I love Star Wars. That doesn’t mean I love all Star Wars. It means that I keep going back even if an installment disappointed me. I loved Ahsoka, the Mandalorian, and Andor. I enjoyed The Force Awakens, but have mixed feelings about The Last Jedi. I thought Rogue One and Solo were excellent in their ways. I love half of the Attack of the Clones and hate half of it. But there is one film in the Star Wars canon that I really have no desire to revisit any time soon. So here are my thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker.
Somehow, Palpatine Returned
My favorite line in all of the Sequel Trilogy is “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”
No, seriously, the line is perfect.
A lot of people make fun of it, and more than a few say it’s lazy.
I beg to differ. I used to work for a telecommunication company in Larose, LA, which is about an hour south of New Orleans. One day, I was walking to the sales building, and everyone was standing outside with no one going towards the building. So I asked and was told there was an alligator by the door. (No, I’m not making this up.) No one asked why the alligator was there. We live in South Louisiana, so it is possible. We just knew it was a threat to us if we went near it. Alligator nuisance was called (yes, that is a real thing), and someone removed it.
The same logic applies to Palpatine. The characters knew it was an immediate threat to their very existence. Would they (and us) like to know why and how? Of course, but it wasn’t the right time. More importantly, it’s not unbelievable in a galaxy that had a series of wars literally named after clones. The only objective was to end this new phantom menace.
Yet, this line seems to be the most ridiculed when it is the most believable and plot-serving line in the entire movie.
More Thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker
Of all the Star Wars films, this is the one I have yet to watch since my initial viewing. Frankly, there are too many movies I haven’t seen that deserve watching.
I admit that I liked The Rise of Skywalker when I walked out of the theater. Almost all the desert scenes were full of gorgeous visuals, and the scene with Harrison Ford and Adam Driver is arresting. Most importantly, Rey completed the hero’s journey and earned the name of Skywalker. I think it would have been braver for her to keep her family name, but that wasn’t the safe move.
However, the rest of the film is just a mess because it keeps choosing safe moves. Sometimes films can be a mess and work. Two of them come to mind: Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Despite their flaws, they succeed because they are ambitious.
The Rise of Skywalker is a lesson in playing it safe. Part of it is the overreaction to the people who didn’t like The Last Jedi (another film that is a mess but succeeds because it is ambitious). Nothing about the plot of TRoS is ambitious. Adam Driver is absolutely brilliant (he might not be capable of a bad performance), but he is also absolutely wasted. That smile he gives Rey at the end tells more of a complete story than the rest of the movie.
Also, for a JJ Abrams movie, a lot of it doesn’t look good. Where he made some of the best night scenes in Force Awakens, almost any scene in the dark looked cheap—so cheap that I kept waiting for the silhouette puppet in the shape of a gumball machine and his two friends to be superimposed on the screen.
The little sides about the spice trade, the sidelining of Rose and introducing a white male actor to do what she could have done (and that white male actor is one of our all-time favorites at NolaNerdCouple.com), and not allowing me a moment to think Chewbacca was actually dead make me like the film less and less every time I think about it. John Boyega, Kelly Van Tran, Oscar Isacc, and Richard E. Grant were all wasted in the film. The film contributed to Star Wars fatigue that the TV programs have helped cure.
But at least I smile when I think about how great the line “Somehow, Palpatine returned” is.
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