How The Rise of Skywalker defines Disney’s Star Wars trilogy
Now it’s complete, what was Disney’s Star Wars trilogy about?
The Force Awakens was about introducing a new cast of characters and reestablishing the franchise with reassuring familiarity.
Under new stewardship, ten years after the prequel trilogy concluded, audiences wanted to know Star Wars was in safe hands. It was a quasi-remake of A New Hope, the safest movie Disney could produce and exactly what it needed to be to get the franchise back up and running.
Episode 7 was safe and took few risks, but it succeeded because of the core group of brilliant new characters it introduced. Rey, Kylo Ren, Finn and Poe Dameron were charming, interesting, well-cast and the perfect basis for a new story.
The Last Jedi was about building on that by exploring what the trilogy could be about.
Rian Johnson’s sequel was a coming of age tale about Rey and Kylo Ren growing more sure of themselves as the mentors they looked up to let them down. Rey was disappointed to discover Luke Skywalker was flawed and didn’t live up to his legend, at least not in her time with him, while Kylo Ren decided Supreme Leader Snoke was only holding him back.
A literal and figurative connection between Rey and Kylo opens up as they begin to better understand each other. He wonders why Rey wants a family so badly when his let him down. She wonders how the former Ben Solo could turn on his family when she never knew or had one of her own.
Episode 8 is also an examination of the series itself, challenging ideas of myth, legacy and nostalgia. It attempts to democratise the force as well, first through making Rey someone unrelated to any existing characters in the series, and then through its final scene as a force-sensitive, impoverished boy looks to the stars.
The Last Jedi posited that this new incarnation of Star Wars should be about more than a small pool of related characters. That it should move forward, not look back. As the second film in a trilogy however there was only so much it could do. It would be up to the concluding chapter to carry these ideas forward… or not.
Handed a blank page and tasked with ending the Star Wars saga after 42 years, writer-director JJ Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio play it safe. Hilariously, desperately safe. And the result is creatively inert.
People will debating The Rise of Skywalker’s place in the larger saga for a long time. Everything it builds on, everything it undermines, what is does and doesn’t achieve. Removed entirely from that however, it’s not a story told very well. The script is a second draft at best and structurally it’s a total mess.
The film can be enjoyable on a base level, but it’s pandering and little about it feels meaningful or earned. It’s as though every discussion in the planning process started with someone saying: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
Whether or not they were encouraged by LucasFilm, the decisions made by Abrams and Terrio might have worked better had they been braver or had more time to hone the scattershot script. They didn’t and they didn’t, so what we’re left with is a screenplay laden with clunky exposition and lazy fan-service.
*** Spoilers Ahead ***
From the jarring opening crawl through to the pivotal revelation roughly halfway through, Episode 9 is a hyperactive chase from planet to planet, set piece to set piece, MacGuffin to MacGuffin. It’s a breathless rush convoluted in its pursuit of a very simple goal: to get all the characters to the same location for the film’s final act.
This could have been accomplished in a much simpler way, allowing the first half of the movie to better establish character and theme instead of being so bafflingly focused on the heroes trying to find plot-driving space trinkets.
Frustratingly, amid the rush there are plot points that might have been somewhat daring, but which are either immediately undone or eventually swept away.
C-3PO scarifies his memories for the greater good, only for R2-D2 to give them back after his reset serves a few gags. General Hux is revealed to be the First Order spy only for him to be immediately found out and killed. Believing he’s going to die, Finn wishes to tell Rey something, but he never does and we never find out what he wanted to say. Chewbacca is thought to be killed when Rey loses control, but immediately after we see our heroes react to this loss the audience finds out he’s alive. He was on a different ship nobody noticed take off in the middle of a desert, obviously!
Moments like these end up carrying no weight. They’re pointless, and in turn the first half of the film feels pointless too.
Central to the trilogy is the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. For them, The Rise of Skywalker picks up where we left off. Still messes of internal conflict, they continue to dance around each other probing for ways to turn the other to the dark or light side. They embody the struggle at the heart of the whole series.
Their story just about sticks the landing despite how predictably it plays out, thanks entirely to the legwork of the previous two films and the strength of Ridley and Driver’s performances.
A pivotal moment for them in The Rise of Skywalker is also the best scene in the film. Leia, using the last of her strength, reaches out to her son as he’s about to land a killing blow on Rey. This creates an opening in which Rey takes Kylo’s lightsaber and plunges it into his chest. Realising what she’s done and sensing Leia’s passing, Rey uses the force to heal Ben Solo’s wound and save his life.
Prior to this is the film’s central twist, which reveals that Rey is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine.
Rian Johnson’s intention with The Last Jedi was to not give Rey what she craved, instead giving her an even more tragic backstory that makes her determination to be good more meaningful. By not making her heritage an important plot point, Rey was also separated from the saga to date and the entwined stories of specific, powerful bloodlines.
The point was to not define the character by who she’s related to, but by who she chooses to be.
Diving back into the series’ small gene pool feels cheap and the revelation ends up making Rey’s story a complete retread of Luke’s arc in the original trilogy. Both are related to the villain and their lineage used to lure them to the dark side. Both resist, both are nearly killed by the Emperor, both are saved by a Skywalker. We’ve seen it all before.
The Rise of Skywalker is an okay movie. It’s poorly-constructed and its script is a mess but it looks fantastic, has good performances and a few decent scenes. The problem with it as a Star Wars movie however, is that it has been made by a director who is a fan first and a filmmaker second.
Through the choices made in Episode 9, Abrams and LucasFilm decided this latest trilogy wouldn’t about anything rich or meaningful, but about Star Wars and why Star Wars is cool.
There are the same themes of identity, family and good versus evil that were also present in the original trilogy, but in The Rise of Skywalker they’re weaved into the story in familiar ways to reach conclusions we’ve seen before. The story leaves everything roughly where it was at the start of The Force Awakens, rendering the sequel trilogy broadly meaningless.
In the end it was just the same story, again.
