The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)
This review is slightly spoilerific.
I remember back in 1999, and the long awaited The Phantom Menace arrived on our screens. Oh, how we piled out in droves to see the rebirth of the legendary Star Wars universe... only to stumble out, dumbfounded, at the weak, incoherent, mediocrity that had been laid on for our entertainment.
But on witnessing The Rise Of Skywalker (having rmembered that I hadn't actually watched it), I can happily announce that The Phantom Menace has been boldly superceded as the worst film in the 9-episode main series. You get the feeling that something is amiss right from the start, as the familiar music blares out and the scrolling yellow text informs us Emperor Palpatine is back. Well. That's kind of a huge, off-camera thing to causally drop on us via exposition dump.
There's no point really addressing the plot. It's just a load of characters from the previous two movies suddenly appearing here and there for a quick action sequence and chat before dashing onto the next, and then there's a big showdown and the film ends. It is incoherent. Apparently, no-one sat down and thought of a solid, ongoing storyline you could follow, they decided to just randomly chuck some characters into different situations for set-pieces to quickly zip through to give the simulacrum of a story. It's an extended exposition dump. It could almost have been done by montage. The belief-suspension and plot-holes are soul-destroying. And much of it is so incredibly lazy I could weep. So Palpatine, dead-not-dead, has somehow via a single planet managed to build a fleet bigger than the Empire. Yes, he's not just magically back from the dead, he's magicked up a whole fleet, not that he even needs one because the First Order has already crushed the Republic militarily. That's a whole fleet that is not only pointless, but thankfully can be destroyed in entirety because it's freakishly reliant on one, single, massive, plot-device point of failure, as if they haven't learnt anything at all from all the previous mishaps.
It squanders tension appallingly. One of the problems is the "has to be bigger" bloat. In Star Wars, the Death Star could blow up a planet, and that was a moment of shock and terror. In Ep. 6 they're building a new one, and it works fine because it creates such a good reason to stop it. In Ep. 7 they resurrect the idea as "Starkiller Base" (that name alone is worth a year of eyerolling), and at the end now every, single goddamn star destroyer in this magicked-up fleet has it's own planetbuster. The amazing has become the boring. It's almost just a casual line of dialogue: "Oh yeah, by the way they've got 2000 ships each of which can destroy the galaxy now. So, how's your coffee, and did you see the game last night?... Mm, yeah, Coruscant Athletic really need a better full back." There's also shocking creative cowardice about this movie. Clearly, the heroine being announced to be a nobody in the last film was a bit controversial, so that got clumsily retconned. That mechanic who helped Finn a lot in Ep. 8 was also unpopular, so she's been slung off to a few bit-scenes. Bringing back Palpatine just to make a new boss battle. I think this is JJ Abrams all over: a sheen of style to cover a creative bankruptcy: movie-making by focus group, cynical, safety-first, no depth and no real respect for source material.
So, that's it, really. A thoroughly shambolic and inadequate end to a humdrum trilogy just so Disney could cynically reboot and make $$$ off the public. Come back George Lucas, all is forgiven.
