(Image courtesy of Lucasfilm)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. our Tomatometer-approved quartet of critics decided to dust off their lightsabers and do battle with STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER and the Disney billion dollar blockbuster empire. Their report:
WADE MAJOR: Seeing as how we have all grown up and become adults and now film critics over the ridiculous 42-year span it has taken to create the complete 9-film arc originally (allegedly) conceived by George Lucas, a CineGods Tomato Slam of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker seems only appropriate.
So let me get us into it by stating just in broad terms that I have never been a mad fan of all things Star Wars. I liked the original film — which was the last movie I saw with my father before he passed — and I love The Empire Strikes Back. I haven’t really liked anything Star Wars since that time, and I found the last two to be derivative at best and turgid fan service at worst. The Force Awakens was “Yeah, fine, scratch the itch, been there, done that, whatever.” The Last Jedi was “What the hell was the point of that?” And this, for me, is, “Glad you got that out of your system — thank God that’s over, can we please now move on?”
Last thing I’ll say is, apart from the fan service — this is a terrible screenplay.
I now leave it to the rest of you to drill down into any specifics you feel are relevant.
RAY GREENE: It is relevant that I haven’t seen the movie yet — and that I may not see a Star Wars movie in a movie theatre for the first time in 42 years.
I find myself deeply disinterested in all things Star Wars after all the alt-right Reddit screeching that greeted The Last Jedi’s rather mild steps toward inclusive casting. The bad taste of all that has lingered for me, and Disney’s recent groveling to all the haters in the lead up to The Rise of Skywalker hasn’t improved my mood. It is really relevant to say this: Star Trek integrated space just over a decade before there was even a FIRST film called Star Wars — so why get uptight if there’s an Asian heroine integrated into the Star Wars crew? It was overdue.
But it is in a sense unsurprising for an appreciable percentage of Star Wars fans to be borderline white nationalist yahoos, given the reactionary nature of pathological fandom, the quasi-religious undertones of the whole Force thing, and the anti-democratic drift of the whole Star Wars enterprise after the original’s wild success 42 years ago. Luke Skywalker was initially presented as an everyman, and his heroism in his first appearance was that of a gifted average guy rising to the call of larger challenges and great events — Lincoln with a lightsaber. When Luke was revealed to be Vader’s son instead of the spawn of a dirt poor farmer on an intergalactic backwater, most of that went out the window. Luke’s gift became one of bloodline, epitomizing that most dangerous of myths: a genetic superiority. The whole geek debate over Midichlorians is even more disturbing when you delve into the official lore — it turns out Anakin Skywalker (aka Vader) was genetically-engineered for glory by Emperor Palpatine — a Hitlerian fantasy if ever there was one. Ew.
In the slavish re-enactments spearheaded by J.J. and company, genetic supremacy continues to be the order of the day. Kylo Ren is Leia’s kid, and Leia is another Vader offspring, so it’s basically a trope at this point that a supreme ability with the Force can only be achieved by DNA. And even though Rian Johnson tried to throw that idea overboard in Last Jedi (and has since been rebuked for it by Abrams), Daisy Ridley’s Rey has always seemed to be on the verge of finding out she’s SOMEBODY’s Force-filled love child. [SPOILER ALERT: She is].
This idea that greatness is genetically transmitted through the blood is actually a pretty appalling mass fantasy for an allegedly democratic society — especially one that seems to be re-litigating so many of its core ideals in the Trump era.
Also: the Disneyfication of Star Wars that has been creeping over the whole enterprise like an artificial moon ever since Lucas sold out his baby reached a zenith in the Han Solo origin story, which played like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes with Wookies for me.
So in the immortal words of Sam Goldwyn, “include me out.”
TIM COGSHELL: “Terrible screenplay…” indeed. When characters are forced to say (and do, for that matter) things that are in pure service of fans the screenplay will always be bad — at least in those moments. This film almost wholly fan service so a lot of it is necessarily bad. But the fans won’t care. They cheered for every one of those moments at my screening — ostensibly a “critics” screening. Plainly, there are fanboys amongst us — may the force be with them. They are going to love this flicker.
Echoing Wade, I’m more Star Trek than Star Wars. It’s interesting that J.J. Abrams has a finger in both. Not that one can only appreciate one or the other. I was good even through Return of the Jedi. Had the franchise skipped from that to this film, I’d have been okay with that — though a detour to Rogue One wouldn’t have bothered me.
Here, J.J. is not only servicing fans he’s also (as he tends to do) paying homage to one of the original icons of his youth. After Steven Spielberg, it is George Lucas that informed the filmmaking of J.J. Abrams. It’s like he’s trying to out-Lucas Lucas in this movie. Literally duplicating all of the tones of the original films… while eschewing any elements that don’t conform. This movie is a throwback in every possible way, not just narratively. Thus, it often looks and feels like a movie made in the middle ’70s.
