FanFare

The Rise of Skywalker is an Unmitigated Disaster

Mystery boxes, MacGuffins, and other tomfoolery

Spoiling the heck out of this intergalactic mess.

The Rise of Skywalker is the final film in the Skywalker Saga and, in a depressing sort of symmetry, is almost as bad as The Phantom Menace, the first episodic film.

The Rise of Skywalker is a fine popcorn movie, splashy and forgettable like recent Transformers and Terminators films. But at its best, Star Wars has always been more than just simple entertainment. It meant something.

After the colorful but lifeless Prequels, the Sequel trilogy was like a dose of Bacta to an ailing patient. The new films are not perfect, but damn if they didn’t feel like the Star Wars of old.

The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t feel like anything. And that’s the problem.

(Note: throughout I will be mostly referring to director JJ Abrams, but this in no way absolves writer Chris Terrio from blame. Wherever you see me refer to JJ, consider it a general comment on the story team.)

Interesting Questions Demand Satisfying Answers

Let’s start with J.J. Abram’s penchant for mystery boxes. He’s made a career out of posing intriguing questions and then drawing out the moment of the reveal. Unfortunately, all that pent-up wondering is only satisfying if there is something in the damn box.

JJ has been riffing on this formula since Lost. I’ve yet to see anything inside one of his boxes that was worth all the hype— answers don’t pop out of his boxes so much as shamefully seep from the seams. I think JJ is aware of this, which is why his films tend to move at the speed of light. You can’t ponder the answers if the story doesn’t give you the time or space in which to do so.

The thing is, JJ is damn good at raising these questions. Its why we keep coming back for more, regardless of how many of his mystery boxes we’ve previously found empty. The Force Awakens kicked off the Sequel Trilogy with some doozies:

• Who is Rey?
• Where did Snoke come from?
• What happened to Luke / why is he hiding?
• What drove Ben Solo to the Dark Side?

There are probably some I’m missing. The Force Awakens has more mystery than Ahch-To has Porgs, but as a first movie in the new trilogy, that’s a good thing! In fact, given the story picks up some thirty years after Return of the Jedi, I’d venture it’s necessary. The questions keep us off-guard and allow us to approach the seventh episode not from a position of self-assured authority, but as tourists to a new world. And it offers us the joy of discovery, one of story’s purest pursuits.

The Last Jedi picked up the baton and promptly set out to answer these questions JJ had so helpfully left behind:

• Who is Rey: she’s a nobody, from nothing, unrelated to anyone you’ve ever heard of.
• Where did Snoke come from: unimportant, he’s dead!
• What happened to Luke: he had a mental breakdown after contemplating killing his nephew.
• What drove Ben Solo to the Dark Side: Snoke, with a final push from Luke.

Some of the angst over The Last Jedi had to do with how these questions were answered. Fans had their own ideas about what should be in the boxes, and they didn’t really care for the gifts director Rian Johnson was handing out. They wanted Rey to be someone with a famous last name, or for Snoke to have an awesome backstory, or Luke to be the hero they grew up with. The problem, of course, is that we’ve already seen those films. The Last Jedi is a flawed film, but at least it tried doing something different.

So here comes JJ again, with another new Star Wars film just in time for Christmas. And he treats The Last Jedi’s reveals like they are a White Elephant gift exchange. The Rise of Skywalker clumsily swaps answers to questions that, in all honesty, shouldn’t be all that damn important:

• Who is Rey: nobody? Psych — she’s Sheev Palpatine’s grandaughter!
• Where did Snoke come from: He’s a test tube baby!

At least JJ had the restraint not to retcon Luke’s stumble and Ben’s fall to the Dark Side. Of course, he couldn’t resist cramming some last mysteries into this final stanza.

The biggest question raised by The Rise of Skywalker is, naturally, how the heck did Palpatine survive the destruction of Death Star II? JJ never addresses it. Palpatine is just there, dangling like the world’s most morbid puppet, cackling and plotting like he’d never really been gone.

Never mind that we all saw him atomized. Is he a clone? Possibly… but the film elects not to address it. What about all those thousands of robed figures in the stands, or the improbability of building such a massive armada in the middle of nowhere, or the fact that each ship needs a crew of thousands to operate?

JJ handles all of these questions like he addresses every other mystery box he’s ever devised: he whisks the story along and hopes we don’t notice the gaping plot holes. Palpatine’s return doesn’t even occur on screen. We are informed of it via the scroll, the most expositiony of exposition. Literally text on a screen.

We don’t even get a reaction from anyone. Palpatine is like Eminem, back again, and the beat just goes on.

Even in a space opera peopled by walking dogs and muppets, there is a limit to how far people will follow a story.

MacGuffins Are Not Plot

I think JJ’s closets must be stuffed full of mystery boxes and MacGuffins. The dude absolutely loves them, and his approaching to plotting amounts to throwing out MacGuffins like they are dog bones and making the characters fetch.

The Force Awakens starts with the discovery of a MacGuffin as Poe Dameron recovers a snippet of the map that will lead to Luke Skywalker, who is the film’s ultimate MacGuffin. The heroes and villains spend the bulk of the runtime fighting over this bone.

MacGuffins are fine when employed correctly. The Force Awakens did it well: the map was there to give the characters something to struggle over, to drive their motivations, and to give the story stakes. Plus, it neatly tied the bow on one of JJ’s beloved boxes: where was Luke and why was he hiding?

