The Ranting Penguin

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not a great movie. It’s not a horrible movie either. It is, however, filled with so much pandering fan-service that it’s as if someone took a tee-shirt cannon filled with Star Wars tees and shot it on full auto into your face. Some folks may love that. I did up until a point. Your mileage may – no, it will – very. It serves its purposes only well enough to close out the Skywalker saga — and for better or worse, that’s the end of that. Now can we get on with telling other stories?

I’m going to keep this as spoiler free as possible which is hard since there is so much going on.

In the opening crawl we are told that supposedly dead Emperor Palpatine is still alive. So the return of the Original Trilogy’s biggest villain is introduced via a Star Wars version of a tweet. Kylo somehow tracks down the hidden secret base of Palpatine. Finn and Poe Dameron are off on a mission in the Millennium Falcon getting information from a mole within the First Order and make a daring escape from a squadron of Tie Fighters. Rey is furthering her training in the forest of some planet that is the current home of the Resistance and Leia is her Jedi trainer. Yet she is still haunted by her connection with Emo Ren — I mean — Kylo Ren, and memories of her parents dumping her. This is in the first few minutes of the movie.

What will follow is revelations that yeah, the Emperor is somehow: alive, cloned, magically resurrected by dark sorcery — take your pick because that’s literally how they explained it. Multiple choice. So, the Emperor is not only alive but it turns out he has his own fleet of ships and army called…are you ready? The Final Order! Dude shows a lack of imagination for sure. But he sure knows how to make conplicated and convoluted evil plans. So in a proposed merger between the First Order and the Final Order, details are worked out. There is literally a boardroom scene where someone asks what can they Sith have to offer in trade.

Rey, decides to go off on her own to go kill Palpatine because I guess being a space sorcerer really doesn’t equate to high IQs. Finn, Poe, Chewie, BB8, and Threepio(?) join her because going alone would be stupid, and because — you know, friendship. But no need to worry about Rey, there will be plenty of moments for her to rush off on her own without her friends. Now in order to get to the Emperor who is on the mythical and of course uncharted Sith homeworld of Exegol, they need a map, and in order to get the map, they must go on a mini-quest. They fulfill the mini quest, but in order to decipher the map, they must go on another mini-quest. And along the way we are introduced to more side characters and land on more planets and we have more cameos of actors who get to brag to their kids they were in a Star Wars movie. This is what happens when you have a generation of screenwriters raised on RPG video games.

In the middle of their mini-quest, we also run in that old smoothy, Lando Calrissian who drops in and points the way towards the film’s maguffin. But playa still has some swagger as he says “Give my love to Leia.” Yeah, dude, I know you’re thinking “What’s up, Princess? I heard Han’s gone now.”

There are chases in the desert and even an escape from a Star Destroyer that looks eerily familiar. Now where have we seen this before? And there are quite a few lightsaber duels, more than in any Star Wars movie to date.

Meanwhile, Rey and Kylo Ren still have that Force bond version of Skype going on and so they continue to troll each other with Kylo trying to turn Rey to the Dark Side and Rey saying she’s gonna destroy the Emperor and that Kylo is still Emo.

The characters and their interactions with each other are genuinely good and especially the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe. There is genuine sense of chemistry between them. Too bad it took three movies to get them all together on screen. These are all top actors doing the very best they can with the material that they have been given. Richard E. Grant as Fleet Admiral Pryde is quite menacing as a First Order leader and just as Domhnall Gleeson seems most comfortable and least over the top in his roll, it’s the end of the trilogy. And of course Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine stands out as well. This time around they at least got the makeup effects right on him as opposed to that monstrosity of a Halloween mask look he had in Revenge of the Sith. And believe it or not, even Anthony Daniels’ Threepio gets a moment. Too bad that moment was given away in the trailer.

But we must address the presence of Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa. She of course died before filming could start on Rise of Skywalker and through many tricks of editing and writing, she was added into the film from unused footage from The Force Awakens and maybe The Last Jedi. It is not entirely seamless but in the end it works. Carrie’s spirit does seem to haunt the film as every scene that she is in is a focus of our attention whether it is intentional or not. If internet rumors can be believed, and of course we should never doubt internet rumors, Leia’s role Rise of Skywalker was supposed to be major. They did the best they could do with what they had. Should they have totally scrapped the idea and gone without Carrie Fisher in it or write her off in the crawl? I don’t know, the answer to that. But I will say it was done respectfully ad with genuine heart.

John Williams returns for what he has claimed to be his final Star Wars score and he does not hold back as the music is exceptionally grand and lush when it needs to be. No matter what fans may end up feeling about the new Disney movies, I think that we can all agree that John Williams’ scores have always been consistently good.

The script by Chris Terrio and JJ Abrams is exactly would you would expect from one of the writers of Justice League and Batman v Superman. It’s filled with odd choices in narrative and plot threads that were unnecessary. New Force powers are introduced that basically locks these guys into the category of space wizards now. I know it’s just fantasy. But I read enough fantasy books to know that good ones have well thought out magic systems. Why do you think that there are so many Dungeons and Dragons rule books?

Yet somehow it works as big dumb entertainment the same way that Aquaman — or even Godzilla King of the Monsters — works as trash . Because once you start thinking about he film everything falls apart. The action and the character interactions are totally watchable. And that is the main reason to watch it. And on a technical level, the film looks and sounds great. The space battle is massive, yet even though it is bigger, still doesn’t compare to the fleet battle in Return of the Jedi. 

Does Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker make a fitting entry into the series? I guess it does. It hit the story beats it set out to do and hopefully the studio can move on from the heavy baggage of the Skywalker (and Solo) name, because Rogue One and The Mandalorian are both examples of how well Star Wars can be done without that heavy burden. As it is, there is a line in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman where the main character tells Jimmy Hoffa just before his demise “It is what it is.” That phrase and the meaning behind it about sums up Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. 

Final Score: 7.5/10 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