Let’s roast the hell out of the turkey that was STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

(or: I’m about to roast this movie harder than Chewbacca roasted that Porg in “The Last Jedi”)

When I wrote my first review of The Rise of Skywalker, back when I saw it in cinemas in 2019, this is a snippet of what I had to say about it:

The Rise of Skywalker may feel like a Star Wars movie, but only because it so deliriously clamours and clings to the coattails of the franchise’s past, afraid of putting away childish things, afraid of letting go of nostalgia and forging along its own path, afraid of having to think for itself, afraid of challenging itself, afraid of committing to meaningful consequence, afraid of imagination or innovation, and of course, afraid of displeasing the forceful dyad of aggressively expectant masters it serves: The Mouse, and The Fandom.

Rian Johnson threw down a creative gauntlet for whoever would come after him, an open invitation to explore with impunity the infinite possibilities this fictional universe has to offer, as made abundantly clear from the many ways in which Johnson exploded the preconceived notions of what a Star Wars film could be.

J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio (with who-knows-how-much direct instruction from the Mouse House bigwigs) adamantly rejected Johnson’s call to adventure, kicked that gauntlet off a proverbial cliff, and scrambled together a ramshackle bad fan-fic of a plot for a sequel that would attempt to appease everybody… but which all of us know is a tactic that has historically proven to perpetually result in satisfying nobody.

There is… SO MUCH that I want to talk about with the maddening mess of TROS — the good stuff, the terrible stuff, the baffling stuff, the emotional stuff, and the frustrating stuff — but for the time being, I’ll just say this:

As I had done with The Last Jedi, I actively avoided watching any of the trailers for Rise of Skywalker for the year leading up to its release. I didn’t read any analyses, fan theories, behind-the-scenes articles, plot predictions, or anything like that, because I just wanted to watch the final film without any prior biases or opinions, and judge it by its own merits, coupled with my own subjective tastes.

Even so, there was this one persistent little detail that I unavoidably saw keep cropping up around the fleeting fragments of information and discourse I saw surrounding the film whenever a new trailer or poster was released, and that detail in essence was:
“PALPATINE IS BACK!!”

And I didn’t believe it.

Genuinely, I thought that the trailers that supposedly featured Palpatine’s villainous cackle were just using it for the nostalgia points and social media marketability, not that it was an actual indication that he was actually — in the words of Robot Chicken Boba Fett — “BACK FROM THE DEAD, ASSHOLES!”

And then, when that one official poster came out — (the one with Palpatine’s sinister visage overlaid atop Rey and Kylo fighting against an epic abstract blue-and-orange backdrop) — that people made fun of for looking like mediocre fan-art, I still took it as being like:
“Oh, okay, so Palpatine’s influence will be felt in some way in the film’s plot, and that’s why they keep bringing him up so prominently in the marketing… but c’mon, Palpatine’s not ACTUALLY returned in some present-day capacity, that’d be crazy, stupid, and absurd! People are overreacting! The film wouldn’t do something that preposterously dumb!”

Look, I was in denial, okay?
I was faithfully of the belief that The Rise of Skywalker wouldn’t indulge in something that hacky.
Like, we’ve all seen with our very own eyeballs how Return of the Jedi ended… we all saw Darth Vader throw Palpatine/Sidious into the second Death Star’s core to save Luke’s life, whereby the Emperor exploded into blue flames, and Vader/Anakin found a measure of redemption in his final moments… and thusly, we all know Palpatine’s been long dead for decades, and there’s been absolutely zero percent indication previously in this sequel trilogy of Palpatine having been resurrected, nor of him having had the capacity to, nor the motivation, nor the… well, anything that would make this make sense!
’Cause could you even imagine? That’d be akin to when Spectre introduced Blofeld for the first time, and out of the blue retconned all three prior Daniel Craig Bond movies into having all been secretly masterminded by him the entire time!
That would be unbelievable, silly, and unbelievably silly… even for a Star War!

But that’s okay, because
PALPATINE
IS
NOT
BACK,
OKAY????????????

