SPOILERS AHOY!
Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.
Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.
As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”
Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.
We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.
Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.
PALPATINE’S FLEET
One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.
First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.
Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.
Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.” But… how? Where did the supplies come from?
Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.
Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.
And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?
This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.
Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.
… no comment.
Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.
But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?
Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!
But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?
Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—
Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!
Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.
What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?
Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.
To be clear: The whole movie is like this.
Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.
ROSE
Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.
But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.
Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.
And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.
Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.
Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.
But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)
Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.
To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.
There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.
CONCLUSION
There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.
And that theme is:
This movie is total garbage.
There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.
I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.
One thing I never liked about Star Wars was the size of the ships. The manpower to build, operate, and maintain each of these ships, plus the resourse needed, to me is comical.
I personally enjoyed the movie. But I do know, if I was as much of a Star Wars fan as I was, say Star Trek, I would have more issues with it.
I didn’t agree with you 100% about The Last jedi but I sure as shit agree with you about this unholy mess. For the vast majority of it I didn’t even feel like I was watching a movie.
I have to agree with Nat; I didn’t entirely feel The Last Jedi was as destructive to the original trilogy as you. However, it was built on a really shaky “reboot” foundation for sure, and I think it did its best to work with what it had in a direction that was both artistic and natural from what was established.
However, here, you’ve presented a really cunning analysis of the foibles of this film through two singular lenses. I really appreciate the Rose analysis, which is just such a simple but incisive bit… but I think I actually have to disagree with you on one point about Palpatine’s Fleet.
Is it remarkably stupid? Yeah… is it really nonsensical? Yes… could it have been written far better? Most definitely… but is it really that damaging to the film? I think it betrays the slapdash nature of the plot contrivances, but all in all, Star Wars is largely pulp action, and there have been lots of other massive goofs and plot holes and ridiculous bits in other films that one can waive due to ‘it’s more fun this way’. I wouldn’t consider it one of the “two significant ways in which this film is terrible”, if I had to pick two ways.
Rose would be one. I’d probably pick the “redemption” of Kylo Ren as my second, to analyze how the film completely walks back and undoes all the progress of the characters in the first film (which you do mention, regarding Poe Dameron)… or I’d pick the absolutely frenetic first…. well, major half of the movie, which is cut at a ridiculously fast pace yet somehow achieves very little and a lot at the same time, and really shows they were essentially writing episode 8-2 and episode 9 at the same time… those would be the two I’d call out, probably.
Bah, of course, I forget to mention an important detail: I’d pick the “redemption” of Kylo Ren not *just* to analyze how it walks back and undoes progress, but how it misinterprets what progress was supposed to occur and goes in some directions that are, at least from my perspective, pretty hurtful and damaging to the messages of The Last Jedi. You know, “nope, power can’t come from anybody, it has to come from one of these two bloodlines”, or “nope, you can’t demand someone redeem themselves and stop being toxic in using your fear of isolation against you and violating your bodily autonomy and privacy, you just… come around to redeeming them yourself again”. In these two ‘developments’, it really shows how the writers fundamentally misunderstood the power of the messaging behind The Last Jedi.
“Your parents sold you to save you”
I’m pretty sure that selling a child into chattel slavery does not protect them from the psychic space wizard in a galaxy where someone without psychic powers can track people in days using a hand sized beeper.
My first thought after watching the movie is still the most telling to me:
“It’s a shame they stuffed two good movies into one bad movie”.
Pretty much every problem The Rise of Skywalker has could be solved by giving it more time, from the ridiculous speed of the character arc, to everything around planet Plothole, sorry Exegol. Giving it another movie would have solved it.
You could have the emperor show up at the end of movie 1, then at the start of movie 2 the fleet could be spread out suppressing the galaxy which would then require the heroes to inspire the galaxy to rise up together when they create an opening by taking the emperor down.
All in all it is a shame that JJ Abrams decided to finish ‘his’ trilogy rather than continuing The Last Jedi.
@Trevor: You’ve slightly misunderstood me. There are two overwhelming problems with the film: NONSENSE and UNRELENTING RETCONNING.
In both cases there are literally dozens of examples, ranging from the large to the small. Palpatine’s Fleet is one such example of the former, but not the totality of that problem. In fact, it’s just one very tiny sliver of the nonsense pie which is this film.
Clearly you didn’t understand JJ’s insightful commentary into the application of Moore’s Law to planet-destroying superweapons. You start out with a single Death Star that takes years and vast resources to make, which is your old mainframe days. Then a few decades later, you can make a huge Starkiller Base, which is the peak of the dedicated supercomputer phase. Now you’ve got the cheap multicore era, where every ship in your whole fleet has one. Obviously the next movie will be the smartphone era, where every stormtrooper’s blaster can blow up a planet.
