The Ships Have Dongs

Rating: 1/10 (20 December 2019)

The Rise of Skywalker struggles to pull this trilogy together following the derailment of The Last Jedi, and what results is a lackluster finale that wastes plenty of time literally piecing together the broken remnants of a setup that was never promising in the first place. What is pretty epic though is that our boy JJ included some phallic imagery to remind us of how the patriarchy keeps us down even to this day. The imperial star destroyers now have giant "underbelly cannons," if you catch my drift. They're hung like horses for sure. Psst, they're the new death stars, again, in case that trope wasn't tired after Return of the Jedi.
It's hard to pinpoint one aspect that really sucks about this film, as it's more a culmination of thorough mediocrity. I can't really appreciate that this film tries re-railing the plotthreads in the previous film if the ultimate product is still a trainwreck just because it minimized the damages. I was out of hope in the trilogy by the end of Last Jedi, and by the end of this I feel I've been proven right. In a way this film is worse because it's not even fun to look at - many scenes are downright hideous, especially the abysmal sky battle towards the end with the dark ships fighting at night-time in the middle of a massive storm. I would sooner rewatch Last Jedi five times than watch this once more despite this film being ten minutes shorter.
Firstly, I feel JJ Abrams is a massively overrated director. His recent films, which are probably his best, feel like knockoff Spielberg without the emotional resonance or character depth, so probably akin to Ready Player One Spielberg rather than Jaws Spielberg. While he's not incompetent to the degree of Michael Bay, his films come off as if they think they're clever than they actually are, and this is most apparent in the dialogue. Now, JJ is only one of four writers, but as a director he's in charge of making his vision come to life, and a massive part of that is in the characters. These characters don't feel distinct. If they were all clones of each other, I wouldn't bat an eye. There's a scene where jetpack troopers prompt three of our heroes to respond "They FLY now?" in succession, which doesn't even make sense as a surprise anyways. Jetpack technology existed back as far as Attack of the Clones, if not earlier. There are many attempts at quips throughout the film, and very few land. In a way, the attempted humor is more cringeworthy than the childish writing of The Last Jedi, and that film had a "your mom" joke in it.
Going back to The Force Awakens, the film was essentially a soft reboot of the franchise with the mindset of "out with the old and in with the new" while retreading the same ground as A New Hope. What resulted was exactly that, with this trilogy macking off of the original trilogy and killing off the majority of major characters and replacing them with our new cast. In a way, Force Awakens was a brilliant movie, giving people a taste of what the original Star Wars was with modern day visual effects. I'm not a fan of it, but I can understand how it can be entertaining. Rise of Skywalker has more story and originality to it, but it is so bland and unrefined that it isn't even entertaining at its surface level. Action sequences seem to start at their best towards the beginning of the film and progressively get worse as the film goes on, and an abundance of long talking sequences in between heavily weigh down a hopelessly lost trilogy. My favorite shot in the whole film is a short sequence of Rae running from Kylo's ship, and doing a backflip and cutting one of the wings with her lightsaber. It was well-paced, well-composed, and well-lit, and it thematically fit as a "Star Wars" force moment. Later on, she has a duel with Kylo in a storm, and while the fight was largely tense, the scene frequently stalled with acrobatics and was much less clear than the earlier sequence. The rest of the sequences take place at night, and in a cave, where only occasional lightning strikes and blaster shots and lightsabers light small areas of the scenery. The space battle is too big to focus already, much like the chaos in The Phantom Menace, but the combination of poor lighting and dark ships make the whole experience thoroughly unenjoyable.
The story, right from the fundamental title crawl, comes across as weak fan fiction. "The dead speak!" I guess no one's ever really gone. At only 68 words, this is the shortest title crawl of the franchise. What it establishes is that Palpatine's back, Rey's training, and Kylo's searching for Palpatine. And then we're shown all of these things as is. I don't even understand what they were going for with Rae. She's such a frustrating character through this movie. She's so unfocused and stubborn in her training that she frequently gets her friends into bad situations by simply pursuing her own ambitions constantly.
