(The spoiler-free Part I can be seen here.)
Mark: Well, I started the first part off with mention of J.J. Abrams returning to Star Trek, so I may as well continue that with this. How fucking hilarious is it that his much-touted queer relationship moment is even shittier than Sulu’s? What we get is this two-second shot of a lady we’ve scarcely seen kissing—gasp!—another woman in this dumb celebration. I genuinely thought the moment already happened when the always obviously-gay C-3PO very nearly came out to loving R2-D2, calling him “best friend” with this winking subtext.
Kevin: How about Leia’s offscreen death which lands with absolutely no weight? Poor Carrie Fisher. I mean I get that they wanted to give her a proper sendoff. But they gave her an anemic one.
Mark: I mean, since we all knew she was already dead, we were expecting the death, so it was hard to make that much of a thing. Though it is thoroughly fucked that her death left us with the would-be humor-filled film’s most laughable moments. Firstly, its even more tasteless and worse-looking CGI recreation of Carrie Fisher’s youth. Second, Maz Kanata’s “Good night, sweet prince” adaptation, “Goodbye, sweet princess,” which had me rolling in the aisles.
I’m far more pissed at the deaths (or similar enough) it so briefly teased. Chewbacca is dead!? Nahhhh. Under ten minutes, it’s revealed he’s fine, just in his Cloud City bondage gear. C-3PO had his memory erased? Nahhhh. A few scenes later, his memories are uploaded to make him forget nearly a whole film in what seems to be a direct metaphor for the scrubbing of The Last Jedi Abrams is anxious to perform in this shoddy mess.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s crass to just say they’re not letting these guys go in case of Episode X, but maybe not? The movie is so pandering with the character treatment that they even brought back the main bad guy from the first six chapters. With almost no explanation!
But I will give it credit for a few moments that I enjoyed, just because they were more unexpected than the rest of a largely completely expected motion picture…
I wasn’t expecting to see Han Solo again. His return was choked and stupid and Forced, but Ford and Driver somehow made it the slightest bit affecting. But then it just leads to the pre-ordained order of events: Ben Solo reclaims his namesake. Ben and Rey team up. It’s spoon-fed.
Longtime my favorite character in the new trilogy, Hux continued to get better with each film—more sniveling, more ineffective. That he ended up a hero completely out of self-interest is wonderful. His betrayal is more interesting than Finn’s, and I quietly cheered when he died. It was such a satisfyingly abrupt conclusion to his increasingly, hilariously pathetic arc.
It’s shocking that JJ could even give a newer, smaller character anything at all resembling closure when even in this final chapter he was throwing more unnecessary minor players onto the heap.
Mark: But all those callbacks are so littered in stupidity!
Like, when Solo returns, he’s just a normal ghost? We’ve seen Force Ghosts, but check this out, everyone: just a guy who isn’t even see-through! Maybe he’s a hallucination or something? Who cares, because he also gives advice!
And, now that you’ve reminded me, I lied about the “goodbye, sweet princess” line being the funniest part of the film, because there are two funnier parts. First is when Hux says to shoot him in the leg to hide how he’s the mole, and then he comes out in a bloody bandage wrapped OUTSIDE HIS PANTS! I hope to god that was meant to be a joke about him playing it up, because it’s Naked Gun-level ridiculous. (I’ll get to the second-funniest part soon.)
Lest we skip over it, I want to call out the whole sequence on whatever-the-fuck planet where the crew first met Lando. It’s all the uncomfortable acculturation and tedious desert racing of The Phantom Menace—but Abrams also adds in this moment of Rey either wishing she had her own baby or mourning her own lost childhood in some loose way? It’s really shit, and then leads into that Chewie bullshit after they sink in (even more cartoonish!) quicksand and find a Sith-branded Mercedes hood ornament and a D&D dagger.
Kevin: Well, yeah. Even the film’s few wise or interesting decisions end up undercut by something utterly stupid. That’s The Rise of Skywalker’s one move, repeated ad nauseum.