So anyway, I finally see Rise of Skywalker, and within the first five minutes (let me reiterate that: the first FIVE MINUTES), we are told that:

A) Palpatine is alive.
B) Palpatine’s been pulling Kylo Ren’s strings all along.
C) Palpatine and Snoke are connected.
D) Snoke wasn’t a clone of Palpatine… Snoke was one of many random clones that was made by Palpatine, who has been controlling these Snokes from afar, and holds all of the unused Snoke clones floatingly preserved in a giant jar.
and
E) Palpatine has a virtually endless fleet of Star Destroyers (with added Death Star laser powers!) on this obscure planet he’s been hiding out on for decades… apparently.

And from that point onward, we are just meant to swallow this carpet-bombing of relentless retconnery, and carry on regardless with everything else the film throws at us.

And oh boy, does it throw a lot at you.

MacGuffins galore!
Fetch quests aplenty!
Revocations and renunciations of Rian’s radical recalibrations of Star Wars lore!
Unlikely logic-defying story beats that have so many in-universe contradictions and fallacies baked into them that it would make your head spin right off your neck if you think about them for more than five seconds!
Countless meandering subplots to pad out the runtime, like that mysterious phantom storage that eats up an iPhone’s disc space! (A niche analogy, but fitting all the same.)
Huge emotional sacrifices undermined by their utter inconsequentiality, due to how they’re almost immediately reversed and undone, with no meaningful or lasting repercussions!

You get the idea.

And here’s the kicker: that was a 3 out of 5 star-rated review. For some reason, I was overly generous towards the movie, at the time clinging to my preconception that surely this was at least still better than the prequels.

But in 2023, I finally took the time to rewatch George Lucas’ divisive prequel trilogy from an older perspective, and I was surprised to find out that I thought they didn’t suck. In fact, Revenge of the Sith is a fantastic film on its own terms, one of the best Star Wars movies in the Skywalker Saga, and in spite of their flaws, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones do have their idiosyncratic charms. Certainly more than The Rise of Skywalker can lay claim to in retrospect.

So now what follows is a running commentary of notes taken during the course of me rewatching The Rise of Skywalker in 2023, this note-taking process done so that I could be occupied by an activity to vent my increasingly seething spleen as this insultingly bastardised mess of a movie progressed.

Interspersed will also be some insights gleaned from reading that old 18-page document of leaked details regarding the edits and reshot elements, in an effort to try — emphasis on try — to understand some of the baffling decisions the film makes as it goes along, and how we got there.

Spoilers ahead, for anyone who might care (though why would you, when it’s The Rise of Skywalker we’re talking about?)…

• “The dead speak!”
Ugh.

• The galaxy heard the mysterious broadcast of Palpatine’s message, and you would have, too… but only if you were playing fucking Fortnite! Because sure! Why not leave a key piece of expositional information out of the film itself, and gatekeep it to the brand integration with a video game large swathes of the audience have never played, and will never play? It makes as much sense as putting most of the expositional reasons for how and why the events of the film even happen… in a future Star Wars visual guide book, patching the holes in the plot after the fact! Such genius! /s

• Ben Solo: half-Skywalker, full Moonwalker. (Annie, are you OK? Nope, because she’s been hit by, she’s been struck by Kylo Ren’s smooth criminal moves with a lightsaber.)

• PALPATINE: “I made Snoke. I have been every voice you have ever heard inside your head.”

Sure, Jan. I’m sure Palpatine was definitely always very super for reals the bad guy all along (Agatha who?) this whooooole time, and certainly not a desperate, frantic move to backpedal from completing Kylo’s obvious arc of being this film’s main villain after The Last Jedi so cleanly set that up, because we can’t possibly follow through on the last film’s character developments, because everyone hates that movie! (Or at least enough people hate it that they’ll make a viral stink about it online, and potentially ruin the box office takings like they did with Solo, so goddammit, we’ve gotta do whatever it takes to make another billion dollars! Fuck artistic integrity! Where’s the money in that?!)

• PALPATINE: “[Rey] is not who you think she is.”
KYLO: “Who is she?”

But I thought you knew, Kylo! You said you knew, and she knew, and it was a whole thing in the last movie! So are you saying you never really knew, that you lied, and that that big emotionally revelatory moment meant nothing after all? Greatttttttt.

• During the lightspeed skipping chase sequence, Poe says: “Last jump, maybe forever.” So did Poe use up all of the Falcon’s hyperspace-jumping energy? (Nope, they use it again later. Useless line, false sense of finality or urgency or consequence. A recurring trend that permeates the entire film, to its detrimental downfall.)

