or his arc? No. There’s nothing of importance at all. Then Finn, they give him…. a friend…. a love interest? I still don’t know, but the sheer gal they had to give her the same exact background as Finn and her being Black kind of makes the history of Stormtroopers a bit more confusing and problematic. Yes, I’m going to bring race and class into this because that character, Jannah, who I will name “Female Finn” because that’s what she is, has the same exact background and we learn nothing from her. Finn was one of the first new prominent faces of the trilogy and they turned him into a peddling, useless backseat character who never does anything cool. Hey, I was shipping Rey and Finn for the longest and then when they brought in Rose and Johnson. That kind of made Rey somewhat asexual in the TLJ, which made me reconsider. But damn, Finn has nothing of real value to do and it’s disheartening to see his potential squandered. Finally… Rose. Holy shit. You sons of bitches — and yes, I’m talking about you, Redditors and JJ — gave Kelly Marie Tran hell for the past two years and her character had to face the repercussions of it by becoming invisible. The biggest disservice that pisses me off more than anything is how they made Rose — a character with wits, smarts, heart, and charm — into a fucking nobody who doesn’t get in on the fun. The backlash she received over TLJ from you goddamn children made her character get pushed to the back of the bus and shrouded by other underused characters. We know she’s capable of much more. You made her into such an afterthought that even all her interactions with Finn occur in split seconds, which is so out of character. It’s fucking disrespectful and that’s the hollowest aspect of all.
I’m not pointing my fingers solely at Abrams or Disney. As much as I want to force-choke Disney for being the undisputable kings of “nostalgia market machine that just keeps churning” — especially this year alone where all of their remakes range from mediocre to just pathetic — I cannot put my gripe on them. It’s on Kathleen Kennedy. When she was brought on in 2012 to be the spearhead for Lucasfilm and their new lineage of Star Wars flicks, she had ample time to gather a team and map out what she wanted the new trilogy to be. With Abrams and The Force Awakens, it was a perfect choice because he knows how to revive a dead property and reinvigorate it with life to bring together fans of all ages. My dad introduced me to Star Trek with his movie and that got me into Star Trek for a while. But then Abrams made Into Darkness which, albeit being a fun summer movie, it was just a regurgitation of the Khan storyline which already existed and had been done better. Maybe Johnson’s impact was so strong that this trilogy flew a bit too close to the sun. After the firing of Lord and Miller and the result of Solo’s box office, it became clear that Kennedy didn’t know what the fuck to do with this franchise aside from peeking over Feige’s Marvel playbook. DC already did that and failed! And look at them now. They’re challenging themselves with standalone features lie they used to do back in their early days and they’re all panning out well both financially and critically! Why would another in-house studio that Disney owns want to rip off something that only Marvel was able to pull off? You can’t rush 21 movies of material into three movies. It’s just impossible and pathetic. That said, I’m eager to see what Feige does after he takes over. Maybe he’ll pull this franchise in the new direction that it desperately deserves. It’s not even Star Wars itself because we’ve been proven through video games and television that this franchise is more than the same fucking formula presented on the big screen. So yeah, if there is any lesson to take away from this, it’s that nostalgia is a disease and can suck all the life out of a franchise that has all the tools to progress. I still can’t believe I hated this more than Cats. At least Cats was more entertaining. Fuck. TROS makes me comprehend the hatred that haters of The Last Jedi felt.Rating: 1.5/5 | 36%