Princess Leia was handled likely as well as possible here. The use of unused footage wasn't too jarring, and gave the character an acceptable ending. C-3PO was fine, though his use as a MacGuffin seems tacked on, and R2-D2 and Rose are nearly non-existant in this film. Dio, the little conehead robot, offers nothing more than some unnecessary character development for BB-8. As far as dibbies go, this is one of the most extrenuous, and they try to feign purpose into him by making you feel bad for him essentially being an abused puppy-robot. It's the definition of manipulative and it stalls the plot.
Bringing back Palpatine is the ultimate sign of creative bankruptcy here. I would almost rather having a time jump at the start of this film and starting fresh to juxtapose the immediacy of the previous film and to distance itself away from that story altogether, but Palpatine is easier because he's an established character that we understand, though he really should be dead. This is essentially retconning the original trilogy and trying to bring in some sort of hook for some of the people pushed away by the conclusion of The Last Jedi. This is compounded by a massive upscaling of his capabilities. Palpatine is now able to cast lightning on what seems to be thousands of ships at once, and Rae has to match him, which results in essentially two gods fighting with their insane superpowers, and in that way there's no tension because it's incredibly easy to turn it at any point to let the underdog hero win without much explanation, which absolutely happens here. The power of friendship overcoming baddies is really lame. Kylo is redeemed and dies, much like Vader, and there's even a sort of awkward nod to the incestuous kiss from the original trilogy in the form of Rae and Kylo.
Towards the end of the film I was met with what I felt was the most obvious misstep, and it foreshadowed it so hard that it was all the more frustrating. A woman asks for Rae's last name, and what it felt like the film was leading into was for her to respond "Palpatine," as her ancestry doesn't define her as a person. She was able to overcome the dark side of the force in spite of Palpatine's claims. Nope. She looks off into the distance and sees Luke and Leia's force ghosts and responds with "Skywalker." There was a milder case of this earlier with General Hux. It seemed like the film was setting up another high-ranking baddie as the traitor, but it turns out that Hux was the traitor, and the other guy shoots him dead and reports that the traitor has been found. What immediately came to mind here was having Hux's lie actually be true in this scene, and have his execution be a cover for the executioner actually being the spy. It seemed like this is what JJ meant when he said "**** it" in that interview. Yeah, use Hux as a very minor plot device and discard him immediately after because whatever. It felt like more of a Rian Johnson approach, to just drive things into the ground just because he can, and hopefully surprise some viewers in the process.
JJ Abrams says he felt beholden to Star Wars with The Force Awakens, and while I think it's much better to try to be creative I really don't think he's a good fit for large stories. His best film is 10 Cloverfield Lane which involves three characters trapped in a small bunker. The more characters and elements in it, the more there is that can go wrong, and if he just plays it safe it ends up being slow, boring, and uninspiring. At this point I'd rather let AI write these Star Wars movies.
JJ seemed to pick up bad habits from Rian Johnson as well. Abrams takes the force connection thing to another level by allowing our two rivals to interact with each other's environments through this connection despite the physical distance between the two. Keep it simple. No reason to keep adding inexplicable abilities into the series.
Thank JJ for not giving answers that he promised he'd give answers to. Would you expect anything else from the guy behind Lost?
I feel like this is probably going to be the most poorly resonating Star Wars film of them all, so I'm just going to slap it with a 1/10 ahead of time to keep it simple. Though I probably won't watch the others multiple times anyways, I can almost guarantee I will never watch this one again of my own volition. You'll have to Clockwork Orange me to make me rewatch this. A dull ending to an awful trilogy. It's shocking how sloppy this film is given how safe it attempts to be, and it's unbelievable how frustrating this film manages to be as a result. It's nearly as insulting as The Last Jedi while being more dull than Attack of the Clones. Think about where this trilogy started, and think about where it ended up. Palpatine gets killed again. If you want a wordier review, I'll post it on my Letterboxd as there's a character limit on imdb.