Non-George Lucas Star Wars At Its Best

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2019)

Star Wars is stupid fun. But most importantly it's stupid. If we remember that, no Star Wars movie will disappoint us too much again. The Rise of Skywalker is a fun movie with some beautiful imagery, over the top dialogue, more cameos than the Oscars, and a healthy dose of pretty good character moments. If you go looking for a fun laser sword adventure with some incredible visuals and perfectly passable (and occasionally surprising) performances, you won't be disappointed. If you go hoping to find George Lucas, he's not here. And that's kind of the problem when it comes to Star Wars and its fans.
Star Wars started out as the passion project of George Lucas. He didn't expect to make a lot of money but he wanted to make a space western. His scrappy attitude and allowed him to make a flawed but personal trilogy. When he set out to make the prequels, the big budget and deeply diverse and committed fanbase exerted a kind of pressure on Lucas that caused the films to suffer in some ways. Lucas started to add goofy little characters in an attempt to reach more people. There was some cheesy lines. A lot of cheesy lines. But Star Wars still felt like a passion project despite its imperfect leader. Now, Star Wars is a franchise made by a corporation for massive profit. As such, it has the usual problems of big corporate fodder: big budgets, fairly straightforward characters, and a good vs evil arc. So what is Star Wars really missing? It's missing George Lucas. That's it. Not the man, but the idea of the man. The idea that when a line of dialogue is a little off or a bit cheesy, it's just George being George. That when characters are a little simplistic, it's because George made them that way. It's his world, his characters, so he can do what he wants. It may be kinda stupid, but it's George Lucas stupid.
Are the Star Wars movies still a little stupid? Yes, but you can't call them George Lucas stupid anymore. You can only really call them Disney stupid. And that's not as satisfying. But it's been more dissatisfying to realize that maybe Star Wars was always kinda stupid. Maybe the stories and characters we all liked as kids are kind of dumb. Maybe Star Wars was always more fun than it was good. And maybe what even makes it good in the first place is the sense of wonder it inspired in us when we were young.
In a way, it's always been the potential of Star Wars that has been the barometer by which Star Wars is measured, not the thing itself. Star Wars can be something amazing. It has great potential as an epic space western fantasy. There's just never been a writer and director with enough artistic vision (not even George Lucas) to make it into something as poetically moving and beautiful as, say, The Lord of the Rings. It's a franchise with more potential in its guts than any out there. It just needs the right writer and the right director. Somebody needs to do for Star Wars what Chris Nolan did for Batman.
That said, this move is fun. It's not great cinema and it's not the clumsy but passionate work of George Lucas. But it is one of the best films to ever come out of the Disney machine. And, at the very least, we get to live in a world with more Star Wars. And I'm fine with that.