Unfortunately, The Rise of Skywalker treats its MacGuffins like they are nested Russian dolls. We need to find the thing, to find the guy, to find some other thing… it’s basically a game of connect the dots, la la la la. Character motivations completely boil down to getting MacGuffin X in order to move the story down the outline. Characters have no agency. Rey and Kylo and the rest aren’t driving the story — they are passengers on an amusement park ride.

Things happen for Story Reasons, which is the worst sort of reason at all. Especially when the destination is yet another throne room in which the Emperor tempts a Jedi to the Dark Side. Yawn.

On Worldbuilding: Technical Advances or Tomfoolery

Star Wars has always had a loosey-goosey relationship with the laws of science. There’s no sound in space, but pew-pew lasers and explosions amplify the excitement, so Star Wars battles have them. I’m good with that — I’ve always preferred the fun whimsy of Star Wars to the self-serious, taciturn Star Trek (pre-JJ).

Even with its vague pseudo-science, Star Wars has always maintained a certain level of internal consistency. Yes, there are planet-destroying Death Stars, but they take decades to build and a city of technicians to run. Faster than light travel is an everyday activity, but requires precise coordinates and pinpoint calculations.

Han Solo: Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?

The shenanigans started with The Force Awakens, as Han performed two unorthodox hyperspace jumps: one from within a hangar, and the other terminating within the atmosphere of Starkiller Base. Both work, largely because it’s Han at the controls, and he’s proven to be a bit of a maverick when it comes to flying. But, looking back, we can see they established a dangerous precedent.

The Last Jedi upped the ante, introducing hyperspace tracking and then the Holdo maneuver, which seems to suggest anything equipped with a hyperdrive could be turned into an autonomous missile capable of downing capital ships.

For all that insanity, The Rise of Skywalker somehow steals the crown. Some of the film’s inventions:

• hyperspace skipping. Sigh. Well, Poe Dameron is an amazing pilot, I guess…
• TIEs somehow following the Millenium Falcon and also hyperspace skipping. Ok, this is bull crap.
• a coin-sized chip that can be used to dupe any First Order security scan.
• a Sith dagger that, when held up to the remains of Death Star II, conveniently points to the location of another Sith artifact.
• a fleet of hundreds of Star Destroyers, buried in ice, built by magic, and flown by pixies.
• each Star Destroyer is equipped with miniaturized Death Star tech (the planet-killing kind).
• everything to do with the Emperor reborn, the Force, and Force ghosts.

I’m sure I’ve even missed some things. It would probably be easier to just list the few things the film doesn’t monkey with.

All of the Sequels have treated the technology of the Star Wars universe like a magic wand that could be waved to introduce new stakes and just as conveniently resolve them. But The Rise of Skywalker’s cavalier treatment of the setting was the most egregious by far.

Introducing changes to such a long-lived franchise should be done with care. It requires the hard work of sitting down and really thinking through the ramifications of anything you introduce. Sadly, JJ and the writers of The Rise of Skywalker took the easy path.

Stakes Are Not Served At Ruth’s Chris Steak House

Fool me once, shame on me.

JJ tried to fool us five times:

• Oh no, Chewie is dead! Psych!
• C-3PO is getting his mind wiped? That’s the droid equivalent to death… oh, but R2-D2 has a recent back-up.
• Oh snap, Rey just killed Kylo with his own blade! Oh, wait. She can heal him.
• Ben Solo just got tossed down a shaft. I’m sure he ain’t dead. Yep, there’s his hand.
• Wow — they went there. They actually sacrificed Rey to kill Palpatine. I wonder how the Rebels will react to Ben Solo… never mind, he’s brought her back.

I half expected Ben and Rey to pass back life force like a game of Pong, keeping the other one alive, but then he vanished. That usually means they’re dead…

You only get one of these head-fakes per story. After that, death loses its grip. We no longer fear what could happen, because we’ve already seen the storytellers don’t have the courage to make the hard choice.

Killing Chewie would’ve been heartbreaking. It’s like John Wick’s dog, times infinity. But the story didn’t even have the fortitude to let us think he was dead for very long. It’s like they were afraid of making us feel anything.

Every time a story does something like this, it trades the verisimilitude of its world for a brief, passing reaction. It’s cheap, and the story deserves better. Done more than once, the story strays into caricature and loses all credibility.

By the end of the film, I hardly cared who won and who died. As a lifelong fan, that is the most damning thing of all.

(As a complete aside, it’s clear JJ has no clue how to write Chewbacca. He didn’t mourn Han’s death with Leia in The Force Awakens. And in The Rise of Skywalker, he just goes quietly along with his captors and boards that shuttle? No way — Chewie would’ve been hollering and shooting his bowcaster. They would’ve had to drag his shaggy, unconscious body aboard that shuttle. How can a self-professed fan like JJ get such an iconic character so wrong?)

We’ll Never Get This One Back

The Rise of Skywalker squandered its promise with a totally lackluster story. We’ll never see the conclusion that Rey, Finn, and Kylo deserved. JJ was too in love with what he thought was in the box, instead of telling a story that picked up the threads from The Last Jedi.

What a waste.

As an aside, how does Chris Terrio, the writer of this film, keep getting so many second chances? Every one of his blockbusters have been awful because of the writing. Keep him away from the MCU!

If you found this arrangement of words pleasing, consider joining my email list.

Here’s a related story to consider: