[CAUTION: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker]
The Rise of Skywalker never stops. From minute one, it is utterly relentless, bringing back major characters, leaping across time and space, and blowing through plot point after plot point at breakneck speed. Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy recently speculated that if director J.J. Abrams had known he would be spearheading this final installment back when he originally signed on for The Force Awakens, he would have saddled up and directed the whole damn trilogy. The Rise of Skywalker bears that out, if only because it feels like Abrams tried to cram two movies into one here.
Abrams and company throw everything and the kitchen sink at the audience. The film includes a heap of major retcons to The Last Jedi. There are check-ins, however fleeting, with every character of note. There are major expansions of the lore at every turn. There’s a flurry of new planets and alien species. And there’s grand returns for the few remaining Original Trilogy characters kept on the sidelines till now.
There’s a caper. There’s a lightsaber fight. There’s a throne room scene. There’s a sky-clogging dogfight. There’s a combination speeder chase/podracing homage. There’s a romance. There’s a star destroyer misadventure. There’s exposition dumps. There’s an endless series of chases. There’s multiple “not actually dead” fake-outs. There are force ghosts galore.
And all of it amounts to a lot of nice moments coupled with a lot of bad choices.
The Disney money-printing apparatus make it dubious that this will genuinely be the last chapter of the saga, but Abrams treats it like the final opportunity to do anything Star Wars and, by god, he’s going big. It’s not enough to have another climactic Sith vs. Jedi confrontation. A revivified Emperor Palpatine must contain within him the spirits of all Sith past and present, and Rey must possess the collective power of every Jedi to make their inevitable stand-off as all-encompassingly epic as humanly possible. Every Star Wars ship ever launched has to crowd the skies above a villainous fleet, purportedly 10,000 times the size of the First Order’s, with every star destroyer equipped with a Death Star cannon. More is more in Abrams’s movie, and for better or (mostly) worse, his approach makes Episode IX into the 37-layer nachos of Star Wars movies.
"What Sith ability is it that makes you all such severe interior decorators?"
Despite that, or maybe because of it, there’s only room for two arcs in the picture. Like Luke and Anakin before them, Rey and Kylo Ren must each decide whether to embrace the dark side of the Force or hold onto the light. There’s poetry in those parallels. Abrams conjures the shadow of Return of the Jedi, as an angry young Jedi who’s rying to stay steady, and a Sith who believes it’s too late for him to go back, endeavor to convert one another.
Episode IX even offers a heartening echo of Revenge of the Sith in its climax. Ben Solo succeeds where his grandfather failed — in his effort to save someone he loves from death itself — and here, even at the cost of his own life, it completes his redemption rather than causing his downfall. For all its other faults, The Rise of Skywalker puts its focus in the right place, with the emotional trajectory and shifting alignments of its biggest hero and boldest villain taking the spotlight.
But in the process, Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio squeeze out just about any meaningful character development for everyone else in the film. Finn and Poe get plenty of screen time, but their arcs, to the extent they have any, are half-finished or undeveloped.
Rise of Skywalker seems as though it’s setting up some big character moments for Finn, whether it’s “the thing [he] never told” Rey, or the sense that he’s constantly trying to get her to return, or his realization that there are other morally mutinous former stormtroopers in the galaxy. But Episode IX never really ties up any of these story threads, instead just letting them dangle in the wind until the clock runs out. Even Poe, who faces a quick-fire challenge to succeed Leia as the Resistance leader, sees his arc over and done with in the span of just a few short scenes.
"Man, being the Resistance leader is hard. Oh wait, nevermind, I just did it!"
There’s simply not enough time for anything more amid the big rush. It’s nice that Abrams and his team want to pay homage to anything and everything significant in the franchise. But between reviving each member of the Original Trilogy, introducing a handful of new characters so late in the game (who all require basic motivations and quick backstories), and making sure that Maz, Rose, Snap, BB-8, and plenty of others get their moment in the sun, there’s little room for real substance outside of the Rey/Kylo drama.
Despite that stumbling block, many of the brief interludes we get with other characters are outstanding. C-3P0 earns the most affecting moment in the whole film with his self-sacrifice. Chewey’s mournful roar sells Leia’s death better than anything else in the movie. And a nearly nonsensical return from Han Solo still works like gangbusters on the strength of its emotional resonance and echoing exchanges. The problem is that there’s not time in a two-and-a-half-hour movie to service all of the characters and callbacks and ideas Abrams wants to include here, which leaves most of them feeling undercooked.
