Movie review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)


Alert: Lots of spoilers (and griping).

The Rise of Skywalker starts out pretty good, and at first I was hopeful that all of the negative things I had heard were not true or exaggerated. I heard a lot of negative from some quarters about The Last Jedi, and I ended up liking it more than most.

But the film collapses. Every time the filmmakers do something right, they do something (or somethings) else horribly wrong. If Rey can float and has the power to pull down a spaceship with the Force, why can’t she just float over the waves that are supposed to be an obstacle? Where was the Jedi healing power in all the other films? If the ghost Jedi can actually do stuff, are they really ghosts, and if they’re basically alive only translucent, why don’t they do stuff all the time?

It isn’t nit-picky to ask for some consistency in the rules of this universe. There is none here. They make things up as they go along.

Once again, as in The Force Awakens, they just slap the new characters in old situations. A battle with the Emperor! Endor! The cavalry arriving at the big space battle!

It’s tempting to blame the failure of this movie on the problems of the first two–they had written themselves into a corner. That’s true to an extent, but there is so much more wrong with it.

There are continuity errors–how did the roly-poly droid get off the battleship? The original characters are all wrong–C-3PO talks too much as a character trait, but not as much as or in the way he does here. After what is supposed to be a touching scene of C-3PO dying, the other characters don’t seem to care at all that C-3PO has just sacrificed himself. What should have been a nice quick in-joke when Chewbacca gets a medal turns into a ridiculously belabored moment with Chewbacca acting like a blubbering idiot, which he would not do. (Plus Chewbacca really needs to hit the space gym.)

I could rant on, but others have covered this ground plenty. Not a good movie.

But at least it started out pretty good…