Well, I guess this was the one place where Disney didn't have money on the mind and just went with their gut in letting JJ Abrams come back to "fix" the mistakes Johnson made in The Last Jedi. The results are without a doubt the greatest Star Wars movie of all time, in strict terms of memes and being a mosaic of awful. The Phantom Menace has been unseated. I repeat, The Phantom Menace is no longer the most wonderfully terrible Star Wars movie out there. Disney put all of their money making sycophants to work to fix up Episode IX to make it more marketable and appealing to fans. The results are a car bomb of nostalgic overload, combined with unexplained stupidity and downright bizarre character choices. This film is right up there Ryan's Babe and The Room as one of the most enjoyably terrible movies I've ever seen. Make no mistake about it, if you ever want to see a big budget film crash and burn for all to see, The Rise of Skywalker is the film for you. It's just...mind boggling how creatively terrible and bankrupt this film is. Truly, I give Disney a tip of the cap. You couldn't have made a film more terribly delightful as this one.
Plot: Somehow, Palpatine returned...Nope. I'm serious. There's no explanation, no reference. He's just back. Apparently it's possible to survive being thrown into the reactor of the second Death Star by your former minion. I guess Palpatine didn't teach Vader that...oh well. Kylo Ren goes in search of the Emperor and finds him on the planet Exxon Mobil (or something like that). Palpatine reveals he was the one behind Snoke and the First Order in a quest to retake control of the galaxy, having created with his Sith powers an entire fleet of Star Destroyers and recruits the son of Han Solo and Leia to find and kill Rey.
After learning that "somehow Palpatine returned...", Rey and her team of Poe, Finn, Chewbacca, BB-8, and Threepio go in search of a Sith Wayfinder, which might be able to give them the location of where Palpatine is hiding. They ultimately recruit both Poe's old flame Zorii Bliss and the last reference to the OG Trilogy in Lando Calrissian, but lose Chewbacca to the First Order, who also gain control of the Falcon. To add insult to injury, Rey reveals she has the power of the Dark Side of the Force in her by using Force Lightning to destroy an entire transport.
While mounting a plan to rescue Chewbacca, Rey confronts Kylo Ren, who informs Rey that she is in fact Palpatine's granddaughter, whom the Sith Lord wanted destroyed because of the threat she posed to him (you know, when he was supposed to be dead from a good old fashioned mine shaft fall). The group manages to escape from the First Order with the aid of apparently General Super Hitler (AKA General Hux, who's apparently a good guy now) and heads to Endor to retrieve the Sith Wayfinder from the remains of the Second Death Star (which was pretty blown up so I don't have an idea how such a large wreckage could still exist, but I digress) and has an epic Lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren, defeating him. But when she learns that Leia passed on into the Force, Rey chooses to heal Ren and spare him from death and flees to where she had begun to train under Luke, while Ben Solo is left to question his role in the universe: to serve Palpatine or to come back to the light and fight as the Jedi his mother and father knew he could be.
What's Bad?: I feel bad calling anything in this film bad. I mean, truly I do. It is just such a treasure of a bad movie to watch that I get more joy from watching this than I do any other bad big budgeted movie out there. Even The Phantom Menace or Twilight. It's a national treasure as far as I'm concerned.
But if I have to be critical, the movie has so many plotholes in it, I thought someone just put a slice of swiss cheese on the screen. First of all, how the hell did Palpatine survive being thrown into the Death Star's reactor core by Darth Vader? Ignoring all of the "Chosen One" narratives Disney threw away with this (because I don't give a damn about the Prequels), I'm just genuinely confused as to how Palpatine could have survived this. But there's no explanation to it. We're just expected to believe Palpatine is so evil, he can will himself in and out of life easily. Or maybe there were clones like in the EU? Either way, there's no explanation. Second, how the hell did any portion of the Second Death Star survive the Battle of Endor, which was clearly blown to bits after Lando and Wedge destroyed the main reactor. And are we supposed to believe it crashed on Endor without any of the Rebel Leaders noticing it and going to either help in cleaning up the forests of the Ewoks or just making sure there wasn't anything valuable there? No? Well, how about this magical new ability Rey has to heal people who have been impaled by a lightsaber? Surely Obi-Wan could have used that when Qui-Gon was stabbed by Darth Maul, right? Does JJ want to show his work and explain? No? Well, what about how the hell Palpatine was able to bring an entire fleet of Star Destroyers to life? Did he just use his Sith power to do it? Did he will the people on the ships to life? Why wait until after Kylo Ren killed Snoke to announce his return? And why use Snoke at all when he could have just revealed he had returned and freaked the entire galaxy out? I'm sorry, but that whole "Somehow Palpatine Returned" storyline is going to bug me. It's the equivalent to the Jedi just ignoring the whole blatant Clone Army being secretly commissioned for the Republic thing. Just so bizarre of a plothole that I'm flabbergasted that this movie plot made it out of the first phase or rewrites and Disney deemed acceptable. Also, one last one that grinds me to my core is if the Resistance was basically left standing alone at the fight on Exxon Mobil (or whatever it's called), who the hell did those 10,000 ships belong to? Like honestly? Who? WHO?!?!
