The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

 

I so wanted to love this film. I really did. Alas, I can't.

Because it's an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. 

Rey is training under Leia to complete her Jedi skills, which somehow makes sense, yet it doesn't, seeing as Leia herself never really finished any Jedi training anyway and apparently all the other masters are dead. But Jedi gotta Jedi, I guess. Kylo Ren has discovered some hidden planet where Palpatine is still alive and even has created a massive fleet of Star Destroyers, each one equipped with a big canon that can - of course - destroy a planet. So our band of rebels sets out on - of course - a quest to find this hidden planet and stop Palpatine once and for all. 

Yep, that's it. Nothing wrong with the idea. It's the execution that makes this one a slog. 

Nothing the characters do during the course of this film makes any sense and nothing is ever explained or made clear. They just hop from one planet to another, do stuff, hop to somewhere else, do stuff and rinse and repeat. New and old characters get introduced willy-nilly and always seem to have something to move the plot along, only the amount of 'luck' recquired for this is mindbafflingly enormous. 

Heck, even a couple of characters actually comment on events happening in the film with an exasperated: "Of course."

No, I'm not joking. 

The editing is all over the place and turns this into even more of an incomprehensible mess. I have no idea what JJ Abrams was thinking, but something tells me the script didn't really mesh and he was called in to try and make some sense of this piece of Bantha phudu. He failed. It's painfully obvious that this installment was made to appease the toxic backlash on 'The Last Jedi' and even though that film does have its problems, it is a friggin' masterpiece compared to this one. Here, they try and use the same beats as in the original trilogy for a large part, but where that worked in 'The Force Awakens' because that was a well put together piece of cinema, this is just nods and winks with no rhyme or reason. 

Bloody hell, this is horrendously awful. 

Okay, to be fair: it is a lot of fun to see Ian McDiarmid reprise his role as Palpatine, even if he is hamming it up more than ever. And I can totally get behind Palpatine returning, as in the expanded universe he made clones of himself, so it's not that unlikely. But why on Earth does Rey suddenly have to be his granddaughter? Why couldn't she just be an unknown? Not everyone needs to have a massive lineage, you know? 

Bloody heck, the amount of misfires and deus ex machina's is honestly making me angry. Even the deus ex machina's have deus ex machina's. 

You know how it feels when you suddenly realize that the prequel trilogy actually is a lot better than the final one, because Lucas actually had a plan and direction and you could feel that all the way through? And that the last trilogy just threw everything at the wall to see what would stick but didn't have an actual idea where it was heading? 

Yeah, makes you feel a little dirty and dead inside.