By Emily Cavanaugh '21
SPOILER ALERT: Every Star Wars fan, or a fan of any movie series for that matter, anticipates a good finale. Whether it’s the Original Trilogy or the Prequels, finales should be as engaging as the movies before it, while conclusively and neatly finishing the story. While others may disagree, my favorite movie in the Star Wars saga is Return of the Jedi, which was the finale of the Original Trilogy. Its rich emotion, fast action, and lovable characters make it unique and memorable. It almost perfectly encompasses what a finale should be, and it is what the newest Star Wars installment, The Rise of Skywalker, ultimately fails to be. While The Rise of Skywalker is a fun movie with its good parts, it feels very disconnected from the series as a whole, and the plot is incredibly weak.
When getting ready to see this movie for the first time, I was expecting a little bit of disconnection from The Last Jedi, the 8th installment in the series. For some background, The Last Jedi was directed by Rian Johnson, whereas the other 2 in the trilogy were directed by J.J. Abrams. The movie received mixed reviews, with 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, but a mere 41% from fans. This may have been the reasoning behind the complete disconnect that The Rise of Skywalker had from the previous movie. First, Snoke, the “main villain” in the 7th and 8th movie, is shown to be quite unimportant, only a pawn in the Sith Army that can be easily recreated. This is shown in the first few shots of the movie while Kylo Ren is exploring the Sith planet Exogol, where several Snokes are seen being “grown” in a vat of liquid. While this somewhat makes sense in the context of the movie since he died in TLJ, it makes the previous two movies feel unimportant and separate. If Snoke was truly this weak compared to the rest of the Sith, then why wouldn’t the Sith be able to introduce themselves in the earlier movies? The movie answers this question by saying that the Sith “were finally ready” in TROS, which makes no sense to me. The Sith are all-powerful evil Force wielders that had 30 whole years to “prepare themselves”, and they only make an appearance in the final movie? This leads into my second major issue with the disconnect in this movie, which was the creation of a new power that Jedis apparently have: The power to heal and bring people “back from the dead”. This happened a few times in the movie, the most memorable moment being when Rey “force heals” the lightsaber wound that she inflicted on Kylo Ren. This particularly infuriated me, because “force healing” has never been used in any other movie. I am fine with introducing new aspects in movie series, but to have a power that is this important go completely unused in the previous movies shows how this movie disregards the entire series. While watching the movie, I thought of all of the times where a Jedi would want to use force healing on someone. For example, in Return of the Jedi, Luke would maybe want to use force healing on his father, after he turned to the light side. Or maybe an inexperienced Jedi like Obi-Wan in the first movie or Luke Skywalker in the 4th movie would want to have used force healing on their teachers, in order to continue their training. The possibilities are endless, and it makes TROS lose a lot of credibility. Overall, the complete disregard of TLJ and the creation of new powers makes this movie feel detached from the saga.
The second major issue with this movie is the plot. There were several times when I was watching this movie where I gritted my teeth in anger, because of how incredibly convenient and lucky the plot was. In particular, there was one scene in the first half of the movie that was purely based on unbelievable coincidences, which infuriated me. Rey and the rest of the main characters are on a speeder, attempting to escape the First Order. They are eventually shot down and the speeder explodes. All of the characters are fine, but they have landed on a quicksand-like substance that is quickly pulling them into the ground. They land in a series of caves, and with a few maneuvers and after “force healing” a serpent creature, they happen to find the map to the Sith planet on a random knife in the sand. Conveniently, after the serpent creature doesn’t attack them because Rey “force healed” it, it knocks over some boulders which leads to a perfect exit in the cave. Wow. This means that Rey was the only character to do anything that advanced the plot in this scene in some way, but most of it was sheer luck. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Rey and the crew step out of the cave and find an old ship that is perfectly intact somehow. Before taking off in the ship, Rey encounters Kylo Ren and slices his ship in half, but then Chewbacca gets captured by a First Order ship (they are still in the desert, by the way). Kylo Ren and Rey each use the Force to pull the ship toward themselves, until Sith Lightning somehow erupts from Rey’s hands and completely explodes the ship that had Chewbacca in it. However, we find out later in the movie that Chewbacca is fine, because he was in a different ship. A different ship. Lucky! I’m not advocating for the death of Chewbacca, but the whole scene felt kind of pointless when the main problem, Chewbacca getting killed in the hands of Rey, ended up not happening. What if Rey discovered that she has the Sith Lightning power when trying to destroy Kylo’s ship? This would have still achieved everything that the scene was trying to show (Rey has Sith Lightning powers), while simultaneously deepening the relationship between her, Kylo, and the Sith. This was all in around 10 minutes of the movie. Many other parts of the movie have these issues, but this was the most prominent. Overall, the plot in TROS felt forced and overly convenient, which had a devastating affect on the movie.
Although much of what I have said of this movie is incredibly critical, it wasn’t the worst movie ever. If the plot issues and the loopholes and the way that it takes everything from TLJ and turns it around is ignored, it’s really not that bad. The very end is nice, the effects and battle scenes were well done, and when I wasn’t shaking my fist at the screen in anger, the movie was fun to watch. However, I think that it ultimately fails as a finale. This movie left a bad taste in my mouth after watching it, and it got worse the more that I thought about it. When I watched Return of the Jedi for the first time at the age of 9, I thought about that movie for days on end. I remembered the ewoks and the battles, but I mostly remembered Anakin’s eyes at the end of the movie, when Luke dragged his body across the floor of the second Death Star. That scene moved me, and it made Return of the Jedi my favorite movie. There was no scene like that in ROTS that stuck with me, and it is because of all of the factors I mentioned before. While there is no perfect Star Wars movie, this one is not one of the best. It lacks depth, it lacks plot, and it lacks a connection to the other movies, which possibly makes it the worst finale in the saga.
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