Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, or, How Not to Respond to Assholes

Mostly, I just wanted The Last Jedi to matter.

We’re only days away from the release of the conclusion to the Skywalker Saga, the long awaited end to a saga that has seen it’s fair share of ups and downs, and the only thing that’s been on my mind is the last installment in the Star Wars series. The Last Jedi was probably the first movie to actually explore what any of the greater lore in Star Wars means; the role the Jedi played in creating Darth Vader and the Empire, the gray area between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, people profiteering from supplying weaponry to both sides of a war, what it truly means to be a hero. I absolutely loved Luke’s arc, as coming back to Luke not as a storied, wisened mentor but a curmedeonly, broken old man not only subverted expectations, but at long last tried to do something with Luke other than make him the second coming of Space Jesus. (The first Space Jesus is Anakin Skywalker, naturally.)

So of course people hated it. Of course. Of course after complaining about how The Force Awakens was too safe and too similar, The Last Jedi flipped much of what we know about they mythos and the characters that exist within it, and naturally, Star Wars fans hated it. It was the ultimate no-win scenario for the Star Wars brain trust; either keep trucking and make TLJ a straight up clone of The Empire Strikes Back, or do something different. Unlike a million other times, Disney actually decided to do something different, and I can only imagine that the backlash to TLJ will encourage them to never take any significant risks (like character development and an actual reason for these people to be engaged in a star war beyond “light good, dark bad”) again.

Where as Disney was rewarded by expanding the Marvel universe and bringing in it’s intergalactic and wackier elements to universal acclaim, if the reaction to The Last Jedi tells us anything, it’s that Star Wars fans very much want Star Wars to be one specific thing. The truth is that they do want movies that strictly adhere to the dynamics put in place in The Force Awakens; safe, boring stories of good guys and bad guys duking it out for supremacy, without having to think too much about the implications of a religious force acting as a police force and generals in a war and why that may not be a good thing when it comes to trying to prevent the galaxy from falling into the hands of the Sith. Luke as a perfect embodiment of all that is right with the world instead of a flawed man who never quite stopped being the same scared farm boy Yoda trained in Empire. Women being way less important. (Full disclosure; I write this having not seen the movie, but the initial, not too spoilery news that Rose has been almost entirely sidelined is disheartening to the point of being enraging).

Also deflating? The media tour wherein the cast and crew of Rise of Skywalker quietly bury The Last Jedi. Which isn’t to say that everyone can’t question the merits of their own work; more actors and directors and producers should do that. But the recent spat of press for the movie has had the slight tinge of “hey, we’re sorry for TLJ making people kinda mad, in this movie there’s less thinking and more shooty-shooty bang-bang, less character development and more dialogue you might hear on Alias, less trying to actually grow the world of Star Wars and more OH LOOK IT’S THE EMPEROR WHO SHOULD BE DEAD!”.

And I’m sure that will make for a perfectly serviceable Star Wars flick. J.J Abrams is the crowned king of doing just enough for a movie to be more than okay. But he’s not going to build on what The Last Jedi created. And that’s a fuckin’ shame, because what The Last Jedi created was perhaps the first bit of actual growth in the series since the Original Trilogy. Rian Johnson evolved Star Wars. He took it in a new direction. Every decision he made wasn’t perfect, but every decision he purposeful; take these characters who started in one place in The Force Awakens, and set them up to be somewhere different in the next movie.

Rise of Skywalker (and again, I haven’t seen it, but I think my guess will be pretty spot on) will plant those characters firmly in archetypes that seem familiar and at home for the type of fans who hated The Last Jedi less for what it was and more what it represented; a shift away from the movies they loved. OG Star Wars fans have been waiting literal decades to get a continuation of the Skywalker story…it’s just they didn’t want this continuation. They very much wanted these movies to still be about Luke, Leia and Han. But (spoiler warning) Han’s dead. Luke is dead. Carrie Fisher has been taken from us. This is not an EU story about what happens directly after Return of the Jedi; it’s set far from the time of those events. It deals with the fallout of those events. Everything that happens is informed by what happened before, but it isn’t about those guys anymore.

Because it couldn’t be about them. In the same way it was almost impossible to have all the Doctor’s back for Day of the Doctor because it would take too much damn time to explain how and why these characters look and act and sound so different than when we last saw them, to have these movies still be about the Original Trilogy heroes would’ve bogged the stories down too much in “what the hell have these guys been doing for the last couple decades and change”. And no story could’ve suitably concluded their arcs. Disappointment, like Thanos, was inevitable. The only way to go was to move forward. Shit can’t be the same as it is when you’re a kid. We’ll never get movies like the Original Trilogy again, no matter how many overtures Disney makes to try and prevent jerks from hating the movie. They will hate it anyways. Don’t listen to assholes.

Rise of Skywalker will probably be fine. It will make a billion dollars when it should’ve probably made two billion. I don’t even think that it’s as bad as early reviews are suggesting; it’ll be okay. That’s what Disney and Abrams probably wanted; a deeply okay movie that they can put out there and then let the icy reception to the franchise thaw for a few years before they make the next set of movies.

But time will show (as Empire did to Jedi) that the middle chapter of this recent trilogy is perhaps the deepest, most interesting chapter of Star Wars outside the Extended Universe and Legends stories ever. It’ll be a shame if a director like Johnson never gets a crack to actually move Star Wars forward again.

But hey; at least the assholes who cried about how a movie “raped their childhood” (a phrase that needs to die in so many goddamn fires, please stop saying this) will be happy. Or probably not happy, because you can’t please people who don’t want to be pleased. There is no Star Wars movie that can appease the type of people who forced Rise of Skywalker to become…this. (I’m assuming.) We’ll have to wait and see how long it takes Disney to figure that out.