• I hate that, in the wake of Carrie Fisher’s sudden and devastating death in 2016, they said they weren’t going to ghoulishly use old footage of her, nor posthumously use her likeness in CGI form, to awkwardly incorporate Leia into the story when Carrie herself wasn’t alive anymore to perform any new scripted material… but then they went back on their word, and did both of those things anyway, because they were in too mad of a rush to allow any screenwriters time to find a way to recalibrate the film’s story to accommodate Carrie/Leia’s passing. Yes, they may have gotten the permission of Carrie’s estate, and her daughter Billie Lourd, to use Carrie’s likeness for this film by way of repurposing deleted scenes from The Force Awakens, and digitally compositing her face onto body doubles whenever necessary… but it still feels wrong, just on a gut level, before you even get to intellectualising over the disturbing moral and philosophical ramifications of this decision.

• I don’t remember it being obvious in theatres, but watching it on my TV, it’s painfully apparent that in the initial scene of Rey interacting with Leia, Carrie’s audio (via The Force Awakens deleted footage her performance is sourced from) isn’t even levelled correctly to match Rey’s audio in the sound mix.

• I hate that J.J. Abrams reverted Rey to her old costume, instead of following the evolution of her attire from film to film, from lighter colours in TFA, to darker colours in TLJ, and from there it stands to reason that in the third part of the trilogy, she’d wear a mixture of light and dark — you know, colour as symbolism! A classic staple of storytelling! But no. They just had to reject as much of The Last Jedi as they could without flat-out pretending it didn’t happen, and Rey’s return to the look of her past self is yet another in a litany of devolutions this film enforces on its characters.

• “Somehow Palpatine returned.” Oscar Isaac’s beleaguered face says it all. You can see the precise moment a little piece of his soul dies inside from having to utter that line.

• I hate that they actively sidelined Rose, and by extension Kelly Marie Tran, into becoming a thankless side character, as if she were somebody who wasn’t an important part of the protagonist ensemble in the previous movie. A disgustingly blatant capitulation to the toxic racist misogynist “fans” who bombarded Tran with so much hate that she left the internet for her own mental wellbeing, all because these insipid fuckers hated the character of Rose Tico (but really because they hated her for being an Asian woman, though of course they gussied up their bigotry in unconvincing arguments about “wokeness” and “forced diversity” and all that bullshit they’ve been spouting for years like a broken sewer pipe).

• Quick! We need to rebuild Kylo’s mask so his character can regress! And also probably so we can use the character in marketing and merchandising without worrying about the rights to Adam Driver’s likeness, and we can easily drop in hastily re-written new ADR’d dialogue whenever he’s wearing the mask!

• The Knights of Ren — why were they ever seen as important? Not one word of a lie, I swear that the LEGO Star Wars Terrifying Tales non-canon short film made the Knights of Ren infinitely more interesting than the actual canonical Sequel Trilogy ever did, because it gave them some backstory and character… even if it was literally by way of a spoof of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, with Christian Slater voicing the Knights of Ren equivalent to Kiefer Sutherland’s white-haired vampire from that movie. (Incidentally, the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special is unironically a better sequel to The Last Jedi than The Rise of Skywalker. No, really.)

• C-3PO: “This festival happens once every 42 years.”
POE: “Well, that’s lucky.”

Well, what do you expect when your script is built on endless coincidences and contrivances to make it tick along? It’s as if J.J. Abrams were still writing with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and in a lot of ways, The Rise of Skywalker feels like that trio’s sloppy work on Star Trek Into Darkness.

Perhaps the moral of the story is: never let J.J. Abrams direct a sequel to one of his own movies.

• Another superficial TLJ holdover — the Force communication, and matter transference from distant locations, that Rey and Kylo are capable of, thanks to their Force connection. (Apparently, the “Force Dyad” concept is meant to explain their ability to do this, but the final cut’s non-commitment to the idea makes this as fuzzy and half-baked as everything else.)

• I hate that I got chills from seeing Lando/Billy Dee Williams getting trotted out for nostalgia points.

• C-3PO: “They fly now!”
FINN: “They fly now?”
POE: “They fly now!”

FUCK. OFF.