Oh I understood your intent in picking Palpatine’s Fleet and I think your opinion is quite valid! I wasn’t meaning to imply you should have picked a different example of nonsense; I just personally disagree that the nonsense is really one of the two worst aspects of the film. But that’s a personal opinion disagreement! I know from your previous reviews you have less of a tolerance for nonsense in your Star Wars than I do. 🙂 And I just thought it’d be fun to share my disagreement in that I’d pick another pillar there for my two pillars of critique; wasn’t meaning to imply you should have gone with mine over yours.
Cheers!
The whole problem here, as I understand it, is that JJ Abrams made a movie, on his own, with no plan for the coming sequels. Then Rian Johnson made a sequel, on his own, with no plan for the finale. Then JJ Abrams made that finale, on his own, trying to connect the mishmash of unrelated plotlines. Great concept for a low-budget arthouse production, but it’s inconceivable to me that the worlds large movie house would manage the worlds largest movie franchise in this manner.
@Sean Nicholson
It worked for the first trilogy, but then again they had writers that understood storytelling with those.
Blaming people in the nebulous “the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls” outgroup for the Rose thing really misses the mark, in a way untypical for you.
Many people that issued valid criticisms not unlike to your post have been totally smeared for no reason and compared to cave-dwelling woman haters and genocidal maniacs.
In a large number of this overreaching reaction, personell directly or indirectly involved with the production and promotion of the new Star Wars trilogy played a major part in slandering people.
Thats not to say that all criticism was geniune and/or valid, obviously.
But this toxic atmosphere helps no one and drowns out measured and neutral discussion.
To suggest that the very same people saying to fans “either you like this movie, or you hate women and jews” now caved in to “trolls” demands, is laughable to me.
The real reason for Rose disappearing into the background and her romantic involvement with Finn being retconned, is China.
The Chinese, unlike Whites in the US and Europe, have a massive problem with on-screen interracial relations between “their” women and Black men.
The black panther movie poster in China featured him with a mask on for similar reasons, for those wondering.
Google “black panther movie poster china” and you’ll see what I mean.
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/outrage-chinese-poster-black-panther-isnt-seems-111825970.html
I agree. I did like the lightsabre fights though.
Fully agree with you Justin, movie is total garbage. Glad to see you feel the same way. If only Disney had actually made a plan, these Sequels had a ton of potential.
Regarding the dagger, I was originally of your mindset. But it has been pointed out to me that Lucas created a very vague system that serves things like that quite well. For example, it would have been trivial for an ancient Sith to have visions of the future, maybe even forseeing that he would help the “heir of Palpatine”, and craft the dagger. Was it explained? No. Did it need to be? I think so. But I’ve made peace with it.
I also agree with Nedreow. Give it more time, and a lot of the problems go away. The retcons become character arcs, the pacing issues vanish, etc. This would have been a good 2 movies.
As far as Rose…that was just unfortunate. I didn’t like her much in Last Jedi, but they had a great opportunity to expand her here. I can’t hate on the new former-stormtrooper, she was cool, but they really didn’t need to throw away Rose like that.
The only thing that got me through this film was the company of my old buddy Qui-Gon Gin who I managed to sneak into the cinema in my coat pocket.
My reaction was almost identical to Nedreow’s. I was thinking that Abrams came up with a pretty decent story that attempted to wrap up not only his trilogy, but the trilogy of trilogies while also reconciling what had happened with TLJ.
The problem was that this story would have taken 4-5 hours. Rather than change gears and come up with something else, Abrams decided to try for it anyway by cutting wherever he could. So, we get plot contrivances galore (that “quicksand” scene….), totally stripping characterization from everyone except Rey and Ren (Finn and Poe pretty much become generic action guys), removal/retcon of character arcs (the worst is near the end, when Poe’s all like “I don’t know what to do now, things are bad!”), reliance on worn-out tropes and cliches to save time (everything with the woman from Poe’s past) and all the nonsense Justin mentioned.
For me, my personal jaw-dropping “this is absurd” moment is when the three main characters do a full frontal assault of the First Order flagship without more of a plan than “run and gun”. The similar set-up in A New Hope was handled infinitely better.
But, as Nedreow said, I kept seeing how some of this could have been good, had they just not overstuffed this like they were checking off a list. Abrams was essentially trying to remake the middle-chapter without spending the time to do so, so none of the payoffs feel earned. This is one of the weirder movie experiences I’ve had in my life.
Other Random thoughts
I don’t disagree that there are a number of times that Abrams is implicitly taking digs at Johnson, but I felt that Johnson started that tussle with digs of his own. As a result, you get an entire trilogy that is just one tug of war from film to film with each subsequent director dismissing the setups from the previous film before them.
