Rambling Review: ‘The Rise of Skywalker’
A desperate fan trying to find a new hope in despair.
The last film in the Star Wars trilogy is.. not good. And that’s me trying to be nice about it.
The thing is, it isn’t like it couldn’t have been really great. There were ideas, characters, moments in it that were brimming with potential, and that’s why I’m so bummed out about the fact it sucked. I would describe it like a hollow shell, decorated to distract us from a non-existent story with stunning cinematography, swelling nostalgic music at the perfect moments and incredible acting.
Some might call me a hater, or a pessimist, but really by talking about this I want to strive for something better — to hold Hollywood to a higher standard, so that stuff like this doesn’t keep happening. We need to voice our criticism constructively, and I’m going to try to be balanced about it.
The main problem with TROS is the pacing. It’s two and a half hours long, but the whole thing lacks focus and never takes a moment to pause. I found myself clinging onto my seat, more because it felt like I was clinging to the outside of a rocket while it hurtled me into space trying to follow the plot as it veered in a hundred different directions. The film somehow wasn’t satisfied with the myriad of beloved and interesting new characters and plot-lines it had to tie up and just kept new characters coming, throwing in confusing cameos left and right, not trusting in the strength of its own merit. Conversations with older fans confirmed it for me: they were more annoyed about these unnecessary call-backs than I was. In the end, there were far too many balls in the air for Abrams to juggle, and it all came crashing down.
I want to be able to take something away from what, at least for me, was a tragic disappointment, to examine what we can learn from Disney’s missteps with the Star Wars franchise.
Watching Supernatural back recently, I realised what a different age we live in now, and how much the way we consume media has changed in just the last ten years. Tuning in week by week is basically a thing of the past; now, stories with filler episodes are an endangered species. I’m not complaining about that, per se. We get much more streamlined and cohesive stories out of that in a TV context. What I’m interested in is how everything has sped up. We’ve all felt it in every area of our lives. We don’t know how to take a second to ourselves anymore; our time is a precious commodity, and trends move so fast you can blink and you’ll miss it. Every moment passing is a fight to stay relevant.
Back in Star Wars’ heyday, it was three years between the release of each film. There was less choice, less opportunity for things to sink into irrelevancy. I hardly have to explain the merits of having more time to craft something to perfection, do I? For coming up with a cohesive plot that would follow through all of the films?
The film feels like a symptom of a time where we don’t know how to wait for a payoff. Character deaths are given a fraction of a second of time for mourning before they’re reversed, for one. There is no time to slow down to grieve — too much convoluted plot to get through and ships to explode. Perhaps Disney wasn’t misguided in the idea that we wouldn’t be satisfied unless it felt as grand a send-off as Endgame. Star Wars fans are notoriously difficult to please.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I suppose I just hope that Disney start to understand that all of this is incredibly complicated, but also so simple. All we wanted was to see a new set of lovable characters grow and undergo an exciting, satisfying, wholly original adventure. I wanted to see Rey coax Ben back from the dark side, Finn and Poe play out the slow-burn love story they were clearly cock-blocked from because Disney are cowards, and a new villain that excited me. And I hope we can begin to understand that crafting a really great story sometimes means having to wait to reap the rewards. Why do these corporations seem to not understand that the whole reason Marvel succeeds is because they played the long game and made us care whether the characters live or die?
Maybe Star Wars is doomed to always be a source of controversy. I hope that isn’t the case. This trilogy couldn’t cut itself loose from the baggage of its predecessors, and it didn’t slow down long enough to make us feel anything. I feel like the whole thing passed in the blink of an eye, and I won’t remember it ten years from now except with a vague sense of disappointment. For whatever comes next, I hope Disney rethinks their strategies, because the missteps they’ve made recently have me scared for what they’ll reboot next.