• FINN: [as they’re getting sucked into the quicksand]
“Rey, I never told you — ”

Rey and Poe will both ask Finn what he was going to say, and each time, Finn doesn’t tell them. And then this gets dropped entirely, and we never find out for certain what he was going to say. Was it going to be a proclamation of love for Rey? Was it going to be him saying he’s started to become Force-sensitive, so as to set that up later? They just… forgot to pay that off, and never cut it out, even though it would’ve been easy to do, because taking it out affects next to nothing, while keeping in that incomplete setup/payoff just adds to the snowballing collection of slipshoddery that ruins the film in its totality.

• Oh, that stupid fucking dagger.

• So which came first in the development process — Rey doing Force-healing in TROS, or Baby Yoda (sorry, Grogu) doing Force-healing in season one of The Mandalorian? That happened on the show in an episode that aired just before, or concurrently with, the release of TROS in 2019, so maybe it was simultaneous?

• And so here comes the pointless fucking detour with the Stormtrooper shuttle exploding in the confrontation between Kylo and Rey, as the film briefly pretends Chewie died, Rey accidentally killed him, and the Sith dagger is destroyed, only for none of those things to be true. This movie spins its wheels for an irresponsibly long time, using MacGuffins and fetch quests like water for chocolate. Instead of Six Characters In Search Of An Author, it’s Six Subplots In Search Of A Story.

• So with the dagger “gone”, only C-3PO has its info memorised, but he has to have his memory wiped in order to be allowed to translate it, thereby sacrificing himself… but then the dagger comes back anyway, and R2-D2 (despite being earlier disregarded as a backup for C-3PO’s data) later restores most of his memory anyway, so this “emotional” “sacrifice” was, like Chewbacca’s non-death, completely pointless. A vacuously empty attempt at unearned pathos.

• I hate that I immediately love D-0 (no, not Ronnie James Dio, I mean the adorable droid voiced by J.J. Abrams).

• Spice-runners, and earlier on, a sandworm (albeit a comparatively tiny one) — those Dune influences ain’t subtle anymore. And with Oscar Isaac, the future Duko Leto Atreides himself there in the mix, the Dune links retroactively run even deeper!

• John Williams’ cameo as the bartender — neat!

• Shirley “Moaning Myrtle” Henderson as the voice of Babu Frik — HEY HEY! (Krusty the Klown who?)

• ZORII: “They win by making you think you’re alone.”

Hey, a good line is a good line.

• I guess Rey doesn’t have to feel guilty about accidentally killing Chewie anymore. How convenient for her to no longer need that emotional baggage or complexity.

• They need the Sith dagger because of a feeling Rey gets… but mainly because the dagger turns out to unfold into the shape of the wreckage of the Death Star so they can find the exact location of Vader’s wayfinder GOD IT’S SO FUCKJNV STUPID. (Genuine rage typo that I left as written.)

• How convenient that Kylo just left the dagger out in the open, on his desk, easy for anyone to find and take.

• Don’t try to make the “Rey’s parents were actually somebody” retcon palatable by casting Jodie Comer as her mother. This is all still utter bullshit flying in the face of The Last Jedi.

• KYLO: [to Rey] “What Palpatine doesn’t know is that we are a Dyad in the Force.”

But what does that mean? How do you know that, Kylo? Where did you learn that? Please elaborate, movie, for the love of god!

• Oh hey, it’s Naomi Ackie — pre-Whitney Houston biopic unfortunately helmed by the makers of Bohemian Rhapsody — as Jannah, there to be unclearly implied as the long-lost daughter of Lando Calrissian, which the leak document portends was the supposed intent of her character, with a clearly defined setup and payoff to link the two in the audience’s mind, yet which ultimately got lost in the sauce of the final cut’s slapdash construction forgetting to provide this crucial context to Lando and Jannah’s eventual reunion in the film’s denouement, so that we never got the relevant info meant to clue us into this even being a reunion we’d have the dramatic irony of recognising as a father-daughter reunion before they did.

But also, she doubles as the cynically conceived new character who’s there to give Finn a vague heteronormative love interest that isn’t Poe, akin to Poe earlier being bestowed his own vague heteronormative love interest that isn’t Finn, in the form of Keri Russell’s Zorii Bliss.

