Film Review: The Rise of Skywalker

Originally published December 20, 2019

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a frustrating film. There are genuinely great, touching and memorable moments. They’re all buried under a mound of shoddy technical work and lazy, uninspired and pandering writing. The film tries to clean up too many imagined mistakes and conclude 40 years’ worth of story arcs, giving what little new material there is no room to breathe. Or it would because there isn’t any new material here.

I would say I hope /r/StarWars is happy, but they aren’t.

It was going to be hard delivering any end to a story spanning 40 years. There’s too much there to tie up every loose end in a satisfying manner, especially for a franchise that made a point of generating entire films out of unanswered questions. And yet Skywalker tries and fails. It’s fitting that we open on the Millennium Falcon lightspeed jumping across the galaxy in a seizure-inducing haze because the speed at which the Falcon moves is a perfect microcosm of the film’s pacing.

Very few essential arcs get conclusions and the conclusions that happen aren’t compelling. JJ Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio try to wrap up the arcs for Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Issac) and Kylo (Adam Driver). Still, they introduce things in Skywalker that never get resolved or brought up again and other events happen seemingly out of nowhere. It helps that all four deliver their best performances in the franchise, but that only gets you so far.

Praise should also be showered upon Anthony Daniels, who delivers a touching and even moving performance as C3PO. The nostalgia only works when it’s shown through his context. The man’s been in all nine main films!

Skywalker often feels like an endless, forced trip down memory lane. Much of the film is self-referential, showing something to the audience and loudly shouting, “REMEMBER THIS?!” It’s done with a wink and a nudge so violent it nearly knocks you out of your chair. It even happens with prequel memes. More than once!

This doesn’t even stop at the Star Wars franchise. There are moments in Skywalker that feel ripped directly from the MCU, Harry Potter and a number of other recent successful blockbusters. There’s not an original bone in this film’s body.

This isn’t even touching on the mostly terrible technical work. The lighting is particularly bad. There are several instances with visible key lighting that don’t make sense when taken into consideration with space characters occupy. It takes away from the natural lighting that already exists and plasters a fake, artificial sheen on it.

The editing, cinematography and CG are also just bad. Scenes are overlong and shockingly dialogue-free, the cuts are jittery, the CG is fully in the uncanny valley and the shots violently oscillate between beautiful and barf-worthy.

The lone exception to this is the practical droids and puppets by Neal Scanlan and Matt Denton. It might just be the best in a series scattered with examples of fantastic work. It’s also sad that Disney has somehow not learned its lesson from epilepsy controversy surrounding The Incredibles 2. There are so many flashing lights in Skywalker that I’d estimate I didn’t see at least 10 minutes because I was trying not to, like, die. It seems like every Disney blockbuster needs a seizure warning attached. With the number of major franchises Disney controls it’s a shame they don’t take a fairly sizable chunk of the movie going public into consideration when making their films.

Some people will love this film. I envy them.

…wait does that mean I envy my mom? I take that back.

(Just kidding. Maybe.)

Final score: 5.5/10