Pettiness and Fanservice Rule the Day in Star Wars’ Safe, Empty Finale

Looking backwards has always been J.J. Abrams’ thing. His movies have all been nostalgic in nature and he’s very good at replicating and catering to that nostalgia. Even the one original film he’s made, Super 8, is an 80s throwback consciously trying to evoke the same source material that Stranger Things did better a few years later. But he’s not a good long-form storyteller and perhaps he knows this, one of the reasons he’s rarely stayed with the projects he’s started, either on film or T.V. When he was brought back to Star Wars for Episode IX after starting the sequels out on an aggressively familiar yet promising new chapter with The Force Awakens, he was faced with the prospect of having to resolve a story, a challenge made all the greater by Disney’s strict release schedule giving him less than two years production time. The original script by Colin Trevorrow (the films’ original director) and Derek Connolly was completely scrapped in favour of one by Abrams and Chris Terrio, infamously the screenwriter behind Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. And as usual, Abrams decided to rely on nostalgia.

This may give some context as to why The Rise of Skywalker is such a fanservice-heavy, unambitious, and uninteresting mess of movie. But there’s also the elephant in the room of its predecessor, widely regarded by critics as the best entry in the franchise since the classic Empire Strikes Back, but extremely divisive among fans –indeed the vitriol to the reaction to The Last Jedi, which has resulted in harassment campaigns against director Rian Johnson and one of the stars of the film, Kelly Marie Tran, has made the Star Wars fan community synonymous with entitled toxicity. And the biggest mistake Abrams made with regards to this film is his belief he has to cater to that community.

The first sign of this in both the teasers and the movie itself is the bizarre return of fan favourite villain, Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). His presence in the film invites all manner of convoluted plotting to justify his return within the already fuzzy (to say the least) power dynamics of this universe. And the film only gets more needlessly inexplicable from there as it charts the heroes’ attempts to find and defeat him. There are detours and close calls, a plot device embarrassingly dubbed a “wayfinder”, action scenes, and confrontations between the series’ two central characters: scavenger turned aspiring Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) and morally conflicted First Order Supreme Leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). In this the pacing is so inconsistent you wonder if the filmmakers even know where they’re going, planet-hopping with a rapidity even the prequels never got to. There are baseless twists thrown in every now and again and a shocking amount of fake-out deaths that result in the movie having no real stakes to speak of by the second act, yet it finds time wherever it can to erase the story and character progress of the last movie.

The most damaging example of this is the question of Rey’s parentage, brought up as one of Abrams’ cliché “mystery boxes” in The Force Awakens, but subverted by Johnson in The Last Jedi as a means of conveying the theme that great power, and ergo worth, can come from anywhere, even nothing. The idea that through perseverance and self-sufficiency, Rey could be a Jedi without having to be a part of some great lineage is such an important and powerful message to send, especially to the children in the audience. And to say that Abrams’ creative choice here is an insult to that vital sentiment would be an understatement; it’s nothing short of malicious and spiteful, neutered for no other reason than a cheap twist he thinks is clever, but that is probably the worst in the series –I couldn’t help laughing out loud at its reveal.

There are other things the film does to diminish The Last Jedi. After his major personal growth in his relationship to authority, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is back to being reckless and foolhardy with others’ lives. Rose Tico (Tran) is downgraded to a minor character after having been such a significant and metaphorically vital component of the last films’ story. And there’s just an overarching attitude that the last film is being consciously ignored, in addition to a handful of mean-spirited jokes at its expense. The only thing that remains halfway consistent is Kylo’s character arc, despite the fact he dons his mask again after destroying it -the seeming inability for Abrams to understand the symbolism of that act makes me wonder if he actually understands Star Wars at all.

Kylo’s ultimate story works well enough on paper and even seems like a decent direction for the character, it’s just executed with hastiness and an awful degree of sloppiness. Curiously, he doesn’t seem as essential as before, having been replaced by Palpatine as the story’s primary antagonist. And that’s a big pattern of the film: conceding to the old –another thing that’s a direct contrast to the “moving on from the past” theme of The Last Jedi. Leia appears in this movie, three years after Carrie Fisher’s passing, through deleted scenes and B-roll of The Force Awakens, and every scene she’s in is clearly written to accommodate her previously recorded dialogue rather than the other way around. The shots are also very awkwardly composed so that she never quite gels with the immediacy of the scene, feeling often like a walking corpse. Two major moments in the climax are dependent on the influence of characters from previous films, even the prequels. And though it’s great to see Billy Dee Williams back as Lando Calrissian, his role in the story has no purpose outside of familiarity. It’s not just the legacy characters that reinforce this reliance on an old vs. new theme though. Rey, Finn (John Boyega), and Poe anchor the adventure as a trio, which they had never really been before (Rey only met Poe at the end of The Last Jedi) in a lazy attempt to evoke the relationship of Luke, Han, and Leia. As such, Finn and Poe don’t have their own story arcs anymore, existing mainly as supporting characters for Rey, rather than having any compelling dimension in their own right. But this clumsily manufactured bond between them services Abrams for the story he wants to tell, or rather regurgitate, pulling from Return of the Jedi in the last act with the frequency he pulled from Star Wars for The Force Awakens, but with less originality and novelty.

It should be acknowledged however that in isolation, bits and pieces of The Rise of Skywalker work great. There’s a chase scene on a planet called Pasaana that’s quite a bit of fun, and a world called Kijimi with a really neat aesthetic. Much like the prequels, the world expansion is often more fascinating than the story at hand. Though the movie is sorely missing Steve Yedlins’ breathtaking cinematography, it does have a few great visuals and visual effects -some that have a surprisingly distinct horror bent to them. Humour was one of Abrams’ strong suits in his last Star Wars movie, and here too it’s often integrated well. And none of the performances are lacking, everyone trying their damnedest with such a weak and far too expository script. I applaud Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver especially.

The main thing to take away from The Rise of Skywalker though is that Abrams took no risks. This is the safest Star Wars movie I’ve seen in a good long while, and the most meaningless. It’s a movie that isn’t really about anything at the end of the day, offering little in the way of significant commentary and metaphor (the First Order is even stripped of its overt contemporary fascist overtones), and refuses to challenge its audience even a little. I expect Abrams feared the wrath of the fans, but as I’ve already written, appeasing them is not a good idea. Instead, he left considerable doubt as to his capabilities to finish a story, as much as Disney is to blame for the rushed development; and the sequel trilogy itself as a bizarre abomination, the least organic and most disparate Star Wars trilogy by far.

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