Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t the movie anyone was looking for. J.J. Abrams certainly listened to Kylo Ren’s advice to “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.” The only problem is J.J. focused on “kill” and thought “the past” was just The Last Jedi. Rather than expand on the ideas introduced by Rian Johnson’s subversive and intriguing film, Rise of Skywalker walks back everything to retread the same ground already covered in Return of the Jedi. This is movie making in the reactionary world ruled by online mobs. By trying to react to vocal minority fan opinions, the final film of the Skywalker saga is unlikely to satisfy anyone.
SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker follows.
Good Times
Let’s start with what was truly great about The Rise of Skywalker. Despite all the negative reactions, including my own, it was still an entertaining spectacle. The visual effects are top notch. Watching the black waves surge around Rey and Kylo as they fight on the remains of the second Death Star was awesome. Seeing Rey wield two lightsabers to counter Palpatine’s lightning was a sight to behold, visually and thematically. John Williams’ score is just as stirring now as it ever was.
The relationship between Rey, Finn, and Poe is still wonderful. They’re not Luke, Leia, and Han, but very few casts of characters are. The nice aspect of the new trilogy is that main trio chooses to be a family. This speaks to the notion raised in The Last Jedi that not everyone is a Chosen One, that greatness can rise from anywhere.
Rey’s journey, while imperfect, is satisfying. She struggles to find her way as a Jedi and is tempted to the Dark Side just as much as Luke was. Her female character besting the old man Palpatine is very modern and is the biggest update to the past that gets past Abrams and crew. Some decried Rey as a Mary Sue in The Force Awakens but she was really no different than Luke was in A New Hope. Rey is an inspiring character, but I imagine has to be especially appealing to women. Prior to Rey, the only strong Force users in canon were ones like Ahsoka or Ventress, deep cuts unfamiliar to fans familiar only with the films. If you’re still complaining about a strong female lead in a Star Wars movie, then you’re living too much in the past.
The ending shot of Rey against the same binary sunset as Luke from A New Hope is spine tingling. As the score swells is the familiar theme and our new hero is silhouetted, we are reminded of the past and shown that the future might still be undecided. As Rey takes on the Skywalker surname, one can’t help but contemplate how her journey compares to Anakin and Luke. The final shot is at once a definitive closure and an acknowledgment of the unresolved nature of destiny, prophecy, and the future. We thought Anakin’s redemption was the fulfillment of bringing balance to the Force, but Palpatine’s resurrection and manipulation of Ben Solo shows the balance must always be maintained and not taken for granted.
Unfortunately, as much as I still enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker as pure entertainment, it had it more than its share of flaws. Be warned, I am a staunch supporter of The Last Jedi, so my opinions of The Rise of Skywalker are largely influenced by how the latter film reacts to the former.
Creative Tug-of-War
Say what you will about George Lucas’ script writing, but Episodes I through VI were at least a cohesive vision. The story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall and redemption was clear throughout. Episodes VII through IX feel like a tug of war between factions of the creative team.
Much has been written about whether there was an overarching story to this trilogy. It really feels like there wasn’t. The Force Awakens did a good job re-establishing the Star Wars franchise for a new generation, even if it was a bit too rote. The Last Jedi felt intent on dissecting and subverting everything that came before it, much to many fan’s dismay. Now, after swinging between those two poles, we get The Rise of Skywalker trying to swing back to the rote homage/emulation tact. Abrams and company keep talking about the weight of dealing with a franchise as celebrated and beloved as Star Wars, but you know that before going in so complaining about fan expectations after shouldn’t be allowed. I thought when Disney bought Star Wars there was talk about an overriding creative team in charge of making sure all the different pieces fit, from the main movies to the anthology films to the books and television shows. It sure feels like that team was missing when it came to uniting Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.
