Searching My Feelings on The Rise of Skywalker…

I’ve started this post at least five times in my digital notepad about Rise of Skywalker. I’ve hit the backspace key at least five or six times on this latest attempt at drafting something for this movie. It’s hard to know where to begin. I’m stalling. Well, here it goes. Final spoiler warning.

The trendy thing would be to sit here and write a post from the perspective that filmmakers should be targeting the end product, specifically to my wants and desires. Misuse terms like plot holes in every paragraph. Have a title suggesting I was going to enumerate all of the things this movie got wrong. Or perhaps revel in the fact Rise erased all that was wrong with the abomination that is The Last Jedi.

If you are here for that kind of article, I am going to disappoint you.

That’s not to say I’m not going to be critical either. As a housekeeping item, I didn’t think The Last Jedi was an abomination. If I had Nerd Girls at the time of its release, I would have had an easier time writing about how I felt about the movie than I am right now. The Last Jedi was a good movie. An enjoyable movie. A Star Wars movie. Were there some issues? Yeah, sure, but this isn’t the time or place for that.

As a stand-alone entity, Rise of Skywalker was an entertaining movie. Rise had all of the action and adventure I would expect from a Star Wars movie. Laughter, good versus evil, danger, sneaking around with hoods clutched around faces, lightsabers, and space battles. It was all there. I’ve said this before after my first viewing. But, it is not a stand-alone entity, and so, I cannot solely look at the film in that way.

Something has been stopping me from committing to liking or disliking this movie from the second I stood up from my seat on December 20th. After seeing the film two more times, I finally put my finger on what that was. The storytelling in Rise of Skywalker, and The Last Jedi, is disjointed.

Having one of your main characters die before completion of a trilogy project is complete is more than a wrench in the works. So, the writers had an uphill battle on that front. My issues with the storytelling, though, go beyond the Princess of Alderaan (General of our hearts) and her storyline. Even if Carrie Fischer had lived, I probably would still feel some if not all of what I’m feeling now.

Rise of Skywalker opens with Palpatine being dropped into the story in the golden scroll. That is supposed to set the scene for audiences. Speed up the exposition so we can get to the action, but that nugget was too much. If you weren’t sure who your big bad is supposed to be and are looking for a surprise twist, you should still hammer that out before the first film rolls into production.

To start, it’s probably in your best interest not to cast a Weasley. I understand why Domhnall Gleeson would want to play a role like Hux. It would allow him to push away from the Weasley orbit. I get why a casting director chose him. But, they opted to turn him into a buffoon, which doesn’t make for a good villain unless you’re watching Looney Tunes.

So, back to the drawing board at a time when it’s not a good thing to be going back to. Palpatine was the perfect villain. There is no denying that. They had a perfect opportunity in The Last Jedi to open the door for Palpatine’s 9th life.

That gorgeous fight scene on the Star Destroyer in Snoke’s reception chamber. When Rey and Kylo are fighting over Luke’s saber as two children would, rather than ending on a cut to black, have the hologram communicator pop up. Palpatine’s signature laugh echoing through the destroyed chamber. The two fledglings become distracted, somehow Kylo gets knocked on the head, Rey escapes with the saber and the knowledge Palpatine is back in town. Cut to black.

Or at least let us hear the phantom message ourselves. Something, anything more than just a sentence in the opening scroll.

The scroll fades, and we are dropped into Kylo being Kylo. I like a cut scene with slow-motion action as much of the next person, but something was missing here. Or rather, someone. Luke Skywalker’s ghost should have been staring Kylo in the face as he cuts down the last man. I mean, otherwise, what did that “See you around, kid” mic drop line mean? It would have deepened the emotional turmoil of the Kylo Ren character. Palpatine has been piping the voice of his grandfather in his head for years. The audience needed a visualization of the light pulling at him that he mentioned in, I believe, The Last Jedi. As the audience, we would be able to see the pull of the Dark Side slipping away from his core beliefs.

This is where I am going to stop my minute by minute break down. No one would want to read that.

My greatest difficulty is with the sequencing of the interactions of our three principal heroes. The third installment should not be where we finally see the three heroes fighting and working together. Their bonds should already be well established. They are almost entirely split up The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. This is why I enjoyed the testy exchange between Poe and Rey. The desert chase on Pasaana. And most especially on Kijimi.

Babu Frik is neat, but that’s not why I got hooked by what happened on Kijimi. The whole sequence needed to happen in The Last Jedi. I don’t have a way to splice this into the action sequence of Last Jedi. I’ve been trying, but no dice. But somewhere, they should have had the journey together between Pasaana and Kijimi. The audience would have gotten to know Poe a lot more. He wouldn’t have seemed like a one dimensional, self-centered asshole when interacting with Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo. Poe and Rey would have had a relationship on screen rather than an implied one.

Otherwise, what the hell was he doing driving the Millenium Falcon with Chewy? I’m sorry, I wouldn’t let just anyone drive the Millenium Falcon if I were her. To further that point, I don’t think Chewy would have gone with just anyone. At the end of The Force Awakens, it seemed clear Chewy felt Han Solo had made her his successor to the Falcon and was transferring his loyalty to Rey.