That’s before all of the retcons and expansions to the lore that Abrams and Terrio cram into the film with little more than a single line of clarification. In The Force Awakens, some of the more curious or cryptic additions could be written off as Abrams’s usual mystery box setup. But with this final installment, Abrams creates as many new questions as he offers answers to old ones, building major new elements of the mythos and overarching plot on the fly in ways that would leave even the most devoted Star Wars fanatics scratching their heads.
Palpatine is back and tethered to some bizarre mechanical apparatus, with the only explanation being a borrowed line about abilities others find “unnatural.” He’s apparently been puttering around for the past thirty years, on a never-before-mentioned secret Sith planet, with a cadre of random druids, a gazillion star destroyers he raises from the dirt, and a tank full of Snoke clones to boot. With little more than a single line of dialogue, Palpatine even takes credit for secretly pulling the strings behind each major event in the Sequel Trilogy so far.
"And with only six easy payments, you too can own this lovely dark side recliner."
If that weren’t enough, we learn that Leia was apparently one lesson away from completing her Jedi training, replete with a special lightsaber no one’s ever seen or talked about before now. But she’s still suddenly knowledgeable enough in the ways of the Force to become Rey’s new master. Oh, and both she and Luke already knew Rey’s true parentage. It’s honestly nice to see Leia treated with such reverence as a Force-practitioner, but like so much in the film, it comes out of nowhere and seems jarring in execution.
It just goes on like this. Rey and Kylo have some super rare mystical Force bond that’s super important but never mentioned until five seconds before it’s relevant. And all Sith souls migrate into the next living darksider after death. And that life force can be gifted or stolen in ways we’ve never seen before. And you can’t kill a Sith while you’re leaning toward the dark side or the Sith will possess you, but if you use the combination of lightsabers and good vibes to reflect their force lightning back at them, it apparently doesn’t count as murder and you’re safe from Sith possession (assuming you’ve had all of your cootie shots).
Look, it’s Star Wars. Not everything is going to make perfect sense, and not everything requires an in-depth explanation, particularly in a movie that’s sprinting to encompass so much. But Abrams and Terrio just stack large chunks of backstory and serious retcons and unprecedented Force rules on top of one another in such quick succession that it becomes the Sith lightning round. Coupled with the preponderance of nostalgic echoes, The Rise of Skywalker is the first film that genuinely feels like fan fiction on that account. The cumulative effect of all these quick-twitch revisions is bewilderment and stupefaction, with each subsequent twist seeming more like a shortcut to a desired endpoint rather than an earned part of the journey.
But the biggest retcon of them all is the reveal that Rey is not a nobody; she is Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter, and it’s the film’s biggest misstep. Setting aside that we’re now forced to consider that wrinkly green dastard fathering a child, that choice reinforces Star Wars’s longstanding small universe problem. Almost everyone of note in this galaxy must apparently be related to someone else of significance. It’s a questionable change that undercuts the laudable message of “the Force belongs to everyone” from The Last Jedi. Once again, noble bloodlines are more important than the notion that anyone could be the hero and that heroes can come from anywhere.
At least it didn't turn out that she'd secretly built BB-8 or used to be friends with Watto.
But Episode IX at least uses that retcon for similarly noble thematic ends. The broader moral of the film is that parentage is not destiny. Instead, we choose who we want to be and who our true family members are. Rey has always tried to forge her identity through genealogy, to define herself via the empty space where she believes her parents are supposed to be. So when she’s having dark visions and learns that she’s the Sith scion, the itch she wanted to scratch so badly is suddenly drawing blood. Rey fears that this reveal dictates her destiny, that her turn to the dark side is inevitable.
And yet, on the cusp of giving in, she instead chooses her found family over her biological one, finding strength and solace in the people who’ve supported her, trained her, and in Ben Solo’s case, given his life for her, because they all know she’d do the same for them.
The final scene in the film, where Rey calls herself a Skywalker on Tatooine, is a little too corny and derivative. But the impulse is a creditable one — to declare that the choices we make and the people we hold dear mean more than any genetic predestination could. It dovetails nicely with the theme Abrams and Terrio offer for the Resistance crew — that bad guys like the Emperor and the First Order want you to lose hope by making you think you’re alone, but that there’s “more of us than there are of them.” It’s a commendable people power message in line with the themes of the Original Trilogy.
