Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

rating: ****

the story: The saga concludes.

review: This will be another film from 2019 I hesitate to call an out-and-out classic.  (True story: when I was picking up the recent home video release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I heard it referred to as the movie where Bruce Lee gets his ass kicked.)  Because I really like Rise of Skywalker, but I'm not immediately prepared to go all in.  Sometimes a movie will leave you with that kind of impression, right from the start.  Sometimes it takes a while.  Some of my all-time favorites are like that.  My appreciation for Tarsem's The Fall has grown even from a hugely favorable initial impression. 

But what you want to read about is Rise of Skywalker.  The Star Wars saga has quite an interesting backstory to it at this point.  I'm not talking about the films but how they've been accepted by fans over the years.  Empire Strikes Back sort of instantly, for most observers, became the franchise favorite, but it didn't make as much money at the box office as A New Hope.  Fans instantly derided Return of the Jedi as a shameless conclusion to the original trilogy, festooned with nonsense teddy bears and sudden revelations like Luke and Leia actually being siblings all along.  But fans forgot these facts by the time the prequels came around.  Over the years, the prequels became pariahs.  But the saga continued.  J.J. Abrams launched the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, but it wasn't until Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that fans, who were already thinking Force Awakens echoed A New Hope too directly, started to grumble loudly.  We live in a #notmy[fillintheblank] era, so of course a fan community already discontent over the prequels had begun suggesting Star Wars was over.

Then of course Rise of Skywalker comes around and is announced as the finale of the Skywalker saga.  Not necessarily Star Wars itself, but the saga as it revolves around the Skywalkers.  (Do you want a spoiler?  By the end of Rise of Skywalker, the concept of revolving around the Skywalkers sort of gets a new definition.  But I think it still technically completes the saga as we know it.)

Now, we also now live in a world where Baby Yoda exists.  Maybe this is enough to bring back some of those skeptics.  I think one way or another Star Wars goes out with a bang, not just in the movie but as a cultural experience.  I don't really care what the public perception is.  I love Solo.  (And still am ambivalent at best about Rogue One.)  But it's nice to think Star Wars can still compete with the MCU.

I think Rise of Skywalker is infinitely better than Avengers: Endgame.  I think it absolutely schools the Thanos finale.  Where Endgame plays at trying to have resonance for a whole franchise, Rise of Skywalker speaks to unanswered questions for eight previous films spanning more than forty years, and does so brilliantly.  It doesn't attempt to resolve everything.  In the finest Star Wars tradition, it introduces new mysteries, that need never be resolved.  I mean, we'll never really know who shot first, after all.  (Thanks, George!) 

If Last Jedi was unconventional, Rise of Skywalker dips immediately and enthusiastically back into A New Hope, and revisits Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  Fans who only want to interpret things negatively will consider the results as nothing more than the original trilogy in a blender, a shameless rip-off.

But it's so much more than that.  J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas.  He's not Kershner.  He's not Marquand.  His sensibilities are as much informed by Star Wars as they are Peter Jackson and Harry Potter.  He's very much a modern blockbuster filmmaker, and crafts his movie around moments and ideas that didn't exist in the saga previously.  His Jedi have the ability to heal, just as George Lucas eventually built up the Sith to have the ability to create life itself (the disputed origin of Vader).  Rey has powers we've never seen before.  I've seen this sort of thing done with existing mythos before.  Green Lantern comics, for instance, which in the '90s I was thoroughly convinced had all the grandeur of Star Wars, before they ever went full epic in the new millennium.  Again, some fans will have problems with this sort of thing.  I think it rings true.  The Force now resides, effectively, in a handful of individuals at best.  And by the end of the movie, by the end of the saga, has shrunk even further. 

I think the mythology is given its due.  I think the characters introduced in Force Awakens are given fitting roles to play, and have fitting arcs.  Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and even Domhnall Gleason turn in trilogy-best performances.  Original trilogy actors abound!  And deliver.  Everything delivers.

Even though I didn't like the movie itself, Return of the King had a killer, memorable climax when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the ring, he can carry Frodo.  I don't know if Rise of Skywalker has a moment like that.  I don't know if it needs to.  Last Jedi had a rousing moment, when Rey and Kylo Ren strike down Snoke unexpectedly, and that's a tough moment to beat in this trilogy, and so it's not really worth trying to compete against.  Instead, Rise of Skywalker is filled with reflecting back on everything we've learned, everything we've experienced over the course of three trilogies.  There isn't a Vader who seems far from redemption, or two Jedi being torn away from a treasured brotherhood at stake.  Rey and Kylo spend the entire movie going over their Last Jedi experiences.  Kylo's best moment is a direct riff on a scene in Force Awakens, a quieter and perhaps as a result, more affecting echo.  And that's sort of the whole movie. 

It knows, as with the best stories, that the ending reflects back on the beginning.  We last see Rey in the most perfect place possible.  I think if the results aren't perfect, they're as perfect as they could possibly have been, especially since George Lucas isn't at the helm, and because Abrams sort of swooped back in at the last minute.  That's some kind of magic.  And that's always been Star Wars in a nutshell.  You don't have to worry about what the fans think.