Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

cinema, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) film

Once you're home to Christmas lights and a hot cup of tea it seems ungrateful to be downhearted about the failure of a film to do what you want it to, in a rich, Western world in which we have so much. But while I was there I couldn't help the hollow feeling I was getting from this latest and last in the current 'Star Wars' trilogy. In the interests of disclosure I should say that I had no expectations whatsoever, except for the tiniest light under a bush of a hope that it would be a better film than 'The Last Jedi,' and as I had successfully avoided all details of the hype, just the bare facts that Emperor Palpatine and Lando Calrissian would return, this only gave me enhanced security that I might enjoy what they came up with because it would be entirely new to me. Like Episode VIII I feel obligated to give the film at least two stars, just because it's 'Star Wars' and features some of those old actors, but this goes right back to the start of this trilogy and its desire to play with the nostalgia of the original trilogy (OT), while also giving us a new main cast to carry the story, with the emphasis on modern ideals to make little girls love this stuff more by appealing to them directly. Not saying that's bad, just that it lessens the chances of the films appealing to a middle-aged male. I feel the problems were inherent in the concept - I applauded the use of the old characters, sets and style of filmmaking that was all in reaction to the heavy CGI and lack of connection to the OT in the prequels, but in retrospect it might have been better to dispense with them and concentrate completely on the new ones.

I'm not saying that would have made them appeal to me more, just that a clear vision might have been the result rather than trying to meld two distinct generations together. Either that, or don't bother with a new main cast, put all the old people back together and have them go on an altogether different adventure, obviously not predicated on personal action and peril. But that could have been too far from the 'Star Wars' concept, which this trilogy adheres to strongly. If you think about it, of course you're going to have wars, and happening in the stars - the clue's in the name! That still didn't prevent me from hoping for a more coherent universe that was a believable extrapolation from the end of 'Return of the Jedi.' That was another problem with the series, there was no satisfying explanation for the state of the galaxy at war, it was just so because that's what you need it to be for the set-piece action and mythic storytelling. And that's another thing, this mythic narrative doesn't follow the conventions of myth and legend, it's all a bit muddled and unsure of itself. Originality would be a boon, but in reality it was set firmly in the OT mould in the sense that they were using those films as the template for chunks of each new film. In consequence you feel yourself essentially viewing the same events, just a bit shifted around, like a moveable jigsaw puzzle, but when you put it all together it's nowhere near as strong a picture. I find this same style of storytelling in so many of the latest franchise films, and maybe formula is what you should get when that's what you're paying for, but again, it doesn't provide much of an experience for those well versed in the Force.

Repeating some of the best bits with superior graphics and inferior everything else wasn't a good idea. You can't see this trilogy as its own thing because it is so heavily invested in those old films, but at the same time I find myself thinking how much more I'd be enjoying one of those old films rather than seeing the same sort of thing with these new characters. Part of it is no doubt the jadedness of age: I even thought Episode II was pretty great when it first came out, and now it's the worst. It's no help to me, however, to know that it might be me that's part of the 'problem,' and I still think that if they had managed to get someone less bland and safe to direct then the material might have been elevated, but only if the writing was also vastly improved. Except JJ Abrams wasn't the only guy to be responsible, it was Rian Johnson who directed Episode VIII, so who knows how it might have been saved? The OT had three different Directors, but it was also held together by one man's vision, whereas it's painfully obvious that this trilogy went off the rails between the first two parts, and was never really 'on the rails' to begin with. This third instalment appears to be an attempt to get back towards the initial direction that Abrams set in motion, but I never got the impression there was a clear idea of travel from the start. Was Rey always going to be the granddaughter of Palpatine or did they bring in the Emperor as a ploy to win over the disaffected? Did they map out how the war would end and the whos, whats and wheres? Or did they just make it up as they went along? That's what it felt like to me.