(Once again, Disney folds to the whims of the bigots of the world, just so they can squeeze those extra dollars into the box office grosses. YOU EASILY HAD THE POWER TO MAKE FINN AND POE GAY, AND YOU BLEW IT, YOU COWARDS.)

• As you’ll recall from the end of Return of the Jedi, the second Death Star was OBLITERATED INTO NOTHINGNESS.

NOW SUDDENLY ALL THIS WRECKAGE REMAINS?

AND THE SITH DAGGER WAS CONVENIENTLY CRAFTED TO PERFECTLY MATCH THE SHAPE OF THE WRECKAGE AND POINT TO WHERE VADER’S WAYFINDER WAS??????

The depths of stupidity this idea stoops to are fucking fathomless.

• Hilarious that the vision of Dark Rey is just her in a black cloak, hissing with sharp teeth, holding a double-sided (but foldable!) lightsaber.

• KYLO’S FOOT HAND. This shot is a masterpiece of unintended illusion. The wayfinder falls down the slanted floor, and Kylo catches it with what looks like his black-booted foot… but then he lifts it up, and now we can comprehend that it was actually his black-gloved hand. It’s such a bizarre shot, that it pulls you out of the movie for a few moments as you try to wrap your head around the shot’s weirdness, ruining any momentum and immersion you may have had before then.

• So the second wayfinder is destroyed by Kylo. Over half the movie has elapsed, and the impetus for everything the heroes have been searching for is gone. What was the point of any of it? (Answer: None. It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. A wild goose chase from the writers having a bunch of exciting stuff happen really really quick, and hopefully at fast enough a speed that you don’t get a chance to take a breath, stop to think, and realise that nothing of true importance has happened yet. Again, much like J.J. did with Star Trek Into Darkness. Spectacle over story. Nostalgic rehashing over original invention. The brief buzz of a sugar high’s instant gratification, in place of the satisfaction of a full course meal.)

• How is Rey’s pristine white outfit still so clean after climbing through the dirty decaying Death Star wreckage, not to mention everything else that’s happened before this point? She’s been running through jungles and deserts, and nautically traversed the rocky waters of the Endor moon to get to the wreckage, so there’s no way her clothes would remain unsullied by the elements. So again, how? This may be sci-fi/fantasy, but clothes in this fictional universe usually still act like clothes do in reality, and realistically, Rey’s outfit should be like John McClane’s grotty vest midway through Die Hard by now.

• Okay, so… the Kylo/Rey duel, leading into Leia’s death.

This scene is so poorly conceived and incoherently edited, that upon the film’s release and long thereafter, you couldn’t get a clear consensus among viewers about what exactly even happened.

Originally, I thought the scene depicted Leia projecting herself to Kylo to distract him from overpowering Rey, allowing Rey to pull an Arya with Kylo’s lightsaber, and stab Kylo, which simultaneously kills Leia. (Remember, the following is the order of the shots as they’re arranged in the film: first, Leia lying in bed, then Rey stabbing Kylo, then Leia’s hand limply dropping as she dies. The Kuleshov Effect of this sequence of shots lead me to believe/assume that Rey’s stabbing directly affected Leia, therefore seeming to show Rey sort of killed Leia. Can you see my logic here?)

But then you go and read or watch other people’s reviews, and their interpretations of the scene, and it changes drastically from person to person.

The question to ask now is: does the document of leaks shed any light on what this scene is supposed to convey?

Answer: Yes!

Allegedly, the scripted intent of the scene was described thusly in the document:

“Off in another part of the galaxy while Kylo and Rey clash sabers, a bright light in the universe begins to fade. Leia is dying. ​̶B̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶t̶h̶,̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶o̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶a̶m̶i̶l̶i̶a̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶o̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶i̶d̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶a̶r̶e̶w̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶b̶i̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶l̶e̶d̶g̶e̶.̶.̶.̶

• Evidently Luke’s appearance to Leia before her death has been cut out. I’m told that this was just voiceover, so it wasn’t difficult to do, but it’s gone at the moment all the same. Although there doesn’t seem to be any sign of Luke during Leia’s death, I’m told that R2 is with her in her final moments. This scene and Rey/Kylo’s fight on the Death Star are cut back and forth.

[Endor]

As their battle rages on, both Kylo and Rey sense the death of their respective mother and mentor.