Then there’s that narrative. Long, meandering and constantly looping back onto itself — which is less fan service than just a lack of cleverness. Or maybe, on the heels of Solo, the deliberate avoidance of cleverness. No freaky robots. At least Lando is rehabilitated. I was just glad Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon and Jar-Jar didn’t show up. Cuz every-freaking-body else does.
I hope that’s not a spoiler.
RAY GREENE: Good points, Tim. I would add that Spileberg and Lucas were members of that New Hollywood generation, which paid a lot of lip service to personal expression, and even their most popcorn commercial achievements are idiosyncratic ones for the most part (I think Spielberg really grew as a filmmaker too, in ways Lucas could not manage). In contrast, J.J. is what I sometimes call a fauxteur. He’s hired because he has no personal signature to impart, and will slavishly emulate some corporately acceptable definition of a prior achievement by pumping it up with the various heliums that have accrued to action filmmaking in the interim between the original and the now. That’s not filmmaking — it’s air traffic control.
Slight aside: I’ve come to hate the J.J. Star Trek movies, which are mostly parade grounds for overstuffed action set pieces with a shvitz of character development sprayed on top and no discernible subtext. Star Trek was frequently all about the subtext, aka the ideas embedded in the sci fi in that old-school John Campbell way. The J.J. approach suits Star Wars far more than it ever could fit Star Trek. because action is more central to the Lucas approach than it ever was for Gene Roddenberry. Lucas wanted to recreate the comic book space opera of Flash Gordon, where Roddenberry was hiring legit sci fi authors like Harlan Ellison and Larry Niven to write his scripts.
MARK KEIZER: Ray’s unbelievably incisive, surprising and depressing conclusion that greatness in the Star Wars universe is a matter of bloodline not youth+talent+opportunity has me hating the entire lot of films. But I’m going to use a Jedi mind trick on myself and fall back in love with a series that is, let’s face it, batting 2 for 9; 4 for 9 if I’m being generous. When it comes to Rey’s lineage, no spoilers here, the problem is not that JJ is advocating for the benefits of genetic superiority. The problem, if a Disney shareholder would even consider this a problem, is that J.J. understands that fans don’t want Rey to be revealed as a nobody from nowhere with anonymous, unimportant lineage. Indeed, the revealing of Rey’s identity is the only thing that has kept me going since The Force Awakens. Finn’s beginnings as a defector Stormtrooper was a promising idea that was never developed. Poe was positioned as Han Solo: The Sequel but that idea died in the crib. As a character, he’s a big zero. Not that the original Han Solo was a three-dimension reflection of contemporary America, but the force of Harrison Ford’s charm and humor covered up a lot of what wasn’t there. Anyway, the question of Rey’s lineage, as the only enduring mystery of the new trilogy, has to be resolved in a way that feels large and exciting and worth the wait. Their answer is arbitrary, convenient and yet, somehow, fine, which is in line with J.J.’s script (co-written with Chris Terrio), which is similarly arbitrary, convenient and yet, somehow, fine.
RAY GREENE: See, this is what’s depressing: “J.J. understands that fans don’t want Rey to be revealed as a nobody from nowhere with anonymous, unimportant lineage.” Because Mark, I suspect you’re right that that’s the thinking (or rather the groupthink, since J.J. allegedly did his due diligence by reading up on the internet fan reaction to The Last Jedi). But lineage? That’s at best a British idea and at worst a Nazi one.
Lack of lineage is a core creation myth for previous generations of American pulp heroes, including but not limited to Flash Gordon (the alleged inspiration for both Luke and Han), Buck Rogers, Batman, The Shadow, Will Eisner’s the Spirit, Billy Batson aka SHAZAM, Plastic Man, James Tiberius Kirk, Batgirl, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk. Admittedly, comic books in particular have frequently played around with the idea of genetic superiority (Seigel and Shuster allegedly invented Superman in large part as a corrective to all that evil rhetoric coming out of Hitler’s Germany about master races and Aryan supermen), hence Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor and every single X-man (or X-woman). But in America, we believe greatness is available to everybody don’t we? Or has the yoke been so tightly bolted to the collective neck that we don’t even dream we can each be great any more?
I’ll shut up now.
WADE MAJOR: Superb thoughts all — pretty much covers the bases.
I’ll just add that when Tim and I first talked, he rightly said that Joseph Campbell would totally approve of what’s going on here — and that wasn’t an endorsement. That was an acknowledgement that this is strictly by-the-numbers myth-making and, as previously noted, “fan service.” But Mark has often raised an excellent qualifier for sequels, which is “if this weren’t a sequel but the first film of a franchise, would it be popular?” which is another way of saying, “If this weren’t larded to the gills with fan service calling back all their emotions for previous, better movies, would there be anything original, innate or self-contained in the film that is worth a lick?”
