Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Our Review

This is what a film looks like when it is written by an algorithm of fan complaints. The Rise of Skywalker spends its first twenty minutes apologizing for The Last Jedi: Palpatine is back via a radio announcement, Rey’s parents were secretly important after all, and every mystery the previous film closed gets reopened with a shrug and a MacGuffin. The result is a movie that sprints for two hours twenty minutes and goes nowhere in particular, resolving a nine film saga with a whisper.

Individually, pieces work. TheKylo Ren and Rey team up against the guards in the wreckage of the Death Star is propulsive, the ocean moon where the wreck sits is a gorgeous location, and Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley keep finding real feeling in dialogue that gives them nothing. The biggest problem is everything else. The plot is a fetch quest across a dozen planets, each introduced and abandoned in minutes. The return of Palpatine is underexplained nonsense that converts the saga’s central tragedy into a Saturday morning cartoon. New characters get introduced and forgotten mid scene. Chewbacca gets a fake out death that is walked back almost instantly, and the film does this so often that no jeopardy lands.

The ending, Rey declaring herself Rey Skywalker on a moisture farm, sums up the entire project: a curated sentimental diorama with nothing behind the glass. The actors deserved better, and so did the audience that waited forty two years for a real conclusion. Four out of ten, and that is being polite to the production design.