I wasn’t a fan of Rose from TLJ, but it’s unfortunate that it was handled here in a way that seems to be a gesture to the toxic trolls. My issue in TLJ is that she appears to be more of an NPC who holds Finn’s hand to guide him through his own story arc rather than a fleshed out character of her own. She also has zero connection to any other character other than Finn (who didn’t seem keen on the romance), which makes things problematic for further development. Still, they should have made an effort to avoid kowtowing to racists.
If they wanted to use Palpatine, they should have had him in some kind of spiritual Dark Side role, not “Here’s a bunch of ships!”. It should also have been some kind of plot-twist, instead of a “By the way” done in the scrawling opener (which is quickly contradicted anyway). But I’m not sure how you would reintroduce Palpatine without totally ruining Anakin/Luke’s achievements, as people have mentioned. Regardless, they should have skipped the “He’s Rey’s grandfather” bit, which has all kinds of problems.
I’ve never read the EU, but it seems like the whole new trilogy should have been based upon some kind of NEW, external threat. Something that the first two trilogies could have been a set-up for preparing the galaxy for. Maybe something that the hubris of the Jedi and weakness of the Republic wouldn’t have worked as a good defense against, but the trials the good guys went through in the middle trilogy would have placed the galaxy in a better position to handle. Not sure exactly how this would work.
Anyway, thanks for the review!
Sadly you are spot on. Let’s hope we get more Mandalorian and less Rise of Skywalker as Disney takes Star Wars forward.
Justin Alexander (a fellow roleplaying namesake in Missouri)
[…] Film criticism isn’t my strong suit & an article by Justin Alexander (@hexcrawl) did a better job of hitting a couple key points better than I could have. Of course, this article is written entirely out of spoilers:https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/43963/reviews/the-rise-of-skywalker-a-critique […]
@Nathan, hey mate, you may want to read the full article you referenced before posting your message. I know, you finished writing on your topic and wanted to find the first link that may prove your point… but it really doesn’t.
Sincerely,
Some guy that likes to click links and see what comes up.
P.S. If someone disagrees with me, did you read the whole thing?
> the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom
Mr. Justin, I feel like you’re talking about people who share my attitude towards certain cast in TLJ, so an observation if you please: the majority of characters of The Last Jedi aren’t hated because they are females, black, yellow or else, but because their acting leaves much to be desired and the lines they have to deliver beg for “WTF?” question every other sentence.
Rose you mention is probably a nice person in real world and might prove to be a good actor in different circumstances. But in TLJ she seems a boring person, a token “postcard wisdom” herald who doesn’t particularly enjoy her role and certainly does not deliver as Finn’s love interest replacement (?). Wouldn’t almost 1:1 transplantation of Jen Yu character from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” fit the story better in every way?
Observe that the very same charges might apply (and should be applied, deservingly) to more than half of the cast female or not. Acting, lines, the whole logic behind characters – it simply makes them unlikable. Unfortunately, in case of females the vibe is particularly strong.
So, why not point at the people who really deserve it – the screenplay writers who decided to make these characters as wooden and unlikable as possible (I still can’t get over how awful Laura Dern’s character was, as opposite to her representation of Dr. Sattler in “Jurassic Park”)?
Thanks.
If your attitude is that sending death threats and racist slurs to an actress because you didn’t like a character she played in a movie is the sort of thing that you should be doing, then you’re just going to have to live with the fact that you’re a disgusting, misogynistic, racist troll.
If not, be less anxious to rush to their defense.
I’m not very fond of throwing obscenities at actors, but at the same time I don’t see why it’s wrong to express an opinion in whatever way one feels relevant concerning their roles, the performance they deliver but also the in-movie execution of a character, the idea behind him as presented by the screenplay writer, his lines and all shebang.
There’s of course the question of civility to vulgar ratio – after all, there are examples of world’s greatest philosophers and discussants not shying out of swearwords that would put a streetworking damsel of negotiable morals into shame, but this is a great topic for an endless discussion concerning the problem of “drawing the line”.
And this is pretty much the ambiguity I see in your otherwise very logical, razor-sharp reviews of Disney trilogy: it’s not clearly visible where > YOU < are drawing the line.
Trust me, I've seen the opposite – people being called "racist, misogynist, xenophobic" and worse when they made the observation along the lines of "that unmemorable character who fails to deliver as the love interest for Finn might as well be gone from the movie entirely and nothing of value would be lost" – something I think is worth opposing with no less force (sic) than "death threats" you were mentioning.
Yet another way the series had polarized the fandom.