• I’m told that Palpatine senses her death too, making him more confident that Rey now has nobody to turn to but him. Sometime around here, Palpatine orders Kajimi to be destroyed as the first ships of the Sith Fleet reach deployment altitude.

They both react, but Rey recovers from the shock sooner and leverages the moment to take Kylo’s weapon from him and stab him through the chest with it. In the aftermath of their concluded duel, Rey declares to Kylo that she will never be like him and fall to the dark side. She exercises her newfound healing ability to save Kylo from death, steals his ship along with Vader’s wayfinder device aboard it and takes off, leaving her enemy behind.”

If that’s what the filmmakers were trying to get across, I’m afraid they failed. Abysmally.

• I hate that Chewie mourning over Leia’s death gives me chills. How cruel that all three of his friends — Han, Luke, now Leia — have died, and he’s the only one who remains.

• I hate that the best scene of the film is Harrison Ford coming back for a forced (pun unintended) cameo as a ghost/memory/vision of Han, here to help speedrun Kylo/Ben’s forced redemption arc. Considering their mournful exchange talking about Leia’s death, I wonder if Ford accepted coming back to do this as a means to honour Carrie’s memory. When Han says “Your mother’s gone. But what she stood for, what she fought for… that’s not gone”, do you think that’s more Harrison speaking through Han to talk about Carrie?

Either way, this is one of the only emotional beats of the film that genuinely works for me, and that’s primarily down to the poignant excellence of Ford and Driver’s performances.

• And now the biggest overt slap in The Last Jedi’s face — Luke walking out of the flames, wielding his old lightsaber that Rey had just thrown into the fire, Mark Hamill’s long-wigged visage emerging to say: “A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect.”

If this were only an acknowledgement of Luke’s evolution in TLJ from disillusioned former master, to a selfless hero accepting of the immense power his legend provides to a galaxy in need of hope, that wouldn’t be too bad. But you just know that’s not why this line’s here. You know that this line was really about appeasing the apoplectic fans who were thrown into a furious tizzy by the sight of Luke Skywalker tossing his lightsaber dismissively over his shoulder, which they took as a personal affront, and a heretical moment of blasphemy that Rian Johnson should be punished for for all eternity.

How fucking petty. How fucking stupid.

• Oh, so Leia knew Rey was a Palpatine all along? And Luke, too, I guess? What a load of old shit! You plainly pulled this straight out of your ass, movie! This was never planned. This was never intentionally foreshadowed. This is all because Disney/Lucasfilm shit their britches when The Last Jedi stirred a big nothing-burger of a controversy among the worst people online, then Solo lost them tons of money, then the overwhelmingly negative reception to Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry scared them into firing him from directing the third film in the Sequel Trilogy, so they arrived at panic stations, and shoddily cobbled together a horrendously contrived series of retcons to bring back Palpatine, make Rey have familial ties to familiar characters, make Kylo a good guy to mirror Darth Vader’s arc (rather than invert it, as was the original plan), and bend over backwards to give the fans everything they want, spoon-feed them the same slop in a new package with no alarms, and no surprises. Give the babies back their binkies so they stop screaming and crying and throwing up all over themselves.

What a disgraceful fucking shambles this all was.

• Oh, so now Luke’s X-wing can not only be lifted out of the water (and yes, I know, it’s a mirror of Luke’s previous inability to lift it out of the water in The Empire Strikes Back, hence the re-inclusion of Yoda’s theme to make the parallel clear), but somehow this immensely waterlogged ship is supposed to still work? Well, congratulations on undoing the importance of Luke’s sacrifice at the end of The Last Jedi, by making it look like he could have left the island any time he wanted to, travelled to Crait to see his sister again, and faced off against Kylo in person, instead of having to do so via Force projection because he didn’t leave with Rey and Chewie, and couldn’t leave any other way! Your lack of forethought is impeccable, and your stupidity knows no bounds!

• WAIT. REY HAS A WAYFINDER INTO EXEGOL? BUT I THOUGHT KYLO DESTROYED THE LAST ONE? AM I GOING MAD?

Oh, right, she took Kylo’s ship after stabbing/healing him, and his ship had the wayfinder he was using at the start of the film.

