Directed by J.J. Abrams
Written by Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
Starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, with hundreds of other actors, extras, and CG critters
Running Time: 2 hours and 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for gratuitous space violence and action

by Hunter Bush and Allison Yakulis

***There may be spoilers, read at your own peril.

It’s hard to talk about Star Wars anymore; many movies actually. Franchises have become such sacred cows that people feel personally attacked by any criticisms. Please know that is not our intent. While there are a lot of things in Rise of Skywalker (2019) that are genuinely good or fun or well-handled, it suffers from an overindulgence of fanservice and a general “more is more” sensibility that weakens its impact for even casual viewers. There is just so much stuff crammed into the film that nothing - good, bad or in between - is given enough time to land.

Yes, there are people who don’t want anything more from their entertainments than to kill some time and, to some extent, that makes sense; life is hard and maybe you don’t go to a Star War to be challenged. But then movies run the risk of becoming homogenized, assembly-line dreck not worth your increasingly high priced ticket purchase. Bucking trends is why the original Star Wars was a success; it wasn’t like anything else around at the time. It would be a shame if the fans allowed that boldness and originality to wither away in favor of empty platitudes.

In prioritizing fan service, Skywalker tells a nice story that looks very good and appears to say all the right things but ultimately lacks soul. For some that will be plenty worth the price of admission, but not everyone is going to be satisfied with its lack of depth. Movies that endure say something, touch a nerve or inspire or challenge, and Skywalker doesn’t do that. What it does is tell a reasonably entertaining adventure yarn in which a plucky group of cast-togethers defeat literally all the evil in the galaxy (more on this later).

Ultimately, Skywalker is just fine. It’s as stuffed with nonsense as any of the prequels, but the direction is better. It’s probably not quite as well-structured as Force Awakens (2015) but the characters are better defined (thanks in no small part to The Last Jedi’s (2017) challenging of their easy remix characterizations and giving them dimension) and the actors are really firing on all cylinders. Unfortunately, so much time is spent info-dumping and ping-ponging from one useless location to another that it’s honestly hard to hold much in your mind (or heart) for long.

There are moments in the movie that have the potential to actually feel impactful, but they’re often either preemptively softened or near-immediately rescinded. There are *so many* fake-out deaths in this that I lost track! It’s a cheap maneuver to resurrect someone within ten minutes without their “death” having any impact on the characters or plot, simply to get a reaction out of your audience.

Let’s talk about fanservice. It’s something that is good on a small scale but becomes absolute horseshit the larger the pool of fans becomes. And Star Wars has an enormous fanbase. What happens when you try to make a movie guided as much by chatter online as by the characters, story lines & thematic goals of the work itself? You get a movie made by a committee of the most vocal and anyone who’s ever attended a public school or ridden a city bus will tell you: the loudest people are not always the ones you want making the important decisions. Imagine if Luke (Mark Hamill) & Leia (Carrie Fisher) being siblings had immediately been reconnected as a result of “fan outrage”? So much of Skywalker is spent walking back what self-styled “real fans” didn’t like about The Last Jedi that I’m surprised they didn’t just pretend it was a dream Rey (Daisy Ridley) had in stasis during a particularly long lightspeed jump. It would’ve at least saved time.

If that seems like an oversimplification of a franchise you love, you may not enjoy this flick very much. Co-screenwriters J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio (working from a story by them and also Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connnolly) have sterilized all emotion out of the film. It’s trying, mind you (hard as shit actually) but it all falls flat. J.J. Abrams traffics solely on nostalgia anymore, to the detriment of the film as a whole. When the great galactic evil is defeated, we cut to SO MANY familiar planets, watching empire ships disintegrate in orbit, it’s like a joke; not solely the planetary locations from this film or this trilogy, we visit some Star Wars greatest hits.

Then again, that’s just J.J. Abrams all over, isn’t it? A who’s-who of characters from previous films all whiz thru the movie but none of the non-core characters really mean anything. They’re all props who mostly only exist on screen to be recognized, and more frustratingly they waste time and attention that could instead be used in furthering the story Skywalker is trying to actually tell.

More damningly, at a few points the writing gets sloppy. The stakes established at the start of the final confrontation between Rey and Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) are abandoned at the scene’s end without resolution or explanation. There’s a running gag that Finn (John Boyega) has been meaning to tell Rey something “for a long time” that is brought up a few times early in the film and never spoken of again. The resurrected Imperial Fleet - each now effectively a Death Star - are tasked with executing “The Final Order”, a thing so sledgehammer-unsubtle that it’s surprising they didn’t call it the Not-See Fleet because you could Not See them hidden beneath the planet’s surface! This isn’t us nitpicking, it’s just poor writing.

Furthermore, the stakes here are out of control, especially since we all know that if Disney wants to make more Star Wars, they’ll make more Star Wars. So, then, why even pretend to have your film end with eradication of the Sith? I guess because it’s a sequel and the stakes needed to be raised? Admittedly, this is the final film of a trilogy of trilogies (nonet?) that George Lucas “totally intended” 42 years ago (why else would he start with chapter 4 haha?), and Star Wars has become almost an industry itself, what with the numerous canon and no longer canon films, books, comics, television shows, video games, and a truly staggering amount of merchandising that was part of the concept from the jump. The final film had to be big, it had to be loud, it had to tie *everything* up - but it feels discordant to destroy all evil in one fell swoop at the end of a franchise that states explicitly that the Force is a balance of light and dark.

To that point, by resurrecting Palpatine, Abrams & co. have effectively changed the trajectory of the entire series. The original trilogy was about Luke Skywalker defeating his own father Anakin in the guise of Sith protégé Darth Vader. When the prequels were added, the focus shifted to Anakin himself, making the six film cycle about his life and death. By now making Palpatine CONTINUE TO BE the source of ultimate Sith evil in this third trilogy, the entirety of Star Wars proper, *all nine films* become about him? We can now watch him ascend to power in the prequels, manipulate events from behind the scenes in the original trilogy and then just kind of show up unannounced here before being defeated, along with (apparently) the entirety of the Sith. Poof! All evil in the galaxy destroyed.

That just feels wrong. Mishandled. It might sound like we hated The Rise of Skywalker or that we hate the fans but neither one is true. The Rise of Skywalker is serviceable but ultimately empty. Abrams shouldn’t take all the blame, but his increasingly more overt nostalgia fetish certainly doesn’t help. Nevertheless, whether you’re pleased with this entry or are intent on ignoring everything made after 1983, may the Force be with you.