There needed to be on camera scenes where both Rey and Poe learn to trust one another. The Last Jedi gave us one when Poe and the remnants of the Resistance were emerging from the abandoned base. Rey saves their lives and, in so doing, would earn Poe’s trust. Kijimi does give us some of the reverse, but it happens too late.

The treatment of Finn in Rise of Skywalker is especially challenging to reconcile. It’s the one element of Rise that I cannot splice and shift scenes to make the story work. I think the difficulty is coming from the backlash from The Last Jedi, and the fan theory about Finn and Poe.

I don’t want this to be true. I want to think the decision-making process was immune to bowing to these sorts of pressure. However, the excuse for Finn and Rose sharing barely five minutes of screentime together was flimsy at best. She is an engineer. Not sure how that translates to being groomed by a General for tactical command, but I was never in the military, so what do I know. Poor CGI? Fine. But, there are writers who, one assumes, write. Put her somewhere else in the action.

Poe’s surprise aversion to touching seems very convenient as well. This is the man who bear-hugged someone he barely knew in The Force Awakens. In a galaxy that has a droid prejudice, this man gets on his knees to hug a rolling piece of machinery. By the third movie, he has developed an aversion to holding hands? Odd reversal that.

And lastly, the addition of yet another potential love interest for him. Han Solo and Lando Calrissian must be pissed. They only had one woman cross their paths. Jannah is a far more interesting character than what she was used for in Rise, which seems to be a romantic thread to boost Finn’s growing love interest pool.

Again, I would really hope that these decisions were not made to quell the wave of hate that crashed over the Star Wars fandom following The Last Jedi. Part of Disney’s mission statement reads, “to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling.” If this is more than just a string of fancy words, then changing the direction of an entire story because of fan toxicity isn’t going to get that done. Especially in a movie series where the protagonists are rejecting hate and The Dark Side.

And now that brings me to Rey and Kylo- I mean, Ben Solo.

Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter doesn’t bother me all that much. The math bothers me and is tenuous at best, but I can get over that. If she had been no one as Kylo and her vision in the cave suggested in The Last Jedi, that wouldn’t have bothered me either. Whoever her family was, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Han, Luke, and Leia were all drawn to her in one way or another. Through that, she became their collectively adopted child. But they went with Palpatine, so we get both.

If the Pasaana scenes were pushed forward in the chronological sequence, in addition to the bonding, the audience would see the exchange where she doesn’t have a family name sooner. It would differentiate her story from that of Luke’s a bit more. Both are orphans; however, Luke grew up in a loving home. Even if Uncle Owen was a stickler for chores.

Speaking of Luke, I think her time with Luke could have been cut up into smaller pieces, similar to Empire and Return of the Jedi. It would have drawn the criticism of too on the nose. But it would have allowed the progression of the new vanguard’s story to flourish a bit more naturally.

I don’t have too much of a problem with Kylo/Ben, either. Like I said earlier, I would like to have seen him be dogged a bit by Luke. I don’t think he should have died. I know you can’t always have a happily ever after and whatnot. I’m not talking because I wanted to have Rey and Ben ride off in their matching X-wings into the sunset. I mean, they shipped it hard enough, so if it happened, I wouldn’t have been upset.

Really, I don’t think Ben’s story was over. A lot of ground was covered in that beautiful scene on the remnants of the Death Star. Harrison Ford and Adam Driver poured so much emotion into that moment between father and son. Repairing some of the damage caused on that terrible catwalk on StarKiller Base. The “I know” really sent it all home. There was more that needed to be said.

Episode X: Ben Solo Eats Crow.

Adam suggested that this should be a series rather than just a movie. I don’t disagree. I imagine the first two episodes would be Chewy beating up on the little punk that took Han away. The third would be Chewy bear hugging the boy he had watched grow up.

I jest. Sort of.

The ending was almost perfect.

I said at the top of this post, I wasn’t going to sit here and tick down all of the things the movie did wrong. I realize I have gone on for quite some time in what appears to be just that. I don’t think that anything in Rise of Skywalker was full out wrong. I feel that the sequence was off-kilter. The majority of the movie felt like I was watching a second act rather than a finale.

Rise of Skywalker made me understand Poe, Rey, and Finn better. I cared more about their trials and tribulations. I wanted more adventure from them. Except, that wasn’t going to happen. Everything was skidding to the endgame by the time I stopped asking questions about each of their motivations. Just about everything we need for a sweeping finale is in these three movies. It’s just not in the right order.

Apparently, what I’m saying is a scalpel, and some tape would solve everything.

OK. One last thing. I thought the choice to go back to Tatooine, revisiting the moisture farm, was a gorgeous tribute to A New Hope, the movie that launched us on this adventure. Having the duel suns rising was a beautiful end parenthesis. If parentheses can be beautiful, that is.

So then where the hell were R2 and C3PO? It seems like a small detail, but shouldn’t the droid that brought the message that changed Luke’s life forever be there? Nitpicky, I know, but that’s the one thing I don’t think I can reconcile. It was an unobstructed basket. That they missed. And missed hard.

And…that’s all I’ve got to say about that. Till next time, Nerd Girls!