So I guess that when she destroyed Kylo’s ship to strand herself on Luke’s island, she decided not to destroy the wayfinder, too? Almost as if she expected she’d soon need to use it to get to Exegol… or rather, the writers did, and they hoped you wouldn’t notice that the keeping of the wayfinder undermines the supposed sincerity of Rey’s initial wishes to never leave the island.

And then there’s another question that must be begged: HOW DOES KYLO/BEN GET TO EXEGOL LATER, WITHOUT HIS SHIP AND WITHOUT HIS WAYFINDER? Where did he get his new ship? How did he get off of the Death Star wreckage? I feel like I’m losing my mind!

• “We should pull some Holdo Manoeuvres.”

Shut up, Dominic Monaghan’s character hogging the lines that could’ve been given to Rose instead. How exactly would you do multiple Holdo Manoeuvres with the Rebellion’s scant resources? Do they have autopilot, or do you need to have a bunch of pilots do suicide runs? Do you have a surplus of ships that can be used just for lightspeed-jumping through the Star Destroyers?

Why am I even asking? This line’s only here to pay cursory lip service to one of the coolest parts of The Last Jedi, and maybe get ahead of those Cinema Sins types who’ll ask why they don’t do multiple Holdo Manoeuvres, as if the reasons aren’t self-explanatory.

Insert meme of Elijah Wood’s tweet saying “no. how could we have known?” in reply to a Star Wars Twitter account posing a “Did you know…?” trivia question explaining what the film failed to tell the audience about how the Last Order fleet came to be.

• Oh right, yeah, Rey’s father was Palpatine’s son, reminding me of the much-mocked notion that I guess Palpatine either fucked at some point, or made a mini-me clone of himself, or he used the Force to immaculately conceive a biological child, like he might’ve done when he may have used his dark Sith powers to manipulate midi-chlorians into the foetus that would become Anakin (which was detailed in a Star Wars comic that I believe(?) is canon(?), though I could be wrong). But honestly, none of these explanations feel like they hold much water. They’re all measly justifications for the fundamentally badly thought-out resurrection of Palpatine, and the badly thought-out ramifications of concocting a shared lineage with Rey. They didn’t think any of this through. They rushed a first draft to get production up and running as quickly as possible, to get the film finished in time for their pre-established release date. The script was both of the highest and lowest priority to Disney. All that mattered was them having a movie-shaped product to fulfil the December 2019 release date slot. As per usual, money and greed are the root causes behind why these self-destructive decisions get made.

• Interesting that from this point onwards, after Ben’s redemption and rejection of his Kylo identity, Adam Driver has no further dialogue (beyond saying “ow”). How late into production was this change made that they didn’t even bother writing him any lines for what were likely extensive reshoots?

• I hate that I like the moment where Rey hands off her lightsaber to Ben from afar through their Force connection (followed by me hating that I like Ben’s little show-off-y shrug at his former Knights of Ren, whom he swiftly dispatches).

• The Knights of Ren — useless, meaningless, and only ever good for the toys that could be made out of them. RIP in piss.

• Weird that J.J. and co. decided to use Dunkirk as their inspiration for the final showdown, where countless ships and countless normal people from across the galaxy come to the rescue of the soldiers on their last legs. (Or at least they claimed that Dunkirk was the inspiration. Cynically, I wonder if this was their cover story to give them plausible deniability about the suspicious similarities to the final battle of Avengers: Endgame.)

• PALPATINE: “Look what you have made.”

What have they made? I’m still unclear.

• The collage of voices of Jedis past is definitely full of Glup Shittos. Sure, there’s the recognisable voices of Ewen McGregor’s Obi-Wan, Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon, Hayden Christensen’s Anakin, Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu, and Frank Oz’s Yoda, but as for the rest? I have no clue. I know who Ahsoka is by name, and by her live-action Rosario Dawson counterpart, but the other listed names of characters cameoing here are way outside my frame of reference, what with me having never watched the Dave Filoni Star Wars animated shows (The Clone Wars, and Rebels), nor have I read any of the comics or books, or played any of the video games (canonical or otherwise).

• PALPATINE: “I am all the Sith!”
REY: “And I… am all the Jedi!”

THEY’RE NOT EVEN HIDING THE ENDGAME COPYING.
PALPATINE IS THANOS! REY IS TONY STARK! AND THE SCORES OF ALLIES APPEARING EN MASSE TO HELP SAVE THE DAY ARE DOING THE PORTALS THING! DISNEY, DID YOU THINK NO ONE WOULD NOTICE YOU REPEATING YOURSELVES?!

