Movie review: The Rise of Skywalker

The dead speak!

We don’t negotiate with fanboys that terrorize actors and directors because they didn’t like a film. This movie is why.

It spends 80% of its runtime trying to undo what the last movie did. And even if some fans didn’t like The Last Jedi, they still could have followed the events of that film and told a cohesive, crowd-pleasing story. We didn’t need to retcon everything that was established just because some people didn’t like it. Instead, Rise of Skywalker panders to entitled asshole fanboys, who were determined to hate the sequels no matter what anyway, thereby punishing the people who did.

I already knew, going in, that this movie was a joke. I knew I wasn’t going to love it, but that’s okay; I don’t necessarily like Return of the Jedi and figured “Palpatine returns” would be the 2010s version of “Leia is your sister.” I was willing to go along with the silliness. Still, Rise of Skywalker managed to introduce so much bullshit that I could never have predicted. It’s detestable, really.

I hated the romanticization of relationships with abusive people, with both Poe and Rey.

The kiss between Rey and Kylo Ren was awful. I thought Reylo was just a toxic fanship,^[1] but it’s canon now. (Unless kisses in this universe don’t really mean anything – like Luke and Leia’s kisses, and Finn and Rose’s kiss.) If they were going to do a redemption arc for Kylo Ren (which I’m not the biggest fan of anyway), then he should have worked to earn it. Whatever this is ain’t it. Why is it on Rey to comfort a genocidal maniac?

It was distasteful for Carrie Fisher’s final appearance on screen to be intertwined with such a controversial and shitty moment in the story. Kylo’s turn to the light side was unconvincing.

I also hated Zorii as soon as she held up a gun to Poe’s head. I could immediately tell they were ex lovers and I hated it. I hate any time in a movie where a gun is held up to someone’s head as a joke, and I especially hate that she did that to her ex. Yeah, maybe it’s just a small thing but it really irked me. The Last Jedi introduced some strong female characters, but when making this movie they were like “no we don’t want those kind of strong female characters,” so they gave us the most on-the-nose Strong Female Character™ ever,^[2] and wasted our time doing so. Their relationship wasn’t even interesting. Zorii’s somewhat cool^{(I guess?)} character design was wasted on bad writing.

Palpatine is a joke. The strobe lighting was annoying as fuck. I couldn’t even focus on the actors’ expressions if I wanted to because the flashing lights were giving me a headache. I know it was supposed to be lightning, but the frequency was too much.

Oh how I long for the Finn we saw in Force Awakens. A complete arc. Him to inspire a rebel uprising, him to wield a lightsaber, him to become a Jedi – anything. Hell, even just a kiss at the end for my guy. The whole trilogy tries to set him up with someone, and he ends up with no one. Finn is supposed to be a protagonist with the same standing as Rey.

Yeah yeah nostalgia, but the Tatooine farm should be gone. It was destroyed by the Empire and everybody on it died, and so that place should either have been abandoned or repurposed. No thank you with that cheap ending.

I would have loved it when all the old Jedi actors were talking to Rey at the end, we heard Jar Jar Binks’ voice too.

Obviously the continuity between this and the last film was fucked, but we knew that already. Don’t you remember in The Last Jedi, when Luke was frantically searching for Exegol, and was poring over the sacred Jedi texts and explaining their importance to Rey?

Oh yeah, of course Chewbacca was on a second ship! Didn’t you notice when they hinted at the second ship??

Well, what did I like about this movie? C3PO was lovable. The horses on the ship were ridiculous, but it was entertaining to watch. I liked Jannah,^[3] she’s pretty. Klaud is an icon. I loved the elephant people dancing. And I love seeing Luke as a force ghost even though it wasn’t well written in this movie.

The third film was originally supposed to be directed by Colin Trevorrow and the screenplay was called Duel of the Fates. A copy of it exists online, as well as concept art and a fanmade comic adaptation. The script was not perfect,^[4] but I generally found it more satisfying as the finale of this trilogy. Finn leads an uprising on Coruscant, Luke’s presence as a force ghost is way cooler and even menacing towards Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren had his own “Dagobah” with a creepy anti-Yoda and an illusory battle with Darth Vader, and Rey (still a “nobody”) wields a Darth Maul style dual blade, which makes me feel vindicated because she totally was foreshadowed as using one throughout the trilogy.

It’s really crazy how Disney executives were so panicked after The Last Jedi that they scrapped that decent script and ousted Trevorrow. Instead, they filmed something that feels like a quickly written first draft.

I didn’t like Rise of Skywalker. Oh well, life goes on. These films are long and they ask a lot of you, and if I think about this movie any more, I’m probably gonna go crazy.^[5] I’mma headcanon that some of the events in Duel of the Fates happened and enjoy the plenty of other Star Wars stuff that I do like.