So screw the critics, I loved Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker. I can’t wait to read those reviews – the movie only has 58% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and all the Last Jedi haters, the ones with axes to grind, are crowing in delight. I think this was the best of the new trilogy of Star Wars movies (and better than the other two as well). And I liked Force Awakens and Rogue One quite a bit, thought the Solo film was fine (you know… fine), and Last Jedi pretty problematic from a storytelling, plotting, and editing standpoint.
So Rise of Skywalker picks up some time after Last Jedi and jumps right into a plot involving the resurrected Emperor Palpatine just in the opening paragraph of the text crawl. That was a big load of data to drop into the text exposition… but the movies have always started mid-stride so I guess fair enough? So anyway, the heroes have to find a map to the Sith homeworld where Palpatine’s desiccated – yet laughing and reanimated – corpse is creating a new Order of Sith and Sith star destroyers. That’s the super basic intro… there’s a lot of running around and shooting and exploding and force powers and wookies to go but I won’t spoil more.
Now, I did love this film but not the entire film. The first hour or so is arguably full of a lot of busy work and things to pad the run time. It’s not boring stuff, but it does feel like a lot of side quests to give characters things to do and enough time to solve a mystery that isn’t super compelling. I think a few more passes on the script level would have tightened things up and still left plenty of story and action set pieces to spare.
But the thing is, I didn’t hate any of that… I just went along with it and it was reasonably fun and reasonably exciting. Just not super compelling. I compare that to the busy work of, say, Canto Bite in the Last Jedi where things got sluggish and bogged down. This movie doesn’t have that pacing issue.
The second half of the movie, on the other hand, I thought was pretty fantastic. It works not just because of cool lightsaber battles or big fleets of spaceships going pew pew pew! I liked it because it had emotional heft, storytelling that mattered, characters that grew, and themes that were satisfyingly resolved from this movie and past movies as well.
In fact, the way they handle Carrier Fisher was respectful and actually was written perfectly into the movie’s plot, themes, and characters. They probably would have done something different if Fisher hadn’t died, but she did and they found a great way to work that into the story.
Now, they did some hand-waving around some of the more contentious Last Jedi issues… some of which just felt like band-aiding that plot to make this one work but not all. There’s actually sequences that pay homage – that even honor – the themes of Last Jedi in ways I just didn’t expect. I dig that JJ Abrams set up a story in Force Awakens (one he didn’t plan to resolve), then Last Jedi chucked a lot of that out and came up with its own ideas, and then JJ comes back in and did his level best to fix it without breaking everything from Last Jedi. Maybe I’m being too charitable. I don’t know.
Anyhow, I came away pumped after seeing this flick. I don’t get the dislike… I thought it was a fantastic piece of sci-fi entertainment that didn’t forget the heart and the themes. The movie worked – at least on me – and I look forward to reading and watching reviews that hated it. I’m genuinely curious to see how different the movie they saw was to what I saw.
Score: 89