The Rise of Skywalker

Right there in the title is an odd choice: I hope we're past the statute of limitations on the previous entry in the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi, because here's the big thing: at the end of Last Jedi, Luke dies, becoming one with the Force and trusting the legacy of the Jedi with Rey, whose personal ancestry wasn't important, but who carried within her a connection to the Force that could save a new generation.

I liked the Last Jedi, and the complaints about it hardened my admiration for it. I grew up on Star Wars - there was a period in late elementary school when I was watching two movies a day - I'd star with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and the next day I'd be watching Return of the Jedi and A New Hope again. There's a reason these movies are such cultural touchstones, and they are certainly a part of the mythological upbringing that formed my own fantasy tastes.

But I've come a long way since I was ten in terms of the complexity I want from my art. Star Wars worked so well in the first place largely because it was a pure distillation of Campbell's Hero's Journey. But of the original trilogy, the one I liked least as a kid but now recognize as the most interesting and effective movie, is The Empire Strikes Back. This is the one in which the Rebels are forced to flee, Han is captured, and Luke loses his big lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, only to realize that Vader has just been toying with him in an effort to corrupt and recruit him.

And I think it's a popular consensus that Empire was the best of them. It expanded a rather threadbare universe into something that felt lived-in and fleshed out.

So yes, I think that in the long run, if we're still talking about these sequels, Last Jedi will be considered the best. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

My overall take on Rise of Skywalker is that it felt like this was the movie JJ Abrams had been planning (except that he was also banking on Carrie Fischer being alive) for IX when they made the Force Awakens. So I can't exactly fault him for making this one, and relying on the big plot twists it had.

The thing I cannot understand is how they let Rian Johnson make his daring, subversive, and audacious Last Jedi if they were planning on basically ignoring the ideas it brought up.

Let's go into spoiler space:


My favorite thing in the Last Jedi is a relatively small detail, but it's one that is entirely nullified in The Rise of Skywalker. Rey has been looking for her parents since she was a child, but Kylo Ren tells her that he looked into it, and actually, her parents were just nobodies. The point was: it didn't matter who Rey's parents were. She's the one who's actually important. And this was reinforced as the example of Luke Skywalker single-handedly facing down the First Order from light years away inspired people across the galaxy to rise up, like the little kid who force-pulls his broom to him - yes, even this random stablehand has the potential to be a hero. It was a wonderful message for a story that has inspired countless kids to imagine themselves to one day be heroic Jedi knights.

So when it's revealed in this movie that Rey is actually Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter, born to a previously-unknown and not even named in this movie child (we don't even know which of her parents is a Palpatine - maybe it's both, Game of Thrones-style,) it takes a lot of the wind out of the egalitarian sails Rian Johnson had raised.

What we all hated about fucking midichlorians was that it reduced a mystical, mysterious phenomenon to something easily testable. And that really drives home an important point:

Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction.

Now, to walk that back a bit, obviously it has science fiction elements. There are robots, spaceships, aliens, and eschews (partially) the medievalism that many consider inextricable from the fantasy genre.

If you've read this blog much, or if you've read my own fiction on Dispatches From Otherworld, you're well aware that while I enjoy medieval fantasy just fine (the next post is likely to be about The Witcher) I'm profoundly inspired by books like Stephen King's Dark Tower series or games like Myst that showed that you can do really interesting fantasy without making everything about knights in castles with British accents. Star Wars is one of the greatest examples of this.

That's, of course, not to say that powerful bloodlines aren't a big part of fantasy. I mean, Roland from the Dark Tower, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, and Daenerys Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire are all important to an extent because of their ancestry. The specific mechanics of that are left mystical and mysterious, as fantasy is wont to do.

But the Last Jedi subverted that idea - the last shot of the movies is an unnamed, maltreated stable-boy who displays that he, too, is powerful with the Force. To me, the Last Jedi suggested an ending akin to the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (spoilers for a show that ended 16 years ago or so,) in which Willow - someone who earned her power on her own terms, even if she took some bad missteps along the way - changed the patriarchal system that had limited the Slayers' power and gave it to hundreds if not thousands of girls across the world, chosen not by ancestry but by a broader destiny. Even if that show's last seasons were perhaps a mixed bag (and Joss Whedon might have been a bit more performative in his identification as a feminist than he had really earned the right to be), it was a perfect way to end the show, because it opened the fantasy of the show - the strength and heroism that its protagonist exhibited - to the entire audience.