One sequence within The Rise of Skywalker exemplifies this push and pull and disagreement about how to move forward. C-3PO reads a Sith dagger but is unable to provide the translation of a forbidden language. Rey, Finn, and Poe make the decision to take the droid to a black market droid tech to access C-3PO’s memory of the translation. The downside: accessing the translation requires wiping C-3PO’s memory. Wiping a droid’s memory is an accepted practice in Star Wars, but C-3PO and R2-D2 have been spared this process and thus allowed to develop more character than any other droids. To proceed with the plot and find the Sith planet, C-3PO’s memory is wiped and he provides the translation. Another piece of the past has been sloughed off to head into the future.
Not so fast. It appears R2-D2 kept a complete backup of C-3PO’s memory. How or why R2 did that isn’t explained. R2 quickly uploads the data into C-3PO, thus totally undoing the sacrifice made to obtain the Sith’s location. And since the backup was made prior to the plan to wipe his memory, C-3PO doesn’t even know what he was forced to do by his friends.
This memory wipe and immediate memory restoration totally symbolizes the relationship between The Rise of Skywalker and The Last Jedi. Abrams chooses to excise the previous film’s forward looking contributions and reset things to the safety of the past.
Rey’s Lineage
The biggest example of this is Rey’s lineage. In The Last Jedi, many fans were outraged to discover that Rey’s parents were supposedly nobodies, especially given the apparent focus on this mystery in The Force Awakens. As I said in my discussion of The Last Jedi, any lineage would upset some set of fans. I don’t think anyone expected Rey to be the granddaughter of Palpatine, though. This twist feels too far out of left field. And for all the weight given to Rey’s familial revelation, it doesn’t really land or play into any events or characters. Rey follows essentially the same arc as Luke did in Return of the Jedi. But Luke’s relation to Darth Vader was much more personal and impactful. It also had much longer to gestate between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And it completed the path of redemption for Anakin. We get none of the character development with Rey’s relation to Palpatine.
I personally loved the notion that Rey’s parents were nobodies. That reinforced the Force as an impartial element of the galaxy. By continuing to focus the strongest Force users in the same families, it feels more like royalty, something you simply inherit rather than earn or discover. The final scene in The Last Jedi really tried to drive home that point with the streetsweeper kid. That tidbit held the promise of more unknown Force users discovering their powers and making it feel more democratic than the Jedi Order ever allowed it to be. Alas, Abrams must have forgot about that kid and his ring because there’s nary a Force user outside of Rey, Kylo, and Palpatine.
The timing of Palpatine having children also does not work in a sensical manner. If you assume Rey is mid-20s at the oldest (she’s likely even younger given her parallels with Luke) that puts her in the same age ballpark as Kylo Ren. Kylo’s parents are, obviously, Han and Leia. We know Leia was born at the end of Revenge of the Sith. So we can assume Rey’s parents might have been born in roughly the same time frame. Which means Palpatine somehow managed to impregnate some poor woman after he became the Emperor. If you assume Rey is any younger, then the timeline gets shifted even closer to the original trilogy, which just raises the “ick” factor of Palpatine having a child. Not a pretty thought. One imagines a Sith mind trick had to be at work for that to happen. But also, it feels totally out of character for Palpatine to have a child, and then to let that child have enough freedom to have another child. Wouldn’t Palpatine have contained and controlled his own child, potentially raising him or her to be a new apprentice? It doesn’t appear Force powers skip a generation, so it’s likely Rey’s parent had some Force power that Palpatine would have wanted to harvest. This whole scenario provides plenty of fodder for future stories to fill in the gaps, but I doubt it will be a satisfactory explanation.
Another missing part of Rey’s lineage was the Force ghosts she sees on Tatooine. She sees Luke and Leia as she accepts the surname Skywalker, turning away from her true heritage. But, if they really wanted to drive home Rey’s resistance to the Dark Side, why were Anakin Skywalker and Ben Solo not present? Both are members of the Skywalker family. Both went to the Dark Side and came back. It would have been an excellent callback to the past and a final nod to Ben’s redemption. I have no idea why this scene was so incomplete. It would have tied together the three trilogies perfectly.