I’d like to imagine Harrison Ford thrilling at not having to sink in some late-model Georgie Lucas quicksand this time, but we know better than to think he watched The Rise of Skywalker.
The Chewbacca death fake-out was some true crap, and endemic of Abrams’ cowardly, sometimes instant, walking back of any scene threatening actual dramatic—or even tragic—consequences. See: C-3PO’s mindwipe, Kylo Ren’s stabbing, and so on. It was even more hilariously brazen how often Abrams’ erased some of Rian Johnson’s more controversial decisions with a passing moment or line of dialogue, like when Luke’s force ghost scolded Rey for trying to destroy her lightsaber, or prominent new Johnson character Rose getting completely sidelined, or—whoops—Ren didn’t precisely mean Rey’s parents were nobodies exactly, per se. I mean they technically still were, buuuuut… Even Hux dying pretty early was just to supplant Johnson’s cowardly villain with the magnificent (but utterly wasted) Richard E. Grant as the rotely imposing General Pryde.
And speaking of B.S. involving the Wookie, how about him finally, 42 years later getting the medal due to him from the Battle of Yavin. Why in the world did Maz Kanata have it all of this time? Why did she have Luke’s lightsaber in Episode VII? What a gross little thieving narrative device she turned out to be.
Mark: The Chewbacca death fake-out was so infuriating. I guess the Chewbacca arrest was just to add in yet an Empire reference for the fetishists wishing to again see the hairy man bound?
Man, I have no idea why Maz has those trinkets, nor am I clear on why she’s now full-blown part of the Rebellion. It’s next level pandering, where Abrams is now just imagining that people desperately want to see another fine Lupita Nyong’o performance wasted as this bespectacled CGI Muppet.
And speaking of blown performances, how does this movie manage to make Oscar Isaac so unbearable? He’s respectively played a criminal sleazebag and a down-and-out asshole loser in Drive and Inside Llewyn Davis and managed to evoke empathy for both. Somehow, given this second-tier Han Solo role a third time (even more directly, with his needless spice-running backstory), he’s fucking intolerable. All these awful not-even-quips.
And THEN, when Kylo shifts to the Light Side or whatever, he’s IMMEDIATELY unbearable too! It was apparently only the Dark Side of the Force holding him back from making little funny comments and comic “oof”s all the time.
Kevin: But wasn’t it so adorable when Isaac, scanning the celebrating, hugging masses notices Felicity’s Daft Rocketeer, then basically plays out a silent Roxbury Guys sketch with her? Oh, brother.
(Honestly, what sort of dirt does Keri Russell have on Abrams to keep periodically getting fed scraps from his blockbusters? I’m surprised she hasn’t already been fitted for a ridged Klingon brow at this point.)
It’s almost as cute as Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver finally kissin’ on each other before Girls eats it following the completely whackadoo final showdown with Palpatine where he demonstrates the ability to Force attack an entire fleet of spaceships single-handedly. It’s also a wholesale rip-off of Return of the Jedi’s ultimate confrontation, not to mention a reminder of Revenge of the Sith’s proof that the Emperor will very easily zip-zap his own noggin with force lightning if you just defend with a lightsaber correctly. Nonetheless, he is finally gone for good. Again. But probably not.
But, fuck, was this even the same Palpatine? Was he a clone? Was the one who fell down and went boom in Jedi a clone? A cursory amount of Internet research might provide a somewhat official answer to how he existed, but I much prefer to keep harping on it as the distractingly brushed off detail that it is, I don’t care how many giant vaguely-medical machines and Phantasm-style cloaked minions are shown on screen. (Ditto, how all of those Star Destroyers—with Death Star laser guns!—came to be, as already mentioned in part 1.)
Mark: Yeah, let’s get to the big Palpatine reveal finally. In almost unquestionably the biggest “fuck you” to the many Abrams gives The Last Jedi (Kelly Marie Tran may argue that it’s how her Rose was demoted to nearly the same four-line role as whoever-the-fuck Dominic Monaghan was, while Finn was off finding a new new female friend to form a brief bond with), Abrams utterly reverses the entire sentiment of Rian Johnson’s Empire Strikes Back moment.
