Woman is the force

Rating: 4/10 (18 January 2020)

We're not just voyeurs; we're also flies on the wall. Our ears tell us that the male ghost on this remote island is not being honest about what transpired the last time he laid eyes on this corporeal woman. Our eyes can register that the woman isn't just cutting the dead man some slack as he rebuilds his legacy; she is aiding and abetting the disconnect between past and present. The girl has amnesia. It's no Jedi mind trick. There was a disturbance in cyberspace, last time around. Rey(Daisy Ridley) and everybody else in this galaxy far, far away, unbeknownst to them, are in a matrix, which changes the trajectory of the narrative that restores Luke Skywalker's reputation as the fearless hero, and reduces the unflappable heroine into a young woman, suddenly stricken with self-doubts, who needs mentoring to help reach her full potential.
Luke Skywalker(Mark Hamill) tells Rey(Daisy Ridley): "A Jedi's weapon deserves more respect," when she tries to toss the light saber into the ocean. Pretty smug, this attitude, these scolding words, coming from the same guy who at the outset of Rian Johnson's "The Last Jedi", flips the returned Jedi weapon nonchalantly over his shoulder and down a steep cliff. The pilgrimage to find Luke that Rey had made for the resistance, ends with an inauspicious first meeting. Sure, Luke comes around eventually, keeping the First Order at bay, as a hologram, on a bleeding salt flat, in which he dies a conquering hero. But not before Rey reminds Luke of who he once was. In J.J. Abrams' "The Rise of Skywalker", Luke says: "It's fear that kept me here," which on the surface, is more or less true, but the source of the fear differs from "The Last Jedi". Imminent death, the potentiality of being stricken down in battle wasn't Luke's reason for being afraid. It was his faith, not fate. "The Rise of Skywalker" obfuscates the underlying cause of the Jedi Master's self-imposed isolationism. General Leia Organa(Carrie Fisher) and her rebel cohorts never learn the truth about Luke's plan, with Yoda's blessings, to secularize "The Force", and deny its exclusivity from future Jedi Knights, such as Rey. "The Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies is vanity." During her abbreviated training session, really, a crash course, in the penultimate film, Rian Johnson, working from his own script, demythologizes the "Star Wars" saga, in which Luke downplays the importance of his kind. Suddenly, Rey feels like a go-between instead of a living God. But in "The Rise of Skywalker", all this doubt and conflict about the righteousness inherent, or not inherent, in regard to the Jedi religion is gone from Luke's mind. "Confronting fear is the destiny of the Jedi, your destiny," he says without self-consciousness, forgetting about the abdication of his duty to mentor Rey. The girl is Leia's burden. After mishandling Kylo Ren(Adam Driver), Han Solo and Leia's son, who was seduced by "The Dark Side", Luke can't handle the ramifications of another failure. Should the former Ben Solo possess Rey, the blame then falls on General Leia's shoulders, not his. Can he live with himself? For the time being, yes, when Rey leaves the island with Chewbacca, newly-converted to vegetarianism. "The Last Jedi", to the outrage of a vocal majority, addressed the provocative idea that the Jedi religion could be both good and bad in equal proportions. The Jedis, paradoxically, make up the galaxy's greatest heroes and its most heinous villains. In "The Rise of Skywalker", however, the nagging doubts that haunted Luke in the winter of his life never happened. His fatalism, in death, is gone; he never asks the pertinent question: "Are we the problem?" The Sith, The Empire, The First Order; these are all byproducts of The Force.