In the case of The Rise of Skywalker, which we will abbreviate as TROS (which almost sounds like the name of a character from the movie), the answer is, “Not really.” Sure, there are some big, giant action scenes — but with no frame of reference for why anyone should care, they’re as interesting as John Carter — and we know how that turned out. The biggest problems I have with this entire final trilogy — and which are crystalized in this film — have to do with the sloppiness of the plotting. Fan service I can stomach if I have to, because I understand the reason for it. But there is no reason to just make stuff up as you go along when you’ve had over five years and literally hundreds of millions of dollars to map out a cohesive three-film arc; and yet, incredibly, nearly every other scene in TROS introduces something for the very first time that is not only NOT established in the previous two films… it’s not even established in THIS film. Like, “Oh, hey… there are only two of these mappy-beacony things in the whole universe — which we never talked about before — that will guide us to some secret Sith star system — which we’ve also never mentioned before — and the only reason there are two of them is so that the bad guys can have one and we can send you on a goose chase for the other.” And when they fail to find the second one, “Oh, hey… we didn’t need it anyhow because look, here’s an old dagger lying in the dirt that just happens to have an inscription on it of the stuff we need, so never mind.”
WHAT THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING? Did NOBODY at LucasFilm or Disney raise their hand and scream, “Uh, no! You can’t get away with that! No screenwriting professor in any film school in America would tolerate that! FAIL!” Apparently not. And that’s inexcusable. How does J.J. not recognize what an unbelievably sloppy cheat that is? How do they not plan this out before the first film even shoots a frame?
And by way of another gripe — with spoilers — this may be “a long time ago” in a galaxy “far away” but if these people can blast around the galaxy at light speed and build sentient, autonomous robots… they can surely figure out a way to back up C3PO’s memory other than to R2D2 who isn’t around so that we can throw in a cheap sequence of “amnesia” gags that aren’t the least bit funny. If something went boo-boo with my iPhone, it is already backing up everywhere, all the time. So no, I’m not buying that “OMG! To get our galaxy-saving translation of an ancient text on a dagger we conveniently found in the dirt, the price we will pay is (possibly) forever losing our friend C3PO because his only backup is in R2D2 who is unreliable (yeah, not really).” What utter nonsense. And that whole “we have a spy in the First Order!” subplot? Did it serve to go anywhere? No. It was a cheap plot contrivance that was paid off with an even cheaper and totally unearned joke.
I don’t mean to say that this is a garbage film, but it’s not a good film. It’s a lazy, sloppy, presumptuous movie that shows no respect whatsoever for fans. It assumes Star Wars fans are drooling, mindless tools who simply want more of what they’ve already been fed ad nauseum for decades — and so it refuses to challenge them or push the storyline into organic new areas precisely because THE FANS and their stiff expectations are what’s now driving the creative train. The inmates have taken over the asylum and the movie studio.
Two final thoughts — firstly, this is the problem with allowing a franchise to metastasize over the course of decades — the longer you allow the narrative to go unfulfilled, the longer you let fan expectations percolate, the bigger and more daunting the challenge of satisfying their expectations. If you keep them hanging for a few years, they will gladly buy whatever you sell them. But if you leave them hanging for decades? Now they evolve their own expectations — and you’re increasingly hamstrung by them at the expense of truly original narrative risk-taking. Now their hopes and dreams have ossified to the point of being inflexible. And at that stage, no franchise can prevail — you’re doomed.
Lastly, to Ray’s point about the over-dependence on lineage — this is an admittedly literary device, an appeal to the Shakespearean notion of generational struggle which is, itself, an extension of the “divine right of kings” so central to European history and its literary output for centuries. Joseph Campbell would no doubt appreciate that, too. But I don’t. Ultimately, we are left, at the end of nine films, with what is not so much the story of individual destiny and the power of individuals — any individuals — to make a difference in the universe, to achieve greatness and destiny no matter how humble their circumstances — oh, no. That’s not this franchise. Nobody really achieves their destiny in Star Wars unless they come from two great houses of lineage — like an interstellar version of The War of the Roses — the House of Lancaster versus the House of York. Only here — SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU ARE TOO DENSE TO HAVE GOTTEN THIS FAR WITHOUT REALIZING IT — it’s The House of Skywalker vs. The House of Palpatine. That’s not only tedious, boring and derivative — it flies in the face of the message that made the first film so remarkably successful. Popular movies triumph because they sell populist heroes to populist audiences and inspire those who seek escapism from the movies to see the greatness in themselves. When you reverse course and declare that greatness isn’t individual, universal and innate… but rather hereditary? That’s a bone-headed cheat for the sake of fake melodrama.
Sure, TROS will make a pile of money. And yes, Daisy Ridley is wonderful. It has some great moments and superb action scenes. J.J. has evolved as a director — there are some ace set pieces. But the script is garbage, the narrative lazy and to think that this is the finale that’s supposed to emotionally pay off 42 years and 9 films — arguably the most legendary franchise in movie history — THIS is the screenplay that was greenlit? This is what everyone at the most dominant movie company in human history thought was acceptable to shoot? This is what they went with?
Incredibly, yes. And that’s why this is such a monumental disappointment.
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