Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

The malign influ­ence of space nerds with key­boards and a car­toon Wook­iee avatar to hide behind are present in JJ Abrams’ pur­port­ed­ly cli­mac­tic instal­ment of the space opera we know as Star Wars. This influ­ence – let’s, for the sake of brevi­ty, call it ​“the dark side” – has result­ed in a film which insid­i­ous­ly kow­tows to the devo­tions of the Star Wars hard­core, and in doing so, mis­takes cheap sen­ti­ment for hard-won nos­tal­gia. The Rise of Sky­walk­er is a cracked mir­ror for fans to hold to them­selves and ask the ques­tion: is this what we want­ed? Really?

Rian Johnson’s eighth episode, The Last Jedi, court­ed the ire of a group of wretched­ly ugly men who earnest­ly believed this fic­tion­al galaxy was built for their per­son­al sat­is­fac­tion. The knives were out. The film cleaved to fran­chise lore as a neces­si­ty, but John­son clear­ly took great pains to cre­ate orig­i­nal, mem­o­rable images and to make music with his cam­era – he want­ed to do some­thing new and excit­ing with this clank­ing old shell of a saga, and more pow­er to him. This new film hits the reset but­ton with the force of plan­et-destroy­ing laser weapon­ry, opt­ing for fuzzy crit­ters, cheer-a-long cameos, sidelin­ing Rose (boo!) and a plot so hack­neyed you just want to bury it deep in the sands of Tatooine and hope no one ever finds it again.

All the old gang are hasti­ly re-intro­duced (Daisy Ridley’s Rey, Oscar Isaac’s Poe, John Boyega’s Finn) and as quick as a flash we’re find­ing a doohick­ey to take us to a plan­et to meet an eccen­tric alien, then we’re find­ing anoth­er sacred object that needs to be looked at by anoth­er spe­cial per­son which means we can get to the place where the thing is hap­pen­ing, etc, etc.

There are bare­ly any expo­si­tion shots in the film – it’s per­haps the first Star Wars title to mute the sense of an exot­ic and diverse galaxy, which ends up bad­ly hob­bling the big finale. Every­one and every­thing is func­tion­al and, save for a few very fruity lines read­ings from old reli­able C‑3PO, so too is much of the dia­logue, which leans very heav­i­ly on musty apho­risms and so, so many calls to look inside inside yourself.

The actors do their darnedest with the thin mate­r­i­al, and it’s their invest­ment in this beloved world that just about keeps things tick­ing. The trag­ic thing about this film is that, while watch­ing it, you know that the end is nigh, sim­ply because there is nowhere else for these char­ac­ters to go. Their ques­tions have all long since been answered, and their virtue is now ful­ly cer­ti­fied. Even when the film attempts to deal with the notion of con­flict­ing emo­tions and a per­son being emo­tion­al­ly dragged in oppos­ing direc­tions, it does so in a man­ner which always empha­sis­es the right way of think­ing. Which is a real­ly bor­ing way of going about things.

What Abrams has suc­ceed­ed in doing with this slight­ly sor­ry film is to make some­thing very safe and very diplo­mat­ic. And when has diplo­mat­ic ever trans­lat­ed to fun? It’s a soft mid­dle ground where the pim­ply base­ment boys get to feel as if their egos are being stoked and they’re watch­ing a work which slav­ish­ly repli­cates the dis­tinc­tive gram­mar of George Lucas’s tem­plate-set­ting orig­i­nal. Mean­while, the more casu­al fan can at least say they wit­nessed this thing come to a close.

There are few scat­ter­ings of plea­sure here and there, such as some nice retro pro­duc­tion design touch­es or an out­landish cos­tume, but in the end, it’s slim pick­ings. The Rise of Sky­walk­er is not a bad film so much as a dis­ap­point­ing one, a would-be oper­at­ic genre flame-out which is way too quick to beg, bor­row and steal, and often from the very worst sources.