The dead don’t die. Everything old is new again. Characters in the galaxy imagined by George Lucas in 1977’s “Star Wars” may believe that balance is achievable, but in real life such a thing seems all but impossible. Lucas and his teams managed amazing feats of plate-spinning with “Star Wars” and, against all odds, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Beginning with the kid- and merchandise-friendly “Return of the Jedi” in 1983, however, and continuing through two new primary trilogies, the “Star Wars” movies have struggled to find the same equilibrium.
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Decades later, the true nature of these movies descended from early adventure serials is still debatable. Is “Star Wars: a new cultural mythology, a framework to interrogate our own reliance on familiar entertainment, or a series of movies primarily aimed at kids, with enough flash and spectacle to appeal to adults?
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“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” ditches any semblance of balance. This movie accepts, even embraces, that “Star Wars” is fundamentally a series of movies for kids — and, in this case, not necessarily an artfully crafted one. This “final” chapter in the Skywalker Saga is a long, propulsive and messy chase movie that sends characters scrambling after one McGuffin or another and the dramatic results vary at best. Maybe Rey (Daisy Ridley) will learn something new about her family; perhaps Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) will strive to reconcile his own family history with the buzzing school-shooter anger that fuels his vendettas. Mostly, Rey, Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) flit from one planet to another, bickering and cracking jokes while blasting Stormtroopers and evading the dogged and evil First Order.
After a bold opening crawl which establishes that (as suggested by trailers) the Emperor has already returned, the movie settles into a familiar, not-all-that challenging rhythm. Director J.J. Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio focus on the same sort of nostalgia-inducing images and character combinations that inflated “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in 2015. (Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, who developed an earlier version of the movie, get story credit alongside Abrams and Terrio.) There’s a First Order officer, played with pitch-perfect venom by Richard E. Grant, who could have been in any of the original trilogy films (a pity he wasn’t in this series from the jump). There’s a Force Ghost and a couple of familiar ships and more than a few returning faces — some expected, like Billy Dee Williams, reprising Lando Calrissian, and some not.
In its best moments — of which there aren’t that many — the nostalgia tricks work almost as well as in “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ doesn’t raise any new themes or ideas; it isn’t about anything that wasn’t already set in motion by previous films. However, as dicey as it all is narratively, Abrams & co. milk earnest thrills out of acts of unity writ large, and find a corny emotional buoyancy in heartfelt reunions.
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And yet there’s the puzzling decision to use outtakes of the late Carrie Fisher to keep General Leia Organa in the story for as long as possible. While cleverly reverse-engineer integrated into the story, these moments ultimately never seem like anything other than scrap riffs awkwardly remixed into a would-be hit single. Fisher’s first appearance in the film is as a head floating awkwardly on a digital body, and Leia’s dialogue is uniformly vague and disconnected. The overall effect would be wholly ghoulish were it not for Fisher’s unique charm.
To many, this movie will feel like a jarring experience coming on the heels of Rian Johnson‘s ‘The Last Jedi,’ which attempted to unpack and deconstruct all the bits and pieces of ‘Star Wars’ mythology in order to push the story into new territory. Johnson tried to look forward as steadfastly as Abrams looks back, but here Abrams has the last word. All the big narrative and thematic swings of ‘The Last Jedi’ are undermined or undone by this story to an almost heartbreakingly disappointing level.
Killing ‘Star Wars’ so that it could live was neat, but ultimately, nostalgia won; looking back is the path forward. This is a world of black and white; gone are the grey and Earth-colored robes of Luke Skywalker in ‘The Last Jedi.’ There is little nuance, or reflection, only a desire to lean on the joke and the setpieces that worked before. Nothing George Lucas did was new. It was all cribbed from Kurosawa and Ford and Joseph Campbell and “Flash Gordon,” but he put bits together in a way that at least looked fresh. His influences weren’t “Star Wars.” While “The Rise of Skywalker” draws from a few different sources — George Miller‘s “Mad Max” movies, Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s “El Topo,” and even (seriously) “Hellraiser II,” in one appealingly nightmarish look at the resurrected Emperor Palpatine — most of this movie’s influences are other “Star Wars” movies. The serpent is choking on its own tail. This is fan fiction on the largest possible scale. Abrams’ decision to undo Johnson’s attempts to boldly tear down and reinvent “Star Wars” plus his refusal to truly push the story in any new direction limits its scope and makes it all feel like he’s playing in someone else’s sandbox.
Perhaps this is the entertainment landscape we’ve made for ourselves by accepting or applauding franchises like “Halloween” and “The Terminator” as they willfully disregard storytelling efforts that are deemed less than ideal. In those two examples, many of the erased storylines are years and even decades old. This Star Wars movie races to dismantle ‘The Last Jedi’s ideas as quickly as possible.
And yet, ‘The Rise of Skywalker; is as much metafiction as Johnson’s film was. Rather than asking questions about what we really want from a series like “Star Wars,” and whether we’re ready to allow our childhood fictions to grow with us, J.J. Abrams and crew decide to lean on the emotional warmth of reunions, friendships, redemptions, and goodbyes. There is some heartfelt value here, or at least, some of it does admittedly produce some anthemic feels, but it doesn’t hold much weight. Ultimately Abrams, taking this epic ship in for one last seat-of-its pants landing and says definitively, that there are no questions to ask, that it’s all just glossy entertainment, and that we can recycle the same ideas over and over for decades into the future and beyond. [C]