By John Camarena

Going into The Rise of Skywalker, expectations were low to say the least. The Last Jedi felt like a slap in the face to the fans that held the franchise close to their hearts, and having 2 of the main characters essentially tell us, the audience, that we are basically stupid for holding onto it, while a brave and interesting move, is not what Star Wars should be. By now it’s been revealed that even though JJ Abrams had an outline for the rest of the trilogy, Rian Johnson was given free rein to make the second movie however he wanted, and what he chose to do was interesting but also misguided. Rian Johnson, in my opinion, is not a bad director; however, his choice to deconstruct the mythology in order to water it down for mainstream audiences split the fandom. Some people liked it, many hated it, and I felt like maybe Star Wars just wasn’t for me anymore. This was most disappointing after the acceptable movie that Abrams had crafted. The Force Awakens, while a soft reboot/remake of A New Hope, was exactly what we wanted in order to bring the old fans back after so many adults were let down by the prequel trilogy. Abrams set up a familiar premise with the potential for meaningful payoff. Then Johnson said “nah” to that and essentially ended the trilogy with the second movie by making the theme one of letting go of the past and starting something completely different. There was nowhere coherent for the third movie to go and it showed: the big bad villain was unceremoniously killed before we get to know anything about his past, his motivations, and his goals; the second most important character also dies kind of pointlessly after spending the whole movie being a downer and refusing to be involved. This was Luke Skywalker! And the movie even makes a meta commentary on the fact that Luke was the former hero now reduced to being a sad hermit. Finally, the big set up that Rey was somehow important got flushed down the vac-tube by reveling she’s actually a nobody and her parents were just drunks. More on that in a bit. Needless to say, Disney was in a bit of a panic and their solution to try and win back the fans was to get Abrams back for the third movie. For some strange reason, it was never intended to have a unifying vision guiding these movies the way Marvel does, but nevertheless, this was a hail Mary play. So we get Abrams back and what happens next? Well, he basically has to undo many of the plot threads from The Last Jedi, or somehow twist them so that they fit into what I presume must have been the original outline of the trilogy. The perfect metaphor for this situation is being introduced to Kylo Ren in Episode 7 with his black helmet, then Snoke makes fun of Kylo Ren for using it so Kylo destroys it in Episode 8, followed by Kylo Ren reconstructing the damaged helmet and wearing it again to bring us back to form. It’s as beautiful as it is stupid. So what happens next? Let’s take a look.

• Palpatine was behind it all. We thought he was long dead, having been thrown into a pit on the second Death Star, and thus fulfilling Vader’s redemption and the prophecy that would bring balance to the Force by eliminating the Sith once and for all. But no, Somehow Palpatine survived his Force lighting self-electrocution, falling down a bottomless pit, and the Death Star explosion,  so he could go into hiding for the next 30 years were basically no one would know where he was and secretly build a huge fleet of planet-destroying Star Destroyers, which now makes them the most inappropriately named ships. Palpatine literally created Snoke as a pawn and influenced Kylo through the Force, making him think his grandpa, Darth Vader, was communicating with him. The problem here is there was absolutely zero set up for this reveal. Which leads me to my next point…
• Rey is a Palpatine. So it turns out she isn’t really a nobody; she’s a direct descendent from one of the characters that’s now been a part of all three trilogies. Sure, her parents weren’t infamous, but the son of Palpatine would most certainly not qualify as a nobody. There are so many more questions that come from this reveal: why were Rey’s parents not on the same page as the Emperor? Who did the Emperor have a child with? Were there other children? Were the parents not Force-sensitive? Was selling Rey into slavery to a shady junk dealer as a small, defenseless child really the best option to keep her away from Palpatine after I’m assuming it was discovered she had Force potential?
• The Rule of Two. The Rise of Skywalker introduces a couple of ideas with deep implications, but like everything else in the story, they get glossed over with minimal explanation. First, Kylo states that he and Rey are a dyad in the Force. Somehow, the two of them are inexplicably and inexorably interconnected within the Force; soulmates. But this idea is new to the canon and has no previous frame of reference really understand the meaning of this. Then the Emperor wants Rey to kill him so she can fulfill her ultimate destiny and the Sith can inhabit her being. This is actually very interesting because it implies that the Rule of Two, first mentioned in The Phantom Menace, is with the goal of the master training an apprentice to eventually kill him in order to transfer his soul into the body of the apprentice and thus defy death and continue the cycle with a new apprentice. Since the Sith cannot commune with the part of the Force that would essentially turn them into ghosts like Luke, Ben and Yoda, they have strived to cheat death through unnatural means, and it seems that this is the secret that Darth Plagueis discovered and Palpatine briefly alludes to in Revenge of the Sith. Again, a very interesting idea worth exploring further, but no we move on and this is not mentioned again. 

This isn’t to say the movie was bad as a whole. In truth, I liked this one the best out of the three. If you shut your logic circuits and can regress to being 5 years old, this is an entertaining ride. It’s only under basic scrutiny that the flaws in the story become apparent. A simple peek behind the curtain and the whole things begins to unravel. The main issue is the course-correction Abrams implemented that both had to undo or recontextualize a lot of the previous movie in order to make this work, and as a result, this felt like two movies compressed into one. Everything moves so quickly that you barely have time to grasp what just happened before we’re whisked away to the next plot point rushing to the finish line. Some of the best parts of my favorite entry in the series, The Empire Strikes Back, are the slow, character building and exposition scenes. Had Abrams at the very least been the guiding hand of the trilogy, we could have avoided a lot of the ill will garnered by the last movie. Had the idea of Palpatine being the puppet master been implemented earlier, this would have been an amazing reveal. In contrast to the movies, Jon Favre has demonstrated that it is still possible to make something good with the Star Wars brand when you have the right people and a vision involved. Here’s to hoping that this is a learning experience for Lucasfilm and better quality control begins to seep in.