‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ or — Let The Past Die… Please, Let It F#8king Die.
‘The Dead Speak’ and Palpatine is back, broadcasting to entire planetary systems like an intergalactic Dave Lee Travis. How terrifying! Who can save countless millions from destruction by The Final Order… whatever The Final Order is? And why is Palps back anyway? And what is a wayfinder? And… and… what, exactly, the fuck is going on?
J.J. Abrams is my least favourite filmmaker currently working right now; I’d even go so far as to say I actually detest his movies where coherence is sacrificed for style, verisimilitude and integrity for speed, intelligence for empty nostalgia as well as his unerring ability to render action scenes incomprehensible in terms of location, geography and stakes. He guts out franchises, keeping only their skin — essentially he’s the filmmaking equivalent of Buffalo Bill from ‘Silence of The Lambs’ — resulting in soulless facsimiles of an original product. Mostly, though, it’s his contempt for the intelligence of his audiences, constantly failing to deliver payoffs that only existed for lazy effect or playing so fast and loose with time and space that he hopes we won’t notice or care.
‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ (2019) not only fails to tie up ANY lose ends ‘The Force Awakens’ set up but it actively undoes previous threads that were securely knotted and tied off, much like a drunken chimpanzee pulling at the ends of a knitted quilt. This is done out of artistic desperation because there was never any game plan here to begin with other than the resurrection of nostalgia and the accumulation of money; at least Lucas had a dream, albeit a stupid and silly one. This lack of direction is inevitably compounded in ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ meaning the end result feels less like a dramatic climax for Rey and Kylo and more a day of reckoning for the scriptwriters. They should make a documentary about the writing of this film because at least that would contain genuine drama.
As for the film itself, well it’s exactly what you’d expect — a frantic, convoluted, slick, hyperactive mess that bears an odd resemblance to the awful Bond film ‘Spectre’ as the dead speak, a deceased character (in Bond’s case it was Judy Dench’s ‘M’) kicks the plot into gear and the big bad collapses under the weight of attempting to retroactively being the big bad of films he had no involvement in whatsoever and, in the process, vandalising the franchise. And the damage is extensive.
Not only that but Carrie Fisher is ‘Dead Men Plaid-ed’ into the film as Leia for a few scenes, which is sad and weird more than anything else and what with the fictional characters popping up who should’ve stayed gone the overwhelming sense in ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ is that of necrophilia, the adulation of Leia’s corpse being particularly uncomfortable.
And yes, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ is an explicit attempt to course-correct events from ‘The Last Jedi’ and with a jarring effect you never usually see in a franchise. There is a traitor in the First/Final Order in ‘TROS’ yet the emotional thrust of the movie feels more like Lucasfilm outing Rian Johnson as the mole in their midst and that allowing him to make ‘TLJ’ was a ploy to entrap him into incriminating himself. Sure, ‘The Last Jedi’ went off in a misguided and extreme left-field direction but it attempted something new and different and besides, Johnson is a far superior director to J.J. Abrams both visually and thematically. This movie is a slap in the face to ‘TLJ’ making me wonder just what the fuck is going on, not in a galaxy far, far away but in Disney and Lucasfilm. Aren’t these people supposed to be highly paid professionals?
I won’t explain the plot because the film’s issues aren’t precisely to do with narrative, story or anything technical you can pin-point in the movie itself (apart from the fact that, once again, Abrams’ can’t direct space battles meaning that in this entire new trilogy we haven’t had a single, satisfying space battle and that’s shocking. Thank fuck for ‘Rogue One’). No, the issue goes deeper and straight the reason why Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas in the first place — weaponised nostalgia. But isn’t nostalgia, that warm glow of this familiar world, what we want? No. Remember — nostalgia, up until relatively recently, was seen as a bad and dangerous thing; the ancient Greeks and psychotherapists knew/know this. Nostalgia was something to be avoided, dreaded and wary as hell of. It stops us from developing as human beings and is a form of psychological poison. Rian Johnson was right — we should destroy the past, whereas Abrams is fixated with digging up the dead and, hence, rendering growth, renewal or the value of mortality meaningless.
But as long as these films make money that is never going to happen. We need to move on although it looks like these ghostly, glowing cunts are going to be haunting us for the rest of our fucking lives. Now THAT’S terrifying.
