Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Incestuous family.  Those are the words that come to mind here for a variety of reasons.  What started as a running joke about the lack of continuity turned into a kind of Huxleyan nightmare.  This metaphor works on all kinds of levels.  Luke/Leia, Rey/Ren, Fox/Disney… As one young rebel once said, “I can do this all day.”

Well, he did, until he put on grandpa pants and teleported back to the pre-Civil Rights era to forget everything he spent his life fighting.  STAR WARS is a bit like that.  Invested in the point of no return, Disney and its army of throwaway writers, directors, plots, march off the cliff of sound judgment into the abyss.

THE DEAD SPEAK! THE GALAXY HAS HEARD A THREAT OF REVENGE… shouts the opening crawl.  Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the menace son of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher),  rage-kills a bunch of creatures on an unnamed planet, looking for a kind of compass to point him to another planet called–  I should know what the name is.  They said it at least a hundred times more than they needed to.  It’s fiery, and red, and black, and its name sounds like a portmanteau of Exxon and Texaco.

The device that guides Ren to this planet is, would you believe it, called a “wayfinder”.  That’s clever.  Light-saber.  Way-finder.  Mind-number.  We’ve no idea why or how Ren comes to discover the existence of this marker.  But I suspect if they felt it was necessary they’d tack on a third hour just to explain it.   But, never mind.  No, really.  Please.

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is two hours and twenty-one minutes of exposition—dialogues explain, in excruciating detail, everything someone or some group does just before they do it—with lots and lots of close ups of individual actors reacting to, presumably, phosphor dots on a green screen stage.  Somewhere in the third act, the last vestiges of the rebellion work themselves up with one of those rousing speeches that should’ve the import of Patton but instead comes across with the jingoistic banality of Pullman (Bill), in Roland Emmerich’s INDEPENDENCE DAY.  Here a wide shot would stress the importance of family, but in director J.J. Abrams’ idea of STAR WARS, every man, woman, and child, is an island—or two if you count an odd jump cut marrying two different close-ups of Oscar Isaac.  It’s as if the filmmakers worried they might bore the audience if any one shot held their gaze for more than two seconds.  How do you make a movie that feels more like a video game than the one-take war film everyone’s talking about?

Writers Abrams and Chris Terrio’s distrust in their own story suggests a twofold paranoia:  1. That prompting audience reactions is necessary only because you’ve given them nothing to which they can react.  2. That there are no real risks taken.  See #1.

In the previous film, a bold maneuver—flying a ship through a blockade at light speed, ripping apart every vessel in range—makes us wonder why the Rebellion doesn’t use it more often, and on autopilot.  The response here, aside from rationalizing that moment in dialogue, is comical:  A fleet of Star Destroyers (the baddies’ ships, for the three people whose retinas remain unharmed by Disney’s marketing) so dense in formation, Poe remarks if they take them head on the ships will end up shooting each other.  And the guy who raised this fleet?  He displays such immense power, you wonder why the sequence exists in the first place, except to lengthen the running time of the end credits.

The wit, wisdom, charm, and imagination of Star Wars is gone.  Take, for instance, Rey’s training.  It’s as if J.J. Abrams watched a wizened Yoda guiding Luke with lessons about transcending mind and body, yet thought the obstacle course was the point.  You almost want Beat Takeshi to show up with running commentary to liven up the whole affair.  Even an implied Han and Leia dynamic, attempted between the ex-smuggler Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell)—a female bounty hunter costumed in such an Art Deco throwback we might as well call her Daft Punkette, the Racketeer, or C3P2—gets thrown into the narrative cacophony, just to “no homo” the Poe/Finn relationship resonating within the fandom’s diversity.  Like Disney blithely dispatching 42 years of canon, even C3PO doesn’t hesitate to erase these horrid episodes from his own memory.  After all, how much do you want to bet there’s a backup drive?

Then there’s the unused footage of Carrie Fisher that seems patched in, like it was shot for a completely different exchange but repurposed here.  There’s something  gauche about robbing an actor of her agency, the clarity and purpose of her performance.  Here, they re-animate Fisher, only to have to justify her death in service to a male character’s arc in a way that, the explanation itself feels like it’s capitalizing on something to which we shouldn’t be a party.   It feels cheap, like the moment in BOWFINGER where the director, Bobby (Steve Martin), tells his ingenue, Daisy (Heather Graham), he’ll never abuse her trust, while pilfering her credit card from her purse.

What was once a thoughtful, evocative series, taking us to distinct worlds of sand, ice, lush vegetation, is now a galaxy surfeit with desert planets and earth tone linens, infantilized cultures—a sort of National Geographic survey of “savages” from exoplanets that just happen to all dress the same.

After leaving the press screening I asked myself why I felt nothing for the characters of Ren, Rey, Poe Dameron (Isaac), and Finn (John Boyega).  There’s a habit in modern cinema to escalate the stakes to absurdity, then simply write an escape precisely where there needs to be one.  The idea of the immortal soul became a clever mechanism by which to extend some magnificent performances from Sir Alec Guinness, but at the same time it forewarned of its own abuse as a plot device.  At no time do we sense anyone is in any kind of mortal danger, because the afterlife doesn’t just exist, it glows and talks to you, often hunched over on a log in a bog.

So we sit, and we listen, to this cockamamie story for over two hours and then what?  On Planet Texaco, the girl kisses the guy who tortured her friends.  Too on the nose?

Can you imagine watching this bullshit transpire for an eternity? Bob Iger can.