Kylo Ren
One of the most popular characters in this trilogy has been Kylo Ren. That’s not surprising given his relationship and emulation of Darth Vader, another popular Star Wars character. Kylo’s devotion to Vader in The Force Awakens was seemingly broken in The Last Jedi as he destroyed his own helmet after being admonished by Snoke. But one of the first things Kylo does in The Rise of Skywalker is reassemble his helmet. That means he kept the pieces around, which totally destroys the credibility of his action in the first place. I suppose one could accept him holding on to his helmet as illustrating Kylo’s identity crisis, but his slaying of Snoke and appeal to Rey felt like he had changed course. Kylo’s exhortation to “Let the past die” certainly feels a lot flatter given his relapse into Vader worship.
Given Kylo Ren’s return to the Dark Side (if he ever even left) makes it harder to buy his change of heart after his fight with Rey on the ruins of the second Death Star. He was completely ready to strike down Rey when Leia does… something… to change his mind. It wasn’t really clear what happened. Maz simply says Leia knows what must be done. So, that deus ex machine allows Rey to stab Kylo with her lightsaber. That feels out of character for Light Side Rey, but does serve as a warning of the potential for the Dark Side in her. It mirrors Luke’s flirtations with the Dark Side. Then Rey’s Force healing (heavily foreshadowed earlier in the movie, just in case you weren’t aware that was an established Force power) appears to totally turn Kylo from the dark. This didn’t feel like a true turning point for his character. If the driving force behind Kylo’s redemption is his love for Rey, then this scene wasn’t really necessary. Just knowing that she’s going to face Palpatine alone should have been enough to drive Kylo to her side.
One of the better nods to the original trilogy does come with Han Solo’s appearance. I was shocked they actually managed to drag Harrison Ford back, after Han’s death in The Force Awakens was so definitive and partially driven by Ford’s desire to kill Han. But Han’s return is nicely handled as a memory of Kylo that helps turn him to Ben Solo. The best part is Ben trailing off his sentence, “Father…”, and Han responding “I know.” Obviously a callback to the famous “I know” response to Leia’s proclamation of love in The Empire Strikes Back, this allowed the proclamation from Ben to remain silent but clearly understood. An excellent use of the past and beloved reference.
General Hux
Poor General Hux. He just can’t get any respect. He is the butt of a terrible joke to lead off The Last Jedi (I still feel like that opening scene put off a lot of people and predisposed them to dislike the rest of the movie). Now in The Rise of Skywalker he is unceremoniously killed to reinforce the “Kill the past” edict. The person that guns down Hux is apparently a general from the days of the Emperor, thus furthering the reliance on elements of the original trilogy rather than utilizing anything new.
Granted, Hux’s motivation for being the Resistance spy were pretty lame. He says he doesn’t care if the Resistance wins, he just wants Kylo Ren to lose. This doesn’t help strengthen his character and makes him feel like even more of an infantile loser. His actions as a spy feel like a kid disobeying his parents because he was punished by them. But, clearly, Hux was around for some comedic relief and to be gunned down by a geriatric Imperial officer.
Fan Service
A lot of bits in The Rise of Skywalker felt shoehorned in to link it back to the original trilogy. It was clearly an attempt at fan service and also an attempt at “fixing” a lot of fan requests.
The most notable was Chewie finally getting a medal. Much as has been made about Chewie not receiving a medal at the end of A New Hope. It’s almost up there with the kerfluffle over Han shooting first. They try to address that oversight here, but it’s so rushed and so out of place it feels ridiculous. While everyone else is celebrating the defeat of the Emperor and his new fleet, Maz randomly comes up to Chewie and hands him a medal. There’s no ceremony going on or anything. No one else notices or cares. This was purely for the members of the audience upset that Chewie was shortchanged 40 years ago. Where did this medal even come from? Did Maz take it off of Leia? Was Leia really still wearing or carrying a medal from 30 years ago? Doesn’t it belittle Chewie to get a medal like this? I almost laughed out loud when I saw this happen.
