Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker
Rise of Skywalker picks up several months to maybe a year after The Last Jedi, where the Resistance is picking up the pieces and trying to find a way to finally put an end to the First Order and Kylo Ren. The movie quickly re-introduces us to the main villain in Palpatine, who apparently didn't die all those years ago at the Death Star for some reason. His plan is to recruit Kylo Ren to bring him Rey so he can turn her to the dark side and he can once again start to rebuild the sith. The idea of bringing back Palpatine felt pretty unnecessary to me, although it was nice to see him and his crazy over-the-top performance again. It just felt like it was thrown in just to have another connection to the original movies everyone loves. The previous movies didn't feel like they were building up towards this reveal, so it just felt like it came out of nowhere and it didn't make as much sense as they probably thought it would.
Later on, in the movie, it's revealed that Rey is actually a descendant of Palpatine, his granddaughter to be specific. This goes against the idea established in The Last Jedi that Rey's parents aren't important people. It makes the message of that movie weaker because it felt like it was trying to say something interesting in that you don't need to be a Skywalker or a Solo to be a hero. Not every hero in Star Wars has to be connected to a bloodline that is well-known in the franchise to be a Jedi, but that's apparently untrue since it turns out Rey was a Palpatine all along.
It also turns out that Palpatine was behind the First Order from the start and that he created Supreme Leader Snoke in his weird lab, so Snoke was actually just Palpatine all along. It feels like that was just thrown in to put some meaning behind Snoke since he died in The Last Jedi before we really learned anything about him. It just doesn't feel like the story here was fully thought out and a lot of the story elements in this movie were put in to "fix" some of the plot points from The Last Jedi. This happens quite a bit in the movie actually.
Some things that happen in Rise of Skywalker that feel like they were just put in to try and fix or go against The Last Jedi:
- Rey actually being a Palpatine
- Snoke being a clone created by Palpatine
- Rose Rico and Finn's relationship being completely ignored
- Luke stopping Rey from throwing away her lightsaber
- Killing off General Hux pretty quickly and establishing General Pryde
Another annoying part of the movie was the whole dagger storyline. A good chunk of the movie revolved around getting this rare sith dagger that would help them find Palpatine's location with its inscription. There's a lot of coincidences that happen in order for them to even find this dagger. First, they randomly find Lando on a desert planet, then they get in a random speeder chase with troopers where they crash land onto some sort of quicksand. Inside the quicksand is a bunch of tunnels where they randomly find the dagger they were looking for. Towards the end of the movie, Rey finds a random hidden compass inside the dagger that just happens to show the location of Palpatine on the Death Star wreckage near Endor. It all just feels... a little too lucky?
The movie also does this thing where it pretends to kill important characters and then brings them back to life or reveal it was fake all along later. It does this with Chewbacca, Kylo, Zori Bliss and C-3PO. It's like they are trying to get emotions out of the audience by pretending to kill off important characters you love only to bring them back. Plus it takes away from Kylo's actual death later on at the ending of the movie when you already thought he was going to die once when he was stabbed.
It also feels like the movie doesn't really know what to do with Finn as a character. Since they completely erase his relationship with Rose from the last movie, we don't get to see what happens between them and if Finn actually feels anything for her. Much later in the movie, they do give him a new interesting character he connects with, a woman he also abandoned the First Order like Finn did in the first movie. This relationship sadly doesn't go much further than just them bonding over the fact that they both were forced to join the First Order when they were young. At the end of the movie, they just randomly stick her in a scene with Lando that doesn't go anywhere and feels a little too random.
To talk about some things I did like though, the cast really brings it in this movie like they have in the previous entries. I really like the 4 main actors (Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo) and I hope to see them more in the future, not just in Star Wars. They have great chemistry with each other and play off each other very well. I think this was the best of Poe we got in this trilogy, his character felt like it was handled well and I had a lot of fun watching him. Poe and Finn's relationship is the most fun one and seeing them on-screen together is always really good. This was also the first time we really got to see Rey and Poe do a lot together and it was also really good the way they played off each other.
Something I wasn't too sure about that turned out to be really nice was how the movie handled Leia's character. I think they used her character well and did great with what little they had to work with. The only strange part was her death were they kind of just put a blanket over her entire body for the last part of her performance as she lay on a bed. It's understandable though because there was only so much they could have done.
The best scene in the movie is actually the most surprising scene too. Han Solo makes a nice final return to have a really well done emotional moment with his son Kylo. Kylo declares himself once again to be Ben Solo and it's honestly really well done and Harrison Ford really brought it.
The action in the movie is still pretty fun even if it sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense, like the weird final battle sequence where they are trying to destroy some kind of navigation system to prevent an entire fleet of star destroyers from being able to go destroy the galaxy. Along with some of the best visual effects you can find in a movie (this is Disney and Star Wars so that's not surprising). AND of course, there's the amazing score by John Williams that always deserves to be praised.
Rise of Skywalker was probably never going to make every Star Wars fan happy, especially after The Last Jedi divided a lot of them. Its options seemed to be to either go along with the changes that The Last Jedi brought to the story or try to fix them somehow in two and a half hours. The movie seemed to mostly try to ignore a lot of what happened in the last movie or try to fix it by adding a new twist or new plot. I think by doing that it made the whole trilogy feel very uneven. It feels like nothing was really fully planned out from the beginning to the end of the trilogy and it was all made up as each movie was made. It could have worked out, but the problem was that this last movie tries too hard to pretend a lot of what The Last Jedi was setting up didn't matter. It also introduces a lot of new ideas that don't get a full payoff. Ideas like Finn maybe being able to control the force and also Finn never really tell Rey the thing that he tries the whole movie to tell her. They also introduce new characters like Zori and Jannah that don't really get to do much and ignore already established characters like Rose.
Despite all of this, I still enjoyed watching the movie for the most part. It was hard to ignore its flaws and for that reason, I don't really see myself coming back to this movie very often. The only reason to return is to see Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo because they are the only reason this new trilogy worked at all. Their performances and chemistry kept this trilogy from being a total mess, even though it was still a mess. It's a trilogy that had a ton of potential after the first movie, but in my opinion, it fell apart with the next two movies. I think many people will still enjoy this movie and I know a lot of people really liked it. I thought it was okay and it had enough good in it to entertain me for most of its run-time. In the end, it's just disappointing to see this new trilogy end in on a low note without bringing much excitement to what's in store next for the Star Wars movies. I think there's still plenty of great stories that can be told in this universe, The Mandalorian and Fallen Order have recently proven that to be true.
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