Johnson of course had Ren reveal that Rey is actually of no great lineage—which shouldn’t even be that much of a reveal, because literally only Luke and Leia were ever a part of the “I am your father” moment. It’s not like anyone ever gave a shit about the pedigrees of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, or Kit Fisto.
But like the worst of Star Wars fans, Abrams is devoted to that being the whole thing, so now it’s revealed EMPEROR PALPATINE is Rey’s grandfather.
I actually love this for how amazingly stupid it is to imagine. The implication is that, at some point circa Revenge of the Sith, the already-disgusting Palpatine was like, “Could we stop at this planet? Daddy wants to get some strange.”
So he hooks up there, leaves the planet, that woman gets pregnant and has a kid. I forget if it was said whether it’s a son or daughter, but it doesn’t matter, because for some reason Palpatine is not at all concerned with that offspring, because they would have then had to be a character in the original trilogy. But now he’s for some reason aware and deeply concerned with just his granddaughter. Even though Abrams got Killing Eve’s wonderful Jodie Comer to play Rey’s mother, she’s so inconsequential that she doesn’t even have a line, as I recall.
It’s all so convoluted, and it’s expressly just so Abrams can subvert the expectations Johnson dodged in favor of yet another of so many unflinchingly direct original trilogy pastiches.
Kevin: Right, because by gum, if Johnson’s going to subvert Abrams’ shit (and thus, refreshingly, fan expectations of reheated original trilogy ideas altogether), then Abrams is going to come back and subvert Johnson right the fuck back. Letting this new trilogy be made as a two-man Exquisite Corpse turned out exactly as you’d expect from pair a pair of white, middle-aged Star Wars nerds passing the baton: combative, passive-aggressive, and contradictory.
Instead of taking a cue from fellow Mouse House über-franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, each successive film in this new Star Wars trilogy, and this last one especially, proves just how damn important it is to carefully plan out these complex sequels in advance. Pleasing the fanbase is a complicated, ever-moving target (there are people out there that love The Rise of Skywalker just because Ewoks are in it, of this I am positive), but creating a cohesive narrative is a much more important goal that could’ve been achieved with more forethought and less hubris.
This new one is so desperate to please that it takes it upon itself to, just off the top of my head: undo anything Johnson did to piss people off; introduce new characters and situations; cram as many walk-on cameos in as possible; cram as many callback cameos in as possible; mirror Return of the Jedi; honor Carrie Fisher’s memory. Unsurprisingly, it buckles under the pressure and doesn’t pull of any of these efforts particularly well.
As stated earlier, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is just a mess. A soppy, chaotic, overstuffed mess.
Mark: It’s great how it also somehow manages to cheapen The Mandalorian. Disney+ released the last episode of that a couple days early, to come before Rise of Skywalker—but it ends up being this lazy justification for yet another new Force power. Baby Yoda spoon-feeds us his pap of Force healing, and then we get it like three times in this trash.
But cheers to Abrams for his latest of so many a Spielberg homage: this moronic recreation of the early Goonies scene where Mikey finds the location of the treasure with a doubloon’s embedded map. Except this one makes even less sense. Rey is just immediately standing in the correct spot for this arbitrary mapping system she pulls out of a knife.
Kevin: Hey, how about the new spaceship ability though: LIGHTSPEED SKIPPING. So cool that Oscar Isaac (Annoying Variant) can recklessly lightspeed jump the Millennium Falcon repeatedly with little regard for navigation in order to escape pursuers. And then Palpatine’s Star Destroyer armada at the end is at least partially done in by too carefully trying to navigate, a fact clearly gleaned from Rose being mainly offscreen to study spaceship plans. Seriously.
Since I’m back on the ways Abrams peed on Johnson, I just remembered that Kylo Ren repaired his helmet with cool red glue. Screw you again, R.J.!
