In the Flesh: The Rise of Skywalker

So there it is. Everyone’s ancestry is established, two extremely chaste kisses have been had, and Disney’s new Star Wars trilogy is over. What was the point of it? I’m not sure anyone involved in the project really knew, beyond “making money.” In three aimless, overlong movies J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson managed to do little more than rehash the plot of Return of the Jedi with all the mystical ambiguity ironed out. Like Abrams’ earlier The Force Awakens, The Rise of Skywalker is relentlessly action-driven, characters racing from one fetch quest to the next with enemies always ineffectually on their tails. 

The film has no genuine emotion, undercutting itself every time it approaches anything real. Chewie’s fake-out “death” and Rey’s anguished, terrified scream for the brief moment she thinks she’s accidentally killed him are as close as it gets, and it lasts about six minutes. When Hux is revealed as a spy the movie breezes past his motivations without digging for anything deeper than pettiness, though if there’s anything Domnhall Gleeson could sell it’s “ineffectual rage and shame at having been humiliated repeatedly”. Even the film’s big family revelation lands with a wet little plop before sinking into the murky soup of the larger story.

The Rise of Skywalker is relentlessly unfun to look at, most of its scenes dreary and dim, its action unimaginatively staged and shot. Its dogfights are visually incoherent messes, its lightsaber duels uninspired and devoid of tension. The climactic naval battle between Emperor Palpatine’s Final Order fleet and a desperate Resistance air force is just bottomlessly uncreative, occurring almost entirely on the horizontal axis with no depth of field, no layering of imagery. It’s like someone chipped everything interesting and exciting off of the opening of Revenge of the Sith. With three times that movie’s budget and the world’s resources at his fingertips Abrams can’t conjure anything half as cool as Lucas’s swirling, chaotic collage of light and color.

There are moments — few and far between — of fun in The Rise of Skywalker, but mostly it’s a tedious mess, a movie made by committee, trimmed and pruned until nothing worth thinking about for longer than the time it takes to watch remains. Abrams’ movie is afraid of even the scant mysticism of the original series, afraid to touch any visual that might edge toward melodrama or silliness, and most of all afraid of doing or saying anything new.