The plot of the Rise of Skywalker wouldn't really work without undoing this great subversion from the Last Jedi. And I'll confess that there was at least one really interesting notion that the movie introduced: namely, that the souls of the Sith seem to be absorbed by the one who kills his or her master. It makes the whole "train an apprentice just so that they'll kill you" strategy for the Sith feel less idiotic.

More idiotic is that the Emperor has somehow survived the events of Return of the Jedi as some kind of Lich-like thing. Mind you - I think an undead overlord makes perfect sense in Star Wars as a space-fantasy story, but the Emperor's destruction in Return of the Jedi was the last actual tangible accomplishment from the end of the original trilogy that hadn't been undone by the Force Awakens.

The thing that struck me also was how the movie kept toying with taking big risks. Relatively early, we see Rey accidentally lose control and send force lightning up at a transport she's trying to prevent from leaving the planet, blowing it up while we believe that Chewbacca is on board. For the finale of the saga, it seemed like a good stakes-raising moment, but it was confirmed basically one scene later that he's fine, and she blew up some other ship. Similarly, there's a potentially poignant moment where C-3PO undergoes a memory wipe to allow him to translate some forbidden Sith writing, forgetting everything that's ever happened to him. But as soon as R2-D2 is reunited with him, Threepio goes boom, back to his old self, status quo safely preserved.

Of course, Leia does eventually die, when she reaches out to her son in the middle of a lightsaber duel with Rey, giving Rey the opening to stab Kylo Ren through with her sword. I'm willing to forgive a lot of the awkwardness around Leia given the real-life challenges of losing an irreplaceable actor before you can shoot the movie. So even though it's definitely noticeable that they were writing around dialogue that had already been shot for another purpose, I give the whole team a big pass on this, with much love to the memory of Carrie Fischer.

I guess I won't go through everything that Abrams walked back (though bringing in Keri Russel as a character who seemed to primarily serve to show Poe Dameron isn't gay felt pretty groan-worthy,) but the movie felt very much like the "playing it safe" sequel.

Here's the thing, though: I would not have minded it so much if that had been the entire point of the trilogy. The Force Awakens brought in fun new characters - I liked Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren, and Poe - but it ran them through a retread plot. I liked the movie, having been nervous that it was going to suffer from the prequels' problems. But Abrams' weaknesses as a filmmaker are not Lucas'. Lucas had tons of imagination - and the prequels' stories were certainly not the same as the original trilogy - but he had A: no sense of restraint and B: not a good sense for writing dialogue or getting good performances out of actors. Abrams managed to do fine with actors and the dialogue is fun, quippy, and the sort of thing you're looking for in a movie of this genre (with the occasional problematic-when-you-think-about-it lines like "They sold you to protect you.")

But Abrams just doesn't come up with original stories. He just wants to take out his old action figures and reenact the movies he loved as a kid. And I get that. And I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't been for the ambition and guts that Rian Johnson brought with his middle installment.

I'll confess that I have a kneejerk defensiveness toward the Last Jedi, and the way that people complained about the wrong things has sometimes made it harder for me to take thoughtful criticism of it seriously. It's not a perfect movie, of course (no movie is) but it was a movie that focused more on the saga's themes than its plot, exploring things like what it does to a person to be a legendary hero, and what biases might cloud our judgment, and the hard lessons one must learn in order to actually be a good leader.

The Rise of Skywalker was not meant to challenge its audience.

Some might say that they want familiar things like Star Wars to simply be comfort food, and I get that. And I wish I could say "well, just watch the original trilogy if you want that," but we're still in a place where you can't get the unadulterated theatrical (or early home-video) cuts.

But Star Wars was a thing before I was born. If we are going to revisit it, there should be a reason why. Let's examine it, with the benefit of wisdom gained from age, and reexamine what it means and why it works. The Last Jedi was not some depressing, burn-it-all-down deconstruction. It was a step toward reconstructing Star Wars, searching for a deeper meaning for the hope and heroism that it represents. Yes, exploring that can be awkward and it can be painful, but the whole notion is that we come out the other side better than where we were.

You know, like the hero's journey.