It was a long film, something around two and a half hours, and it did drag, but the length of a film has no bearing on its enjoyment factor - in fact, the best films are the ones you wish were even longer because you don't want to leave that world! That was far from the case here, it was a lot of running around using up time rather than building a story structure. The films have always been a bit messy in terms of location and object, but somehow the OT flowed neatly and purposefully. This film in particular didn't appear to have a strong structure. I'm not even sure what it was about, and if you can't sum up a story concept simply then you've failed. It was about finding a gizmo that points the way to a place where Palpatine is holed up so Rey and Ren can confront their destiny, I suppose is the best I can do, but it's not entirely as simple as that. What was the purpose of the other main characters, Finn and Poe? Finn seems to have a new girlfriend every film and Poe balks at command when he's thrust into the role at last, yet in the previous films he's quick to lead and even go against his superiors because he's so sure of himself, so this newfound crisis of confidence rang false. They also undercut any dramatic potential by quickly and easily undoing any terrible things that happen. By my count this happened at least three times: firstly, when Chewbacca is believed killed when Rey and Ren Force-fight over an enemy transport, tearing it apart; then C-3PO must sacrifice his life (essentially - his memory of all that had gone before, though they pulled that stunt to similar effect in the prequel trilogy); and lastly in Rey killing Ren.

In each of these cases there's little time to experience horror, remorse or regret before the problem is solved, and this is where the 'Disney' effect comes in hard as if they're afraid to deal out too much to the characters because it's for children. That's fine, but that's also why it appeals far less to me. It's not because I want to see Chewie die, of course I don't, but if you remove the stakes and think that at every turn everyone's going to be fine then where is your drama? I never thought for a moment that Rey was really going to turn to the Dark Side, a growing plot point that had been poorly implemented across the trilogy - it was like an even poorer man's Anakin from the PT, someone we know is inevitably going to turn. At least Rey was a little more likeable than that awful character in Episodes II and III. Actually, likeable is too strong a word, she was middling, and I don't rate Daisy Ridley as an actress. Whether it was her local southern British accent that makes her so everyday to me, or that the character never went anywhere, I don't know, but I never found myself caring what happened to her. At least Poe had a slight edge to him, even if he was just a younger, tamer Han Solo. Finn, too, was awfully bland and forgettable, so it was up to the older supporting cast to prevent the film from being completely at a loss (although I do think Kylo Ren's role had some interest, and he's clearly a good actor).

I was pleased that 3PO actually made it into the adventure this time rather than having a couple of lines and being no more than a redundant reminder of the OT. But as I said, his great sacrifice amounted to nothing because R2 could back him up - it smacks of the empty death of Data in 'Star Trek Nemesis' where we can just fill another android body with his memories and allow his personality to filter out eventually. I liked the symmetry of R2 returning his memories when at the end of the PT I seem to recall he wiped his friend's mind, but it also wiped any sacrifice. Again, I don't want 3PO to become a vegetable, and I was glad that the impending running gag of the protocol droid continually getting 'laughs' from not knowing what everyone else knows was much more sparsely implemented than I expected, groaning inwardly as I thought I saw the direction things were heading in. Chewie didn't seem quite himself, and I know that Peter Mayhew died before this was made, I don't remember if he was even alive for Episode VIII, but I noticed visible signs that this was a different performance in the way the big lump walked or growled - it shows that the role wasn't just a background extra and that Mayhew was able to imbue this creature with personality, just as until Andy Serkis played Gollum people didn't really believe motion capture was acting. If Chewie had died in the ship crash (and it was a little daft since Rey should be able to sense his absence from it if she can sense his presence later), it would have been a pointless, lacklustre death, but if it had been a well-kept secret only to come out later in the film that he might still live it would have had some impact.

The biggest flaw with this is when Rey kills Ren in the same manner as he murdered his Father, Han. I can see where they were going with Ren actually being the Skywalker who rises in the title, thus he couldn't die at that point because he needed to join Rey, but his contribution and even turning away from Palpatine was poorly handled, something the PT was equally guilty of, so it's not like this film wasn't committing the same sins as its derided forebears. Ren was just as easily and oddly turned as Anakin was: the latter gets a bit miffed because he killed his wife, Padme, and the former has a pep talk from a surprise guest cameo of Harrison Ford. I did wonder how many and who would be showing up (I'm sure that was Wedge Antilles manning the gun on the Falcon at the end - they must have offered him a bajillion pounds to do it!), but in so much of this trilogy, as much as it was nice to see him back, it just felt empty. From the start I was disappointed that we didn't get the gang all back together as I so wanted to see, and it never happened: Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, the droids and Lando were largely kept separate, and that was galling. I know they aren't the stars of the show, but that's what I paid my money to see! 3PO without R2 by his side is like… well, something that should be together that isn't. Yes, my writing ingenuity is about as accomplished as the script writers so I shouldn't be pulling them down, but I just wish they'd shown evidence of aiming higher!

