Star Wars the Rise of Skywalker attempts to make the best of a bad situation that Disney placed itself in with the conclusion to the Disney Star Wars Trilogy. So the question that everyone is wanting to know: “Did Rise of Skywalker Stick the Landing?” Let’s dive in and see what the strengths and weaknesses of the film and the trilogy as a whole were in this review of Star Wars Rise of Skywalker. Spoilers ahead, you have been warned!

The Plot

We need to do a plot dump here just in case as there is a lot to unpack here. If you don't need a refresher go ahead and skip down to the critical part of the review starting with the characters.

The plot to this film was set in a way that makes me wonder what is missing from the film. There are plenty of unexplained moments and throughout the film from why is there a slug on the Millenium Falcon to what the hell is Finn trying to tell Rey? 

The Emperor has returned to the series as the former villain is no more. This is such a jarring addition to the story and a blatant sign that there was zero direction in this trilogy aside from maybe, “We want Kylo to go from bad to good.”

It starts with Kylo hunting down a thing called a sith wayfinder. In fact a lot of this movie can be summed up with the feeling of a video game fetch quest. Find an item, figure out the clue, find the next item, figure out the clues and so on. This happens for over half of the movie.

The fetch quest continues as Rey Poe and Finn find out about the sith wayfinder. They attempt to finish what Luke was attempting to do and find the clues to the wayfinder so they themselves can go confront Palpatine.

They arrive at yet another desert planet and get chased by the first order. Chewie gets captured after they manage to find the dagger. Rey tries to get the transport that is taking Chewie away to land using the force and accidently blows up the transport. But wait, Chewie isn’t dead but our heroes don’t know that yet.

They take C3PO to a hacker that can help them decipher the sith writing that C3PO knows but is not programmatically allowed to speak what it says as it's locked away from him. After the code is deciphered they discover that Chewie is alive and go to rescue him on Kylo Ren’s ship how has been following them this whole time.

On the ship they manage to rescue Chewie but get caught again, General Hux is the double agent and lets them only to get a bolt in the chest later. They escape with the Millenium Falcon that Kylo and the first order took from the desert planet conveniently.

Rey confronts Kylo again and this time learns the truth that she is the grand daughter to Emperor Palpatine. The Millennium Falcon comes up next to the hanger their in and flashes the first order sending them flying to the back of the hanger expect for Rey who is not affected and Jedi jumps onto the ramp of the ship and they take off.

I had a real issue with the dagger key to finding the second sith wayfinder that Rey, Finn and Poe are out to find. The dagger looks much older then around 40 years and is pointing towards death star wreckage out in the sea that may or may have not eroded away over time? This seemed lazy to me. There could have been so much better methods to have an excuse to get the characters to arrive at the death star weakage.

Eventually Rey steals Kylo’s wayfinder and ship after a very wet duel on the wreckage in the sea. Rey heals up Kylo because she feels bad for him that his mom died or something. She runs away then back to the planet she found Luke on and throws a fit of anger burning Kylo's ship with the intention of becoming a hermit like Luke had.

Look comes back as a force ghost and pep talks Rey into action and gives her Leia’s lightsaber but not before throwing shade at the Last Jedi of how to treat a lightsaber. He then raises his own X wing out of the water and Rey flies off to confront the Emperor.

Rey flying to this hidden location allows for the resistance to follow her path and attempt to take down the fleet of thousands of star destroyers. The space battle is not really interesting to me but is something to break up the dark force battles happening below.

The emperor like usual wants someone to strike him down so he can re incarnate through his granddaughter. She is about to do just that until.. Another force link with Ben who has also shown up and now a good guy. They then attempt to take on the emperor together but fail to do so. Palpatine sucks life force out of Rey and Ben leading one to wonder why he did not do such a thing in the first place to just Rey.

He then ditches Ben into a pit and Rey uses the powers of all the Jedi to strike down Palpatine that is using all the powers of the sith. This kills Rey, but wait, Ben climbs out of the pit and uses the same healing technique to bring Rey back to life. But wait. They all of the sudden have feelings for each other and share another awkward star wars kiss, but wait, Ben then dies after giving up his life force to Rey.

The movie finishes with Rey going to Tatooine and paying homage to the Skywalker family by buying the lightsabers in the sand and taking the Skywalker name over her Palpatine one and then staring off into the sunset.

Characters

I think we can all assume that what is going on is that Finn all of the sudden has obtained some level of sensitivity to the force. He is able to feel when something is wrong with Rey. At the same time, he is not able to feel the passing or lack thereof of other characters during the duration of the film. It feels a little sloppy. With the film clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes there had to be things that just needed to be chopped off of the final cut so I will be curious to see if any of these oddities with Fin are taken care of.

I will still attempt to avoid counting all the times he yells other characters names as there are not many lines of dialogue between each one out of him. 

Do I think that Finn's character should have been killed off in the Last Jedi? Sure, it would have been more meaningful of a sacrifice and his character was already fully transformed into a hero that does not run from anything. But I have to say that his character was still enjoyable in this film and he seemed like a cool hot shot resistance fighter during the course of the movie.

