It took a while to get a grasp on that one. The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t as terrible as some folks have immediately decided, though it’s a lot further from being a masterpiece... it’s just that it’s completely baffling and then kinda forgettable. I watched it at the movies within two days of it being released and only now have I been able to figure out how I’m gonna write about it.

I think the reason for that is this film, this whole trilogy really but especially the first and last, are built to work on an emotional level rather than a logical level and if that’s the intention then job done. Tick the box and we can all go home. Other than an extremely sketchy first half hour, Rise of Skywalker is a blistering trip through space full of twists and turns and action and drama and plenty of fun for the whole family. The time you spend watching it – if you haven’t already, which you probably should’ve coz I’m not apologising for spoilers here – will be time well spent. It’s a perfectly enjoyable movie.

But once you walk out of the theatre and start pondering it... SW:TROS (as nobody is calling it) loses it’s shine quicker than a new pair of footy boots in winter. The reason the first half hour is so horrible is that it spends that time basically unravelling any hint of the complexity that Rian Johnson tried to give the franchise in the previous film The Last Jedi. I hadn’t rewatched anything leading into this so I was kinda hoping for the scroll text to fill in some blanks but instead it was all chaos. The dead live now? What’s going on here. The tone was strange and the exposition stranger and that’s not really the mindframe you wanna be watching a popcorn blockbuster with. They almost threw a salvaging floatation device our way with Adam Driver’s Kyle Ren on a rampage but then he got to his destination and here we go... Emperor Palpatine’s back. Yeah turns out he’s been alive this whole time, living in a machine planet or something, and he was pulling the strings all along even though Darth Vader killed him back in the 80s and, like... this is canon now? Jeezus.

The idea itself is skull-slammingly stupid but it’s made worse by the fact that they laid zero groundwork for this twist. It’s just a random thing that happens, as if it was written in two minutes by a lazy script supervisor or an interfering studio suit... which I’m not gonna rule out. They’d already set up a big bad with that Snoke thingamajig (Snoke was stupid too, hence Rian Johnson’s film killed him – shout out to that guy because The Last Jedi stocks have soared in value since TROS came out). But nah they couldn’t even come up with an original villain for this trilogy closer. To make it worse they don’t even explain how Palpatine survived... this old bastard got force zapped to hell and back then thrown down a cavernous well on a planet-sized spaceship which was promptly annihilated. Even Harry Houdini’s looking at that script and being like: bro, come on.

How typical though. The first film in this trilogy, the other one also directed by JJ Abrams, was so mind-numbingly paint by numbers that if you were under any illusions as to the real reasons why this franchise was being revived then you knew now that money was the defining factor. How to please the maximum amount of people at once whilst still creating a film worth watching just enough for the dollars to roll in. But they succeeded, largely thanks to the sheer delight of seeing so many of these favourite old characters back on the big screen and relevant once more.

Problem was, that nostalgia factor wasn’t ever gonna last until third film. This trilogy needed to stand alongside the originals rather than walking in their shadows but for some reason The Last Jedi copped a bad rap and Disney freaked out and gave the third one back to Abrams. I don’t know why TLJ got that reputation. It was an ambitious film that didn’t always land on its feet but it tried things and it had something new to say about this universe that it depicted. The hint that Rey might simply be an orphan, that her parents were nobodies... that was fresh and exciting, enough to make you wonder where the third one might run with that mythology. But that was just another idea from the second film which is dumped on in the third, like the character of Rose Tico who is completely shoved to the sidelines here. So petty.

This one was supposed to be about resolutions and wrapping up the trilogy with cohesion but there wasn’t a whole lot of that on offer here, mate. A few times the film seemed willing to take a risk only to completely bail on the idea. Like when they pretend to kill off Chewbacca and then play it off as one big sike-out... which I literally still don’t understand. Was it a different ship? Was it a force projection? Whatever it was, once they copped out on that the message was clear: you’ll be getting nothing new today, fair viewer.

Think of it like a snowball effect. They made some terrible storytelling decisions in the first half hour and then spent the rest of the movie having to live with them as the consequences of that grew bigger and bigger. Abrams did have one last ace up his sleeve, the same one he lived off for the first one in this trilogy: nostalgia. So we got cameos from all sorts of old mates. Lando Calrissian showed up. Emperor Palpatine showed up. Luke Skywalker showed up, even though he’s dead. Hell, we even got an extended scene with Han Solo (also dead) which might have only lasted a few minutes but you can guarantee that Harrison Ford got the heftiest cash per screen time pay cheque of the lot of them. That would’ve been one expensive cameo. Oh yeah and we got a fair bit of Princess Leia too despite Carrie Fisher no longer being with us. Those scenes... oh man. Like, I appreciate the sentiment but it sorta seemed as though they only had fifty decent seconds of Carrie footage to use and just spliced it up. She only speaks a few words and it’s like she’s in a whole different movie to whoever she’s talking to, it’s so obviously not what they wanted it to be.

Also for a film as telegraphed as this one, why does Finn keep trying to tell Rey some big secret only for them to never actually get around to saying what it is? Chekhov’s Gun, dudes. Come on. George Lucas would never.

They also got really freaky with the force in this one to where it became a bit of a narrative crutch to lean on. Messages being sent across time and space and characters revived from the dead and at one point Palpatine literally tries to suck the life out of Rey and Kylo to restore his own power and if that ain’t a bloody hammer on the nail representation of why the phrase OK Boomer exists then I don’t know what is. This just isn’t a very well told story and you can see the proof of that in the reaction. For a film franchise which has had such a lasting life because of the mythology and fanfare that it created... there’s nothing here to keep people talking. We got maybe one week of good memes out of it and then it was out of the public conversation. That’s not a good look.

What saves this film is that emotional core and the pace at which it unfolds. I can’t say much about it being too long when the next film I wanna write about is The Irishman but things happen so fast in this one that it feels longer than it actually is... and it’s pretty long. But that also keeps you distracted enough that you let the rollercoaster take you where it will rather than second guessing the directions (probably why it all hits you as you leave the theatre). There’s a level of technical expertise that blockbuster films are always going to have with the budgets they’re given and needless to say the visuals are incredible. Gotta love that John Williams score too, even after all these years.

That frantic pace actually clouds a lot of the emotional stuff... but we do get some delicious tension whenever Kylo Ren and Rey share the screen. That’s about the only aspect of this thing that was consistent the whole way through the three films. Individually, Kylo had some sloppiness with his arc and I didn’t buy Rey’s moral wobbles at all but those two together were easily the best thing on offer here and I reckon they handled their journey pretty sweetly. As for Rey Palpatine, that reveal was garbage. But ReyLo, or whatever the internet’s calling them... that lived up to the hype. That’s where this film thrived... full credit to a couple fantastic actors.

This probably reads like a way more scathing review than it should. The film’s fine, as I already said it’s a perfectly enjoyable few hours that’ll exhilarate and thrill. It just doesn’t have a lot of substance to it and it sacrifices all integrity by trying to rewrite the previous film out of a weak pandering to a portion of loud fanboys and probably a bit too much ego as well from those calling the shots. The disappointment is only in response to expectations though so if you lower those expectations to, say, Marvel movie level (it’s you and me, Scorsese!) then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Rise of Skywalker plays it safe and hits the usual spots, leading to a strangely forgettable experience by the end of it but there are worse Star Wars films than this one out there. At least three of them. Whatever. No worries. It’s just a movie.

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