So Ren is killed, then right away Rey sees the error of her ways and heals him as we saw in the cavern earlier in the film. I liked that scene - it did come across as unimportant until you realise it was clear foreshadowing, but it makes you wonder why any Jedi couldn't heal each other - Obi-Wan could have healed Qui-Gon, for example. Okay, so Rey is supposed to be this super-powerful Force user since she's got Palpatine blood running through her veins, but even so, it's an ability that is almost as difficult to deal with as General Holdo's hyper-speed through the enemy fleet in VIII (which is brought up as a tactic, then sensibly fixed by saying it was a one in a million chance, one line of dialogue I appreciated to make up for idiocy of such an act in the previous film). Were we supposed to assume that because 'good' Rey healed 'bad' Ren, that was what gave him his change of heart? If so, that's a nonsense in itself since she was full of anger about the murder of her parents: a never-before-known son of Palpatine was her Dad. Trouble with it is that Ridley doesn't have the acting skills to portray someone torn apart by anger and hatred so you never get the slightest hint of this burning rage - at least the petulant Anakin seemed dangerous, in his whiny, snivelling way ("It's Obi-Wan, he's holding me back!"), but Rey is nothing but a clean-cut straight arrow simple girl with none of the struggle the role should have been about. Driver at least embodies some of the struggle, but even he has no real development to this precipice moment of decision.

I think back to Luke learning who his Father is, and the furore of emotions that overpower him and lead him to cast himself away to potential doom rather than deal with this hideous truth thrust in front of his unsuspecting face. Or the rage of bloodlust as he tastes his own power on the Death Star when he takes on Vader for the second time. There's not one moment in any of these films that even comes close to the vitality and raw horror and power of these scenes that have made those films classics. Blandness, suffused with complication and a confusion of avoiding mythical archetypes in order to fit with a modern sensibility have robbed this latest trilogy of any strength and life - it's an insult to the young girls it's trying to please, to suggest that this is good enough. It could have been so much more! As much as I was pleased to see Ian McDiarmid back, one of the best actors in the franchise, I also have to concede that his presence is yet another destruction of the OT. If all that was for nothing, Vader died to save Luke and defeat the Emperor, freeing the galaxy from tyranny, then what good was it all for if a few decades later he's still hanging around in some underground cavern with hordes of followers (were they supposed to be clones of him - we never got to see under their cowls?), and a vast fleet of Star Destroyers he just happens to have stowed away.

The First Order, and now this Last Order, as it was known, was one of the biggest problems with the trilogy. I see the problem: if you're going to have wars then you need an army to fight, but right from Episode VII's beginning I was dismayed that they glossed over any sense of development of the story and just had a huge army there running the galaxy again. They'd already done a story of the Republic falling prey to Palpatine's political machinations (which were almost as daft as this trilogy), so they couldn't easily do the build up to yet another Evil Empire, but surely they could have come up with a better idea than simply conjuring up a load of Star Destroyers and the hundreds of thousands needed to crew them! In this film, Richard E. Grant does a commendable job of being a new lieutenant to Ren's Supreme Leader. At least he isn't the butt of stupid humour all the time like useless Hux was. His death, shot for being a traitor and helping the rebels (because he hated Ren? Um…), fitted his pointless, useless character perfectly, and a note of interest was injected into proceedings when Grant's character says he helped the Emperor in the first war. Where did all these people go? Were all those ships hidden at the Sith planet crewed there? How did the Emperor feed them all? How long did they have to wait on this dark, dreary planet and what was their motivation?

There's some talk of other Stormtroopers being held against their will as Finn was, but again it was never explored. We don't know much of anything about the First Order, what happened after Episode VI, or anything else, and it would have been helpful to at least get some backstory. The closest we come to that is a fleetingly charming scene in which we see Luke instructing his sister in the ways of the Force, with a lightsaber duel in the woods - their faces are covered to save on production budget, but we do at least get a short shot of them flipping up the visors to present youthful versions from VI, even if they did seem a little lifeless. That's something I would also have to level at Carrie Fisher's current state as General Organa in this film. The actress had died just before VIII was released, and I thought there was going to be only a little of her using material from an unused scene in VII, reworked to include her. We actually got far more of her than I expected, but I wondered if a lot of it was CGI - it's impressive if I'm not sure, which I'm not, but it also felt odd, like they'd cut around her or picked out specific lines because that's all they had to work with. So sometimes her presence in a scene goes unfinished, and though I'd much rather have the Princess of the franchise than not, I don't know that it really worked and it must have been hard to have the dead body of Leia on set when they knew Fisher herself was also dead - as if they'd had Leonard Nimoy's Spock die on camera in the third modern Trek film.

