The Rise of Skywalker (Review)

I managed to see Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker within the first week of release. That's pretty good by my standards.

I have mixed feelings about this movie. I suppose there's the usual excuse that it would be hard for any movie to live up to this kind of hype. I think this one worked so hard to top everything that had gone before that it went too far.

It's as if this story went through 100 exaggerated retellings via oral tradition before anything was written down and made into a script. That, and some aspects of the writing seem a bit lazy.

That said, the acting is great, the visuals are amazing, and there are some neat Force-related events that add interesting twists to the story.

I'm going to give it three stars and say it's worth seeing.

Spoilerish remarks below the fold (mostly focused on the things that annoy me and keep this movie from getting five stars).




As to the things that are bothersome, the first is the villain. Why did the writers decide to dredge up Emperor Palpatine to be the big bad. Wasn't getting rid of him the point of Return of the Jedi. I'm not especially fond of resurrecting old baddies to menace the heroes again. This is one of the things that strikes me as lazy. Maybe its meant to appease the Star Wars Expanded Universe fans, since Palpatine is a recurring threat in the novels and comics, but I never liked it when Palpatine returned in the EU, either.

And of course, when he reappears, he brings with him a giant fleet of new Star Destroyers, each of which is now its own little Death Star. This bugs me in part because the whole point of building the Death Stars was that a Star Destroyer just wasn't big enough to mount a weapon that could destroy a planet, to say nothing of the power supply needed to charge up the thing. Why were the Death Stars ever built if you could achieve the same effect with a ship less than two kilometers long?

And where is the infrastructure needed to build this fleet? There is no sign of industrial facilities on Palpatine's secret Sith hideaway planet, Exegol! The residents all seem to be ascetic Sith cultists. Who built all these Star Destroyers? Where did the materials and other resources come from? The idea that all of this could be built without anyone noticing seems preposterous, and there's no attempt to justify it. The logistics are a plot whole the size of a planet.

And, of course, we learn that Rey is Palpatine's grand-daughter. This disappoints me because I actually liked the idea that a great Jedi or Sith could arise anywhere. This development further establishes that sensitivity to the Force is hereditary, but if that's the case, why weren't the Jedi and Sith running breeding programs to breed the most powerful Force-sensitives possible for their respective sides? Maybe the Jedi didn't on general principles and the Sith didn't because they feared being overthrown by their own children, but you'd think they would at least know where to look to find the most likely candidates. Force-affinity was supposedly so random that the Jedi of the Old Republic used to run "midichlorian tests" on children everywhere looking for the rare child with Force potential.

And in the finale, of course, we see Palpatine turning the Sith lightning up to eleven, enabling him to disable a giant fleet of starships with a gesture, something that is certainly unprecedented in the movies, if not the EU.

You can almost hear them in the writing room saying "we have to make this one BIGGER THAN EVER!"

The result is getting carried away and challenging my suspension of disbelief. I saw enough of that with the new Star Trek movies (which are coincidentally also J. J. Abrams projects).

One more minor quibble: the lightsaber fight choreography is still terrible.