After 42 years, the story of the Skywalker family officially came to a close with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Since director J.J. Abrams helped relaunch the franchise for a new generation of fans four years ago with The Force Awakens, it’s been a tumultuous time for Star Wars’ legacy fans.
Predictably, old fans spent the last four years tearing each other apart in a frenzy over the new direction of Star Wars and what many considered to be Disney’s lack of vision for their trilogy of films. Unsure which masters to serve, Disney attempted to bring an end to the saga while unifying its famously fractious fanbase and still delighting a future generation of Star Wars fans to hopefully keep the spark alive. They failed and did so spectacularly with The Rise of Skywalker.
You could say The Rise of Skywalker begins like a sugar rush of Star Wars, but that would be putting it nicely because the experience is something akin to a bad trip. Moving at breakneck speed, Abrams reintroduces Emperor Palpatine to the stage as a messy lab project of Sith acolytes. Kylo Ren, who shows up immediately to confront him, ends up doing Palpatine’s bidding without much question. It seems Kylo, like the audience, is expected to suspend all disbelief and go along with it. The Emperor is bunkered up in a Sith temple on the unknown world of Exogol, which is apparently a Sith lair and also a hiding place for Palpatine’s secret legion of unmanned Star Destroyers. For the First Order, it’s something of a “join or die” moment, where the villains we were just starting to understand in this new trilogy are cowed into the service of Sith ghosts.
A huge part of Star Wars’ legacy is major plot twists, the inheritance of the “I am your father” moment. The Rise of Skywalker fulfills this legacy like a federal employee completing a checklist. From the enhanced powers of Rey to a dozen cameos such as that of Lando Calrissian, reprised by actor Billy Dee Williams, this movie’s approach to new information is to assume you expect it — because Star Wars.
The story of the Resistance versus the First Order is subsumed by mutterings of a shadowy Sith Empire under the control of an undead Palpatine, so our heroes take off on an adventure to find relics known as “Sith Wayfinders,” which can point Rey and Resistance toward Exogol to face them. The casual fan of Star Wars, who loves the movies and sees every one of them in theaters, will hear the term “Sith” more in The Rise of Skywalker than in eight prior films combined and see legions of Sith spirits gathering for a spooky dark side convention. It’s a jarring dive into the weeds of Star Wars lore that was previously confined to animated series and books, one that will almost certainly leave those fans and, more importantly, younger audiences, disoriented.
Then there’s Rey, or Rey Palpatine. The girl from nowhere whom we had mostly accepted as a nobody is, it turns out, a blood relative of Emperor Palpatine. Surprise! Abrams simply scraps with the narrative climax of The Last Jedi, where Rey is confronted with the hard “truth” that she has no legacy, no people, no name, and only her own strength to rely on. The era of dynastic politics and power in Star Wars was supposed to be over, but like with some of Rian Johnson’s treatment of Abrams work in The Force Awakens, this was revised ham-handedly. This sets off a series of cringy twists that are neither warranted nor earned, including the change of heart by Kylo Ren for reasons that remain entirely unclear.
There’s something so disturbing about this film in that it follows two installments where the operating message was to move forward or let the past die, but then goes back on all of that as if it was a mistake. Abrams takes fan service and nostalgia so far that the story cannot breathe. It’s Star Wars pornography at its most cheap.
The famously divisive installment of Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, will go down in history now as one of the bravest films of this genre for challenging the vain desires of Star Wars’ most rabid fans (myself included). Directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi engaged with the saga in a rather meta fashion, critiquing some of its own morals and then painting a picture of a different future for Star Wars that was free from its baggage. Swaths of fans revolted, but many others held up The Last Jedi as a high watermark for the saga.
There is no way to look at The Rise of Skywalker as anything but a capitulation to the fans that raged against Johnson and The Last Jedi. In doing so, The Rise of Skywalker aims to satisfy everyone from the basement-dwelling trolls to the Reylo’s, from the YouTube fan theorists to the film critics they lavish with perks at Disney Parks. In doing so, The Rise of Skywalker betrays itself in a finale that is something like the worst of Star Wars fanfiction in the 1990’s.
The “expanded universe” as it is called, or the mountains of disjointed Star Wars books and comics that Disney did away with upon buying the franchise, got their day on the big screen as one single movie.
What Disney initially set out to create was a continuation of the Star Wars story with strict adherence to the style and prose that made the original trilogy such a profound success. Their approach was to honor, but still challenge fans’ instincts about what the saga is all about. After receiving truly vicious pushback along with market signals of trouble, such as declining ticket sales movie over movie, Disney’s Star Wars retreated. In doing so, they created the most shallow, convoluted, frenzied, and nonsensical Star Wars film of all time with The Rise of Skywalker.
What’s painful about this conclusion is that as far as we know, it is the end. There is no fixing it. J.J. Abrams and presumably Kathleen Kennedy internalized the cries of a vocal minority within Star Wars’ disaffected fanbase and in the moment of truth, totally blinked. In doing so, they not only tarnished their entire trilogy but four decades of Star Wars films that did something Abrams and Disney could not — stand for something.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is the spokesperson for Young Voices, host of Beltway Banthas Podcast, and an entertainment contributor for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