That sort of human element buoys the film’s best stretches. While The Rise of Skywalker often loses itself in convoluted lore and rapid-fire plot points, the sheer joy of seeing our heroes working together and going on adventures keeps the first act of the film engaging and adds heart to its last tender moments. The tension between Rey and Kylo Ren remains a potent counterpoint the main trio’s friendly camaraderie. Just as Daisy Ridley is able to play Rey’s fatalistic intensity with conviction as the young Jedi teeters toward the dark side, Adam Driver does a superb job at not only conveying Kylo Ren’s renewed internal conflict, but also his more casual, dare I say Solo-esque bent, after he pivots toward the light.
The film harnesses these performances in a series of solid action sequences, extending the location-bridging force connection to creative and more corporeal confrontations. The saber stand-offs have character to them, and while the film’s final act ends up as overstuffed and busy as the rest of the film, Episode IX can still boast any number of stellar sequences. The Rise of Skywalker lacks the same arresting visuals of prior films, with occasional muddy images, but still sees the movie’s production, costuming, and design teams realizing a score of new people, places, and things in beautiful detail.
"That's it! No more playing with your lightsabers inside the house!" "Aw, but mom!"
That aesthetic excellence, mixed with John Williams’s always stirring score, create emotional high points that the film has trouble ginning up through other means. While not fully seamless, the effects team does a creditable job at navigating Carrie Fisher’s notable absence, even when the script gets a little clunky in trying to write around her. A swelling score helps cover for the script’s faltering attempts to replicate the franchise’s usual stabs at spiritual and personal profundity. And raw images — of a Force tug-of-war between Rey and Kylo, of Chewey pawing at the ground in anguish, of our heroes enjoying a warm, victorious embrace — muster more feeling than the film’s whirlwind plot and fan fiction-y lore expansions ever could on their own. The craftsmanship on display in so many areas deserves recognition, even as the film rumbles through most of them and threatens to topple over at any second.
The advantage of The Rise of Skywalker’s grand, film-length rush through everything is that it denies the audience the chance to stop and process what they’re seeing. Taken as a cluster of individual moments, of vaguely-defined emotional beats and isolated sequences smushed together, the movie has a certain propulsive allure. A particular brand of warmth, nostalgia, and kinetic energy at play hold the damn thing together. Sometimes it’s just barely though, via the same duct tape and bubble gum that keeps the Millennium Falcon in one piece after all these years, but it’s enough to keep you along for the ride.
But when the ride stops, and the viewer finally has a chance to stop and process what they’ve just watched, the movie all but falls apart. The more you pause to think about The Rise of Skywalker, the more the ungainliness of the thing stands out, the more its narrative leaps seem questionable if not downright baffling, and the more its efforts to channel our affections for past stories and characters feels less and less earned.
At least Billy Dee Williams gets to take a bow as Lando.
Cinema is always a magic trick, and savvy audiences, willing to dig deep enough and think hard enough, will inevitably uncover the sleight of hand. The brilliance of Star Wars, past and present, is that the trick was always mesmerizing enough, the magicians and assistants so endearing, that it’s easy and even fun to handwave away all the ruddy details. But Episode IX crumbles, not only under its own weight, but under the accumulated weight of ten other films, scores of spinoffs, and forty-two years of this franchise swirling around in the popular consciousness. With so much pressure, Abrams strains to pay off, and pay tribute to, so much in one single, off-balance heave.
His final Star Wars film aims to do and be and encompass everything, with resurrections, redemptions, and reunions that all happen so fast and furiously that few have time to land with any force before it’s on to the next thing. That pace protects Episode IX, keeping both its strongest and weakest moments glancing enough that the film can keep rolling no matter what. But eventually, like all things, it has to end. It’s then that this accumulation of wobbly story beats and character moments and callbacks feels like less than the sum of its parts, less than the proper culmination of nine films’ worth of storytelling, and less than the triumphant capstone to the whole of Star Wars that it aims to be.
The Rise of Skywalker isn’t a bad film. But it is, nevertheless, a lot. Abrams and company try to bite off far more than they, and maybe anyone, could chew, and they race through it so fast in the hopes that no one will notice. The ultimate result of all this tumult, revision, and rebellion, is a well-intentioned but ill-fated finale — one that does too much and yet, somehow, not quite enough.