Mark: Christ, yeah, the neon-glued helmet—another on-the-nose literal metaphor for Abrams misguidedly thinking he’s putting this thing back together after Johnson’s flawed but at least moderately interesting effort. And the lightspeed skipping is the weirdest part of that, because one of the most poorly thought-out ideas of The Last Jedi was that you could hyperdrive straight into someone like a bullet. From my admittedly loose understanding of Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence, that held all kinds of prior consequences—like that someone probably could have just lightspeed-rammed a modestly-sized craft into the Death Star and blow it up, right?
Whatever. Those prior physics aside, it’s like Abrams jealously just wanted to make his own confused new hyperdrive dynamic to only play out in a single scene.
Likewise, Abrams ALSO wanted to catch up with Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards in having his own tasteless, utterly unconvincing young Carrie Fisher CGI model arrive late in the film? What is wrong with this guy?
Kevin: Yeah, that was yucky, huh?
Hey, at least J.J. finally got his ballyhooed Knights of Ren in there. To make almost no impact. But that’s about par for The Rise of Skywalker’s course. Almost every character has to be so quickly glossed over just to keep the film 122 minutes-long that—aside from, like, Rey and Ren—nobody does much of anything besides stand around on the outside of scenes like so much window dressing. Though, as is tradition for robot actors in science fiction franchises, Anthony Daniels finally gets his begged-for heroic sendoff—before, as we said, that’s completely negated.
This was right around the time they get that other MacGuffin (a wayfinder, a knife—this movie is particularly lousy with them), a First Order decoder ring from Oscar Isaac’s ex-girlfriend that allows them to sneak on a Star Destroyer to rescue the other actor in a weird costume with an undone sendoff. This Warp Whistle approach to infiltrating an Imperial space vessel sure makes the heroes and their similar—though actually exciting—attempt in A New Hope look like idiots.
Mark: And can you believe Rey takes Luke’s fucking X-Wing there? Just about no possible reference is left untouched.
Then, finally, when we get Rey confronting her grandpa—as the trilogy had been building to!(???)—he’s, like, in The Matrix. Palpatine comes down on this stupid cyberpunk robot arm thing, he sucks the life out of Rey and Ben Solo, and suddenly—I swear to god—his OUTFIT changes. Like, his little nub fingers grow back, color returns to his face, he wipes off his ridiculous goth lipstick, and suddenly he’s also wearing this nice red undercoat.
“At last! My crimson velvet thing I now wear under my dark robe has returned! My fingers as well!”
Kevin: That’s the power of the DYAD, Mark. Didn’t Sidious have red crap on in Revenge of the Sith? Always be referencing! And why stop at merely other Star Wars? The part where it seems the final battle is lost until suddenly Lando comes on the radio to announce good guy reinforcements sure was just like Falcon’s similar late-to-the-party transmission in Avengers: Endgame.
That bit with Rey and Ben getting the life Force-sucked out of them has to be the most wildly derivative and cheap-looking visual effects shot in the film. We’ve seen so many instances of nebulous “energy” transference between frozen heroes and the bad guy that I can’t pick a single reference to cite. Just stupid. And lazy. And also sort of blue energy-y, just like a Marvel.
Mark: And then Lando leads us into what is apparently the final and definitely weirdest “I am your father” moment, where it seems like maybe he’s coming on to Finn’s latest would-be girlfriend but then instead shifts to saying, “Oh, you’re from that planet? Better take a paternity test, baby, because I drank a lot of Colt 45s when I was over there…”
Kevin: That’s one of a series of odd emotional beats during the same mercifully-brief Return of the Jedi-cribbing wooded celebration at the end of the battle featuring Chewie’s medal, Isaac’s Roxbury flirting, and Amanda Lawrence’s perfunctory kissing of a lady. You’d think our three whiplashed trilogy leads ostensibly embracing for the last time on screen would be the most cathartic hug of the scene. But no, that distinction belongs to the one between Dominic Monaghan and that Millenium Falcon crewmate who looks like a giant weird slug. Thank you, Star Wars; that’s precisely the kind of inter-species emotional payoff Howard the Duck producer Lucas would be proud of.
Mark: Seriously, though, who is Kit Fisto’s dad?