Yet it was good to see her again, as it was Luke, and especially Lando, still in the flesh. I don't like the too-solid Force ghosts they've been going for and I was terribly disappointed that we didn't get a shot of all the old Jedi Masters at the very end, it was just Luke and Leia back at the old Tatooine homestead, which, now that I know was kept up as a tourist attraction where you can stay, has far less sentimental impact on me than when I first saw it brought back in Episode II! It almost felt like a travel advert with that knowledge: come and stay at the Skywalker ranch! It also doesn't entirely make sense that Luke and Leia would be the ones to reappear - surely her parents were more important to her, but because we only see them briefly in flashback they don't mean anything to us. I really wanted Alec Guinness, Liam Neeson, Yoda, and every good character that had died to be present, but it suited the muddled story that you don't know who to expect in that scene. I had no sense of where the story was going to go from there, either. It's supposed to be the end of the Skywalker saga, but it would have been good to know what was going to happen next, for Rey at least. I wonder if she'll be coming back in forty years time in a similar role as Fisher, Hamill and the rest fulfilled here? I wouldn't be surprised unless Disney exploits the property into the ground. Can I see this trilogy going down as film classic and being loved for generations? Nope, but it's an unfair comparison to make since the OT was a true revolution in cinema, marketing and merchandise that could probably never be repeated to have the same impact as it was such a moment in cinema (and business), history.

As is so often the case, my negative opinions have swamped any positive observations, but I must say that I loved having 3PO play a role as big as the old films, and I think they really missed out by not keeping the format of everything happening around the droids as if they were the real main characters. Partly, this was down to the desire for toy possibilities, which is as much as BB-8 ever meant. He, or it, never had any of the character of R2, and I can't even remember who he even belonged to. It was a good design, but something that fell through the cracks as they failed to understand the things that made 'Star Wars' work. Oops, I'm straying back into negativity, so let me say I liked McDiarmid, even if I questioned the choice to bring him back and the way he was defeated was simplistic. But he was pretty good. Poe was fairly good, there was still a lot of the contemporary humour undercutting everything, but it was always going to be 'fun' and 'funny,' it's just a shame they forgot about the drama. The tiny droid-fixing character, Bibbo Frik or whatever he was called, was amusing and used sparingly and to good effect. The environments were big and bad, it was slightly touching to return to the wreckage of the Death Star, crashed as it was in the ocean of Endor - I was especially pleased to get my shot of some Ewoks as I felt they were missing when we met the rebels on that world.

I have to say that there were a few things that pulled me out of the 'story,' mainly the casting - seeing a Hobbit among the rebels (i.e.: Dominic Monaghan), was bad enough, and Richard E. Grant was good, but obviously Grant, and there were one or two other faces I recognised. That was never really a problem in the OT because it was made so long ago that I didn't know the actors other than from those films. I just like having an actor in a role where they're so well served you forget they're an actor, or another famous role. That's why the main cast should have been spellbinding as I only know them as those roles, except the casting department fell down and didn't deliver. Nothing on the scale of Hayden Christensen, obviously, or even Ewan McGregor who was up and down, but neither was there a Liam Neeson to hold up the cast - you hear Qui-Gon's voice as one of the Jedi urging Rey on, but I couldn't work out if they were new lines or a reuse of previous ones. I've so wanted to see a Qui-Gon reappearance as Episode I is still my favourite post-OT film, and nothing since has come close in matching him, Darth Maul, or the events of that film. What more can I say, except that I did appreciate the minor course corrections that were made, the old relics that were brought back (like Luke's X-Wing), but as before it was just too heavily dependent on the past stories and didn't effectively develop the characters or plots beyond the standard 'Star Wars' fare of throwing a load of ships into pitched battle. Even seeing Lando and Chewie in the pilots' seats of the Falcon failed to move me. If I'd had expectations I'd have been majorly disappointed, but as it was it merely justified my lack of cinema attendance for the last three years and didn't encourage me to go back there any time soon. Sad, but that's what I got from it.

**