Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - The saga wraps with a breathlessly busy script and a mandate to play it safe
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
“The Dead speak!” declares the first sentence of the receding letters on the opening scroll of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Some spoilers: Some major characters from the ‘70s/’80s first trilogy – Episodes IV, V and VI - are indeed resurrected in various ways in the new movie.
That group includes the late Carrie Fisher who appears (thanks to left-over footage and movie magic) as General Leia Organa, the trainer of protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley), heroine of the current sequel trilogy. Her role requires her to be the bearer of sententious Jedi-esque commands like: “Don’t tell me what things look like. Tell me what they are.”
Daisy Ripley as the Jedi’s new hope, light-sobering you for, ostensibly, the last time.
A couple and a half hours later, after a much-needed bathroom break, I thought: “They sure got their money’s worth from the multiple plays of John Williams’ theme music.” Like most reviewers of a certain age, I have a fond 42-year-old memory of seeing the original Star Wars. But the truth is, I thought it was kitsch for kids. My fondest Star Wars-linked memory is Bill Murray, on Saturday Night Live, as ski-lodge lounge-singer Nick Winters, crooning: “Star Wars … nothing but Star Wars, Give me those Star Wars … don’t let them end.”
Read our interview with Joonas Suotamo, a.k.a. Chewbacca
Well, they’ve ended Nick, officially after nine movies (oh, sure) with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, summing it all up in Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams’ well-stuffed script. Perhaps the best way to describe the movie is like a breathless six-year-old waking his parents on a Saturday morning with an account of the last five cartoons he or she has seen:
To wit: “You remember Kylo Ren, who used to be good but is now mad and bad. Well, he’s looking for the source of a mysterious broadcast and on another planet Rey is learning Jedi fighting and Poe and Finn and the guys from the Resistance say they have a mole in the First Order and everyone’s going to have a big fight with light sabers. But then Rey and the others have to go and find some things, and they fall in quicksand and there’s a tunnel with a big worm. And Emperor Palpatine wears a hoodie and has black lipstick and he goes like ‘Meh-heh-heh – surrender to the Dark Side!’”
Director J.J. Abrams revived Star Wars with 2015’s The Force Awakens before handing the reins to Rian Johnson for The Last Jedi, the latter of which was a critical and box office success (in spite some nasty fan blowback against its racial and gender advances). Abrams is always impressively competent in plot traffic control, sifting exposition and action with bearable amounts of Spielbergian sentimentality and visual excellence (cinematography is by Dan Mindel, production design by Rick Carter and Kevin Jenkins).
Yet, with another billion dollar box office movie on the line, it feels as though Abrams plays things safe, finding ways to wind up loose ends, mollifying the fan base and going for the tie rather than the win.
Among the reiterations, the plot once again evokes The Wizard of Oz (a young woman on an identity quest, accompanied by a hairy creature, a tin man, a Toto-like little robot to confront the evil wizard) and is similarly episodic. There’s a crisis every 10 minutes or so, with lots of cross-cutting between the Rey and Kylo Ren narratives. The film is easy to imagine as five or six episodes of of a TV fantasy adventure serial.
Often, it’s easy to get lost as to which spectacular planet we’re supposed to be on (desert, verdant, glacial?) and why. Characters fight against specular backdrops – the stormy sea one is most impressive. They occasionally stop to catch their breaths while delivering swaths of exposition, with the occasional interlude with a cute baby animal or weird franken-beast (horses with big tusks!)
Daisy Ridley mostly looks determined, while Oscar Isaac, as the roguish pilot Poe Dameron, offers a pale echo of Harrison Ford’s Hans Solo sassiness. Otherwise, Adam Driver, as the brooding, fretful Kylo Ren, embodies the philosophical theme of divided dark-and-light nature, in a way that seems a bit too explicit.
The Star Wars saga can hold profound meaning in real lives. Not long ago, I attended a funeral for a friend, where George Lucas’ Jedi maxims were invoked. But the Jedi code against fear doesn’t feel compatible with the final episode’s caution. Instead, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dodges complications like a Jedi star-fighter threading through an asteroid belt, delivering a one-size-fits-all “believe in yourself” message, and a generic celebration of political defiance/invasion resistance and melodramatic sacrifice.
Like the Marvel Universe, Star Wars is about conflicts and characters shielded in the armour of franchise logic, where defeat and even death are somehow temporary. To quote Bill Murray’s song again, “Star Wars/ those near and far wars” checks the boxes of a lot of the audience’s base, while seeming unburdened by real gravity.
Star Wars; The Rise of Skywalker. Directed by J.J. Abrams. Written by Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams. Starring: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, Ian McDiarmid, Oscar Isaac and John Boyega. Star Wars can be seen at the Scotiabank Cineplex Theatres, the Yonge-Dundas Cineplex and other locations