Uncharacteristically, Rey leaves her Resistance friends in a lurch during their greatest time of need. She can grieve over General Leia's passing back at the rebel base. A Jedi Knight, surely, has the power to compartmentalize, the innate ability to separate personal feelings of loss from professional obligations which make the difference between life and death for so many. While she mourns, Emperor Palpatine(Ian Diarmid) puts his endgame into action with a tyranny-free D'Quar on the line in a galaxy far, far away. But since it's Rey, a girl, who deprograms Kylo Ren from his learned dark lessons with Snoke(Andy Serkis), the supreme leader, the extra-diegetic world of the audience needs placating, since it suggests that Rey is more powerful than Luke Skywalker, their childhood hero. The hold in which Snoke had on Ben Solo, in "The Last Jedi", was uncontrollable under Luke's tutelage, whereas Rey possesses the raw benevolent power to clean up the mess perpetuated by the legendary Jedi Master, the man responsible for creating Kylo Ren. To go from one triumph to an even greater triumph, without exhibiting any human weakness would be too much for matrix bystanders, therefore, as a courtesy to the patriarchy, Rey makes a detour to Ach-to, better known as Skywalker Island. This plot point puts the female hero back in her place. Luke inspires the uncharacteristically frightened young woman at the expense of rewriting Rey, who in "The Force Awakens", displays her irritation every time Finn(John Boyega) grabs her hand as they evade enemy capture at the Jakku marketplace. Quite pointedly, as visual punctuation, a filmic exclamation point, Rey helps the fallen renegade stormtrooper up by offering "her" hand. In "The Rise of Skywalker", Poe Dameron(Oscar Issac), Leia's second-in-command, concedes the leadership position, since Rey's light saber better illuminates the underground quicksand caverns than the weak light shooting from his emasculating flashlight. Face to face with a sand serpent, Rey employs diplomacy instead of brute force, deploying the benevolent energy of The Force as a salve that heals snake's wounds with her guiding hand instead of blowing the thing away to smithereens. That's a big snake. That's a woman who can take care of herself. But alas, "The Rise of Skywalker" restores the patriarchal construct which "The Last Jedi" knocked down. Because of his pep talk, Luke Skywalker, in death, gets to bask in the afterglow of the limelight when Rey, during her climactic battle with Emperor Palpatine, discovers that two light sabers are better than one, when she crosses them, forming a pointed "x" as an impenetrable shield strong enough to withstand the electrical currents shooting out of the surprisingly alive old man's wrinkled fingers, while inching forward incrementally, until she is close enough to kill him with his own dark energy. Kills her too, until Ben Solo climbs out from the rubble and resurrects Rey, like how she resurrected him back at the pier. A man can resurrect the dead just as well as a woman. Ben doesn't bring his true love and dyad back to life with a Prince Charming-like kiss, but the resemblance to classical male hero tropes will not be lost on the audience. "The Rise of Skywalker" restores the "Star Wars" saga back to the sensibilities of the original trilogy, in regard to women: Codependent(Rey), or ornamental(General Leia Organa), whereas in "The Last Jedi", Vice Admiral Holo(Laura Dern), with no history to heritage to draw on, gives the resistance safe passage by plowing her empty vessel into the First Order's laser cannon-equipped ship.
"You have no part in this narrative," Kylo Ren taunts the Jedi hopeful, as motivation for the orphaned scavenger to make her departure from the resistance and help him oversee the First Order, in "The Last Jedi". Rey, an outlier, being so disconnected from the "Star Wars" universe, dismayed many, since she was integral to the survival of the Jedi religion. Their protestations helped unwrite "The Last Jedi", reduced to a "rumor", as if Episode VIII never transpired. The patriarchy, fervent in their ideology, forced a sort of alternate universe, a matrix, in which the franchise's most important character, Luke Skywalker, a deity, gets back to his original roots of pure, unadulterated heroism. Gone are his doubts about the beneficence of the Jedi. As a result, Emperor Palpatine, long-thought to be dead after Darth Vader, in Richard Margand's "Return of the Jedi", chooses Luke over the former Anakin Skywalker's teacher by throwing him a long ways down the Death Star reactor, somehow survived disintegration and has been alive and well all this time, unbeknownst to both Luke and Leia on the planet Exegol, biding his time. Even Yoda didn't know, apparently. A Jedi Knight would sense Palpatine's existence, you would think, but never mind. Since Rey is being counted on to save the galaxy, she better have some family tie, no matter how convoluted. That is how Rey ends up being Palpatine's secret granddaughter.
In Rey's house, a downed AT-Walker, the audience spots a homemade Luke Skywalker doll, a proto-figurine, on her shelf that she probably spun great adventures with as a child. Back then, Luke Skywalker was a myth, a belief not o dissimilar from us, at the outset of "The Force Awakens". There's something poignant about Rey being an outsider. She represents every boy and girl who ever played with those miniature replicas of those iconic characters from George Lucas' "A New Hope". When Rey meets Han Solo(Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca, it's you and me, living out our childhood fantasies of hugging a Wookie, and helping the rebellion defeat the empire. On some primitive level, we already knew what Han Solo tells the starry-eyed Jakku native: "It's all true," just like the small boy looking up towards the heavens for a sign of the Millennium Falcon, zipping across the sky at the end of "The Last Jedi". But the true believers, they too saw the fourth wall, and shrank away from it, because they wanted a boy, not some girl, to break it.
It's a matrix. The girl from Jakku is not a Skywalker.
Just call her Rey.