The big stumble of The Force

Rating: 3/10 (2 March 2020)

The last installment of the saga finally convinced me that these three films are not a trilogy at all. In South America we call "mazamorra" a thick liquid mixture made from corn. In Peru, where it is usually made with our traditional purple corn, we also use the same word to describe a mixture of ideas or elements lacking any method or order. A total jumble, like The Rise of Skywalker. Rian Johnson generated such an disproportionate disorder with his film, that when it was J. J. Abrams's turn to take back the baton, he did not know where to go and he had no choice but to transform his film into an enormous mazamorra. A badly done one.
My experience at the cinema with this film was certainly different than the previous one. After the disappointment of The Last Jedi and the general boredom that Disney has caused with its movies, cartoons, comics, books, clothes and toys and other Star Wars merchandising, I could not care less. I used to watch the trailers of the movie mostly as a cinephile or fan obligation, but my expectations were the lowest possible. I believe that is why I left the cinema relaxed. I had seen a movie that made me laugh on many occasions, which had the most vulgar display of fan service seen in a Star Wars film - but still it moved me with some of its excessive references -. The Rise of Skywalker seemed to me in general an erratic, shapeless, but very entertaining story. The best one in a trilogy of bad movies, I thought at the time. Now that the weeks have passed and I have tried unsuccessfully to understand or justify the course that path taken by the story in this film, I think it is the worst.
What turns it into a mazamorra? Let's start talking again about the three protagonists of the original trilogy. The Rise of Skywalker is full of alterations, contradictions or reinterpretations of facts previously established in the previous film, that is, cases of "retroactive continuity", commonly known as retcons. One of the most brutal is to make Luke's infamous sacrifice and the end of The Last Jedi worthless. His death was supposed to be the inspiration that would unite the citizens of thousands of planets against the First Order, and at the beginning of this film the Resistance is still a group of twenty people. This sidereal assembly ends up being orchestrated in the last battle by Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) in a very random and gratuitous way. Why did Luke's last act have no impact? In addition, Luke is almost not mentioned in this movie and his version as a Force ghost only appears for a couple of minutes in a pretty much forgettable scene. If the first and second installments of this trilogy are closely related to Luke Skywalker - one revolves around looking for him and the other has him in one of the starring roles -, in this one he is almost completely ignored. It gives us the feeling that The Rise of Skywalker is a separate movie, and that increases the disconnection...
On a creative level, The Rise of Skywalker is a paradigm of chaos. Unlike Lucas, Abrams never kept control or left strict or exact plans about where was the trilogy going after the first film, everything suffered a substantial alteration in the second installment and for the last one the only possible way was to amended, fix the disaster in any way you can. And honestly, despite certain fearful or coward decisions that reflect the fear of innovating and surprising the followers, this is the best thing they could do after how Rian Johnson left the trilogy. We also have to remember the following: apart from not knowing how to finish his stories no matter how good they may be, as it happened with the controversial final episode of Lost, his acclaimed television series, here Abrams is also guilty of an outrageous lack of imagination. In a way, we can all understand and agree that The Force Awakens is so similar to the first film in the saga, a tribute to come back comfortably into this universe after so many years, but that The Rise of Skywalker, the "new" final of The Skywalker saga is so unoriginal, so derivative from the classic trilogy, a vulgar copy of the previous conclusion in Return of the Jedi, that is unforgivable.
Indeed, Abrams went straight through the safe path, already known to him: a recreation of Return of the Jedi. Because that is what it is, an inferior, inconsistent and somewhat absurd imitation of the sixth episode of the saga. At the end of the trilogy, which culminates in a peaceful and emotional celebration of the Resistance, like the Rebels in Endor, we have the galaxy in the same conditions than how we saw it last time in Return of the Jedi: Emperor Palpatine is dead - this time for good, I hope - peace has been restored, the Republic and the Jedi Order must be refounded. It is all the same, let's just replace Luke, Leia and Han with Rey, Finn and Poe. It brings nothing new. An unfortunate rehash.
This rehash, however, spends the entire movie doing something very obvious that makes the trilogy weaker but it is still interesting - and sometimes funny, depending on the viewer -: to deny Johnson's ideas. Sometimes it seems as if the whole movie was a criticism or punishment to its predecessor. A good example is the scene with Luke's Force ghost. A Rey in panic seeks to exile himself and throws the lightsaber into the fire, only to be caught by his late Master, who tells her: "A Jedi's weapon deserves more respect". A reference to how he throws the same saber into the cliff at the beginning of The Last Jedi. Abrams manages again and again to try to tell us that Johnson was wrong. The film denies or reinterprets the events of the previous one in such a way that we could just ignore its existence. If the opening crawl would add the line "Jedi Master Luke Skywalker died a year ago giving his life for his friends and Kylo Ren killed Snoke and proclaimed himself the new Supreme Leader" or something similar, there would be no need to see The Last Jedi. This is certainly not a trilogy.
However, we must admit the following: Rian Johnson had a vision of what he wanted to do and was committed to it, regardless of whether this would become a damage to the franchise's narrative. J. J. Abrams shows the opposite: he wanted to get out of the problem quickly and was ready to make a supposedly consensus film, to try to please all the fans and not divide them like The Last Jedi. The Rise of Skywalker wants to mesmerize us with its references to the original trilogy and feels too rushed, so many things happen and they have no time to explain anything. It is as if they were telling us the last two episodes of the saga together. They try to seduce us with plot twists that feel deceptive and are not relevant at the end, such as the "false deaths" of Chewie, 3PO -when they erase his memory- Ben or Rey, to name an example. My first impression with The Force Awakens is confirmed after all: Abrams had the fence too high to continue the saga, and it got out of hand.
It is so rare to find all these issues in a Star Wars movie. It makes me think of a group of film students from university, enthusiasts who want to make a movie but do not know where to lead the story and end up spoiling it all. An experience of amateurs, but we are talking about a Hollywood studio. This trilogy proposed fifty questions in the first film, suppressed and contradicted those questions in the second and established others and in the last installment tried to amend the disorder and revalidate the first questions, usually with unsatisfactory answers. It is a pity that even with so much material, decades of novels, comics, animated series and video games that have shaped the Expanded Universe, the saga had to finish in this. I would say that The Rise of Skywalker is a very entertaining film with a good dose of nostalgia, working well at an emotional level at least in a first viewing, but terribly weak when it comes to the plot and characters, reaching ridiculous moments. A disaster.