The remaining main character from the original trilogy that had not appeared in this new trilogy was Lando. That was “fixed” in this movie. But Lando served no real purpose. He’s acknowledged as a General. And I suppose it’s his pull that finally gets other members of the galaxy to answer the plea for help. But why didn’t those same people respond to Leia’s plea? Surely Leia was much more renowned and respected. Thus the grand entrance of the calvary to help destroy Palpatine’s fleet felt like another deus ex machina rather than a triumph. Lando was here mostly to recreate the attack on the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, piloting the Millenium Falcon and taking out world destorying laser cannons.
Lando does utter the famous phrase used in every Star Wars movie, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” But it’s use is so shoehorned and inexplicable that they might as well have left it out. Usually this phrase is used when the characters are approaching some unknown danger. In this case, it’s used as First Order ships clearly come for our heroes. Of course you have a bad feeling about that, Lando.
One more bit related to Lando his is conversation with the black female ex-Stormtrooper. They instantly relate to each other. There seems to be a weird romantic chemistry developing between them. Then Lando randomly says they’ll find out who her family is. Queue the author being assigned that novel. This was clearly here to provide a jumping off point for a side story of some sort. A better fit would have been to continue the relationship between this Stormtrooper and Finn.
Finn, though, is too busy being in too many relationships. His romance with Rose appears to have cooled down. The only hint we still get of that relationship is the occassional tearful reaction from Rose when Finn puts himself in danger. Finn seems to hit it off with the ex-Stormtrooper; a shared past and a shared mystery will do that. But Finn seems to also still harbor feelings for Rey. At one point he’s about to tell her something, but gets cut off by events. They reference it a couple times throughout the movie, only to never pay it off.
Was Rose pushed to the side to mollify those unfortunate fans who disliked her character? Hopefully not. But another element derided by fans was the Holdo maneuver, when General Holdo sacrificed herself by ramming the First Order ship with a hyperspeed jump into it. When the Resistance fighers are brainstorming ways to take out Palpatine’s fleet, someone chimes in with the suggestion of the Holdo maneuver. Finn immediately responds that it was a one in a million action and they won’t attempt it. This was clearly thrown in to try and quiet those fans that wondered why everyone wasn’t taking out ships with this tactic. One rebuttal is that it’s the equivalent of a suicide bomber, and only a certain type of fanatic is willing to die like that. The counter to that rebuttal is the existence of droids or other unmanned ships. But if one goes down that path, why are living beings fighting at all in these wars? Droids are clearly ubiqitous and not the sole province of the First Order or the Resistance. Shouldn’t everyone be fighting like Ender’s Game and saving actual lives while sacrificing machines? By even bringing up the Holdo maneuver the movie opens up this can of worms all over again rather than letting the past die.
The End of the Journey
For better or worse, The Rise of Skywalker concludes the latest Star Wars trilogy. The film provides enough closure to move forward, but one has to wonder what that future holds if the main films are going to be so shackled to the past. Hopefully with this trilogy being billed as the end of the Skywalker saga we can move to new stories. Or, if we’re sticking with the past, go even further back to eras like those in Knights of the Old Republic.
When Kylo Ren told Rey to “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to,” he wasn’t saying to forget the past. He was saying we can’t live in the past; it does no good to dwell on the past. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the memories or learn lessons.
I just hope with all the fighting and criticisms against each of these new episodes that fans can make some peace and look forward to enjoying the classical elements of Star Wars. As Rey takes on the Skywalker name, it shows there is still a choice to how one views and accepts one’s past. It highlights the most important lesson from this new trilogy.
Your future isn’t a destiny predetermined by your past.
And that gives me the most hope for Star Wars moving forward. Let’s enjoy the myths, the new ones as well as the ones from long, long ago.
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