I feel it might be blasphemous to say, but I think John Williams phoned in his performance here. There are so many callbacks to the original musical pieces he wrote for Star Wars, from "Duel of the Fates", "The Emperor's Theme", "The Imperial March", "The Force Theme", "Luke and Leia's Theme" and especially the main theme. There was almost nothing new about this score and I find it similar to how Hans Zimmer scored The Lion King (2019). But whereas that film used the themes in the original movie effectively and to move both the audience and the plot, here it's just for a callback. I guess Disney was so creatively bankrupt after they blew their load on Avengers: Endgame that they just didn't care enough about one of their most important movie franchises.
This film did not do any of it's characters apart from Rey and Kylo Ren any justice. Poe and Finn are just there to fill in lines and support roles, Rose's role was scaled so far back it almost seemed like Disney was taking those racist posts about Kelly Marie Tran online seriously, and I genuinely do not think any of the OG characters besides Palpatine did anything. Threepio, R2-D2, Lando and Chewbacca are just there and Carrie Fisher's death (while sad) basically meant that Leia did next to nothing in this film and probably should have been killed off in either The Last Jedi or offscreen. That's also adding that I don't think any of these other new characters, like Zorii or Jannah do anything outside of just exist to add new characters to the story. I guess you could argue Zorii does something, but Jannah I think was put in just to give Finn some kind of friend to talk to with Rey and Kylo Ren basically all but getting together by the end of the story. Star Wars may be progressive, but we can't really have interracial relationships just yet in this story. Unless it's Star Wars Rebels. Then you can have humans and aliens get together. But since the chuds don't watch cartoons, they didn't notice.
What's Good?: Ian McDiarmid is, as always, a brilliant Palpatine and practically saves this movie with his over the top villainous acting. Even if it makes absolutely no sense for him to even be here in Episode IX, I don't think I could have stomached someone other than Ian as the Emperor. And he is so delightful here it evokes his performance from Revenge of the Sith. Simply wonderful.
The acting for both Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley is also on par with their performances in the last two films. They seemed to be the only two characters JJ knew what to do with in this one. And Adam Driver is growing on me as an actor. I think he was excellent as an anti-hero again in this film, perhaps a little less polished in this one than in The Last Jedi. And I've always been able to get behind Daisy Ridley in this role as Rey. Personally, while Mark Hamill will always have my respect as Luke, I think she might have been the best actor of the three main leads of these trilogies (including Hayden Christiansen since George Lucas didn't have a main character to get behind in the Prequels). She sells her scenes well enough and helps carry the otherwise unnecessary roles the side characters have.
Overall: This film is absolutely a treasure. Unlike The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi, this film isn't so much of a chore to sit through. It's 2 1/2 hours of pure chaos on screen and I cannot help but be in awe of how terrible this movie is. Disney, JJ Abrams and everyone involved (with the exceptions of Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley and Ian McDiarmid) should come and take bows. And considering how abysmal working on this film has been, I am not surprised both Oscar Issacs and John Boyega are not at all interested in coming back to make more films. This trilogy was an example of how Disney truly had no vision or plan for this series except to make money. IF this was the plan, wouldn't it have made more sense to follow an outline like the one George Lucas had? I mean, the end product still would have turned out like Seasons 5-8 of Game of Thrones, but it still would have been a coherent and not at all sloppy mess of a movie. George has proven to be an excellent idea man. He's just a terrible script writer and director. The whole creative team behind The Rise of Skywalker was just like a coop of chickens with it's head cut off. The end result is pure chaos. It worked here. But when the end result isn't as memorably bad as this, I pity the next soul who Disney puts in charge of Star Wars...
Seeing as how I don't want to work on Cruella considering how terrible it was, I think I want to follow up on something a little more positive. How about a List Update? Yeah, let's go with that...
Coming Up Next: An Updated List of How I Rank the Disney Animated Films (Adding Moana to Raya)
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