• So, if Palpatine somehow survived both Darth Vader throwing him down that shaft into the Death Star reactor, and the explosion of the second Death Star, how are we supposed to believe that Rey really killed him for real this time, just because she used two lightsabers to bounce his Force lightning back at him? What does death even mean anymore?

• Well, are you happy now, ReyLo shippers? You got your kiss out of them. Are you satisfied, even in spite of Ben dying and disapparating at the same time as his mother, for some reason?

• Here comes the token lesbian kiss, from two minor characters, in a single 2–5 second shot we can use to blow smoke up our own asses about our diversity quotient, but which we can also easily cut out for the money-making territories that criminalise homosexuality! Aren’t we just sooooo open-minded?

• Are you old nitpicky Star Wars fans happy now? Chewie finally got his fucking medal after 40+ years, and all it took was all of his friends dying! Do you like the taste of that monkey’s paw you wished upon?

• But of course we have to come back to Tatooine.

• How is the old moisture farm on Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s home still intact? Not just after all the years that’ve passed, but also taking into account the place was burnt down by stormtroopers. Also, who rebuilt the hut? Does anyone still live here? Does that old woman live here? Why am I asking questions to which I already know the answer is: “don’t think about it”?

• Rey doesn’t answer the old woman’s question (“Rey who?”) for roughly 22 seconds, during the protracted pause when Rey chooses her new identity with the blessing of the ghosts of Luke and Leia.

Without John Williams’ swelling score informing the intended emotion of the scene, that would objectively be a hugely awkward moment.

• And so the trilogy ends with Rey staring into Tatooine’s binary sunset, alone save for BB-8, in a shot that isn’t even real, but a composite of an earlier different shot of Rey, edited to remove her lightsaber from her hand, and placed in front of a sunset to silhouette her form.

Yet Rey wasn’t meant to end this movie and trilogy alone, for the leak document details that the ending once looked like this:

“For the end of the film, the heroes then travel to where everything began. The desolate, sand swept planet of Tatooine. Between defeating Sidious and this moment, Rey has disassembled Anakin and Leia’s lightsabers and used their components to construct one of her own that I’m told contains a golden/yellow blade. Rey buries the leftover pieces beneath the Tatooine sands at the site of the Lars homestead. As Rey turns to join Finn, Poe, Jannah, Chewie, R2, 3PO, BB-8 and D-0, a stranger calls out to her. The stranger apparently speaks of how nobody has been seen around this land for a very long time and asks Rey for her name. This is the second time in the film that this question has been posed to her, but unlike her response on Pasaana, Rey has decided who she is. She gives the name Rey Skywalker to the stranger, adopting the name of her masters and revealing the primary meaning of the title of the film. Rey joins her friends as they look off into the distance at the horizon of the desert planet and watch twin suns set on a universe filled with hope.”

But instead of a hope-filled final shot of our ensemble of friends staring into the suns-set, for some unassailable reason, they opted to leave Rey as a solitary, stoic figure, without her friends, and not even really there, seeing as this is an emotionless, recycled remix of a shot that had nothing to do with this moment.

Because of this, the final shot of the entire Skywalker Saga feels utterly devoid of any emotion whatsoever.

• But hey, at least Ian McDiarmid had some fun coming back for one last go at being Palpatine again (at least until Obi-Wan Kenobi came along anyway, and not counting any other future possible cameos Disney might rope him into before he dies; not to be morbid about it, but I’m afraid that when talking on matters of Disney, their morbidity is as darkly infectious as their corporate cynicism).

CONCLUSION:
The Rise of Skywalker makes me feel sick to my stomach at the sight of all that lost potential, all that fruitless compromise, all that excruciatingly terrible writing, and all that bowing to criticism and pressure inflicted by a cynical quorum of media-illiterate bad actors no one should ever negotiate with.

I was far too kind to the film when I originally gave it 3 stars back in 2019, even though I was still harshly critical about parts of it then, as well.

But it has only gotten worse with age, an apple rotting rapidly from the inside out, until there’s nothing left but maggots and flies atop this gross dead thing that was once fresh and sweet.