![]() It is no surprise that a Star Wars movie leans heavily on nostalgia this is, after all, one of the few Hollywood franchises so obsessed with its own history that it first continued the story by looking backward, not forward. (Okay, maybe "They fly now," but only because it’s spoken three times in the span of about 10 seconds.) There’s not a single memorable line of dialogue in the whole movie. ![]() The boundaries of the Force seem to be whatever the screenplay requires at a given moment, from teleporting objects around to healing open wounds and/or death. The eventual explanation for his survival? He was actually on a different spaceship. Early on, there’s an incredibly unconvincing fake-out about Chewbacca dying on a spaceship that explodes. There’s a new droid named D-0 who is the victim of abuse from his previous owner, which is weird-but also don’t worry about it, because he’s just a device to move the plot forward.Įverything about Rise of Skywalker feels half-hearted and perfunctory-like Abrams and cowriter Chris Terrio wrote a rushed first draft of the script, intending to fix the problems later, and just never got around to it. Finn walks right up to the edge of confessing his feelings for Rey and then just… doesn’t. When the movie opens, Rey and Poe are argue-flirting like Leia and Han-until the movie decides that never mind, they actually get along fine. There are so many aborted storylines and character beats in this movie that feel like the script was accidentally shredded and taped back together from a dozen different drafts. ![]() But even with the bar so low you could step right over it, Rise of Skywalker somehow fails to clear it. I don’t care how this fits into the old Star Wars movies I just want to watch the new one. Rey is a Palpatine, or a Kenobi, or whatever. Her midichlorian count is probably off the charts! Everybody loved midichlorians, right?įine, you might say. (If you want to learn about Palpatine’s family, I’m sure a canonical tie-in novel about his wife or his son or whatever is already on the way.) Rey’s proficiency with the Force wasn’t a fluke after all it was in her blood all along. ![]() So it’s soon revealed that Rey’s grandfather is actually Emperor Palpatine, and that her "scumbag" parents were actually a noble, loving couple who rejected Palpatine and abandoned Rey to protect her. That was clearly intended to be the final answer, and it should have stayed that way-but having originally raised the question in The Force Awakens, Abrams couldn’t resist mucking around with the answer. The Last Jedi found a clever way to zigzag around all the fan theories: The mysteriously orphaned Rey really was a nobody, whose parents were random scumbags who sold her off for a quick fix. The subject was hotly contested at the release of The Force Awakens, and the odds-on favorites were that Rey was either a Skywalker or a Kenobi. This is as good a time as any to address the biggest and dumbest retcon in Rise of Skywalker: The question of Rey’s lineage. That’s just the start of the many half-explained geegaws that will drive the plot forward, as a Sith dagger leads to a Sith wayfinder leads to a bunch of bullshit that leads to Emperor Palpatine’s big goofy chair. Each of those Destoyers is, somehow, equipped with a Death Star-style cannon powerful enough to destroy a planet. In the meantime, Palpatine has also managed to assemble his own army, complete with what looks like thousands of Star Destroyers. Has he really just been sitting around on a never-before-mentioned Sith planet this whole time, telling Snoke what to do and waiting until… I don’t know, until he remembers radio exists? Apparently. How did Palpatine survive his apparent death at the end of Return of the Jedi? Don’t worry about it. Because yes: Emperor Palpatine really is alive, and it only takes a couple of minutes for him to win Kylo Ren to his cause. Abrams has turned in a Star Wars movie that is only surprising in how unsurprising it is.
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