The same goes for Poe, there seems to be some differences in what Poe’s character is actually supposed to be. A fighter pilot with family from the rebellion, a spice runner that is able to hot wire a speeder. It was clear that JJ and the writers were attempting to up the Han Solo-ness of Poe for the trio in this film.

He does come off as a cool resistance fighter but I feel that over the course of the trilogy of films I have come to see him as less and less of leadership material. Even in this film when he apologizes to his own fleet during the final confrontation just didn’t jive well with a leader mentality to me.

Rey is the same overpowered character as ever in this film. She proves again and again that she has abilities that she should honestly have no right being proficient in. I am not saying that it's wrong for her to be able to do everything. But it needs to be said that healing other characters and creatures is new. Repelling force lightning is new.

The training scenes helped a lot in some of the believability and the frustration of Finn and Poe that she should be out helping the resistance instead of training tells me that she had to be doing it for awhile.

Kylo Ren is the last character I am going to single out here. His character grew more menacing in this film which was a welcome change. Much less yelling since the last two films where constant yells from so many characters.

His character shows growth as well with the largest happening in the last half of the film. It still is hard to get behind his character even with a tonal shift after Ben gives up the dark side of the force. There is not much interaction with his character after this switch so that was probably the reason it felt rather weird.

The scene with him and the memory of his father Han Solo was nice and had call backs to the Force Awakens. I was not expecting to see Han Solo at all in this film so it was much appreciated and probably a requirement of having the Han Solo character saying that he forgives Ben for killing him.

Palpatine is the same character as usual. Power hungry, old and angry. All he desires is to be cut down in the film and control the galaxy once again. So not much has changed with his character aside from him being back from the dead in a way we will never know, at least in the movies.

Leia’s character did not have any development which is to be expected, but I was very happy with how they respected Carrie Fisher and the character she played in the film. It was tasteful and it was clear that they were giving not just Leia a send off but Carrie as well in the film and I really liked that.

C3PO deserves a shout out in the character section of this review because Anthony Daniels just finally being a part of the adventure at a full capacity really makes this feel like a Star Wars movie. The constant quips and random facts and issues that he causes are what I missed in the previous two films.

The same cannot be said about R2D2. The poor droid feels like he has maybe gotten 10 minutes of screentime in the entire trilogy and that would be being generous. He makes way for BB-8 who thank the creator has been returned to normal droid levels of competence. No more controlling first order walkers.

All in all the character developments in this film are good. They are nothing flashy for sure, but they get the job done and actually get me to put some care into all of these characters for the first time in the trilogy. To bad it was the last film so it wouldn’t be enjoyed through the rest of the trilogy… Ouch. 

Finishing What He Started

JJ Abrams gets the ability to put the capstone on the trilogy that he started for Disney. He was able to maneuver the very muddy waters that the previous divisive film laid before him. Recovering many plot points and themes and concepts that were utterly tossed out by the direction the previous film attempted to take.

This film does the best that it can to recover the respect of fans while also giving us something new. With that being said, the fact that a redo button needed to be pressed so many times for this film really took away from where else there could have been more character development or deeper story.

I wonder if the plot of this trilogy would have been better if it was just JJ Abrams at the helm the entire time. We probably would have gotten answers and plot points not dropped to a level where we could have been more attached to the new characters as well as really set up a non jarring final chapter to the trilogy.

That being said JJ Abrams brings to Star Wars some really nice things that were in with the Force Awakens that I really enjoyed. We get a good taste of alien culture, a much more sinister villain that does not need to yell to feel menacing who also is as tired of Hux as everyone else is. That being said. This film is not without it’s plot holes and there are many, but many important questions get answered and closed off well in this movie. I am sure that some of the stuff on the cutting room floor that we will one day see will answer some more of these as well.

Pacing

The pacing of this film is really fast about all the way through. There was so many location jumps in this film that I thought I might end up getting whiplash. That being said, they did manage to accomplish tying things together rather nicely and place a decent bow on the overall movie. The plot though out of the blue and rushed was was still enjoyable and every new section of the movie had a point to it.

One thing that countered the pacing and lead to a little confusion for me was the amount of Rey and Kylo interactions through the force. I can amount to a car stepping on the brakes because the traffic in front also stepped on their breaks. It happens over and over again, each time taking longer and longer for my ability to care to return. 

I think that there were probably more interesting scenes that would have kept the pace of this movie rolling better then these force scenes every 15 minutes and that would have really helped with the pace of the film as a whole. Try cutting out each of these force interactions and see how much shorter the film is when it comes to Disney Plus in 2 to 3 months.

Conclusion

I feel that I need to find a place to stop here. I know that I was a little long winded on the description of what happens in the film, but it is important that we keep them all in order as there are so many scenery changes and events happening in quick succession that it was all necessary to include for my own sanity. 

Does this film attempt to solve the issues of the Last Jedi? Yes. Does it do so well? Probably as well as it would have ever been capable of doing which is commendable. I do give JJ Abrams and the writers credit here. I also wish that he just had control of the entire trilogy so we would not have been in this mess and the last film wouldn’t feel like a rushed patch job.

I do not agree so much with the idea that I need to read expanded series stuff in order to better understand why some things happen or what I missed between films. That is a lazy way to take care of unanswered questions and plot holes in these movies and this film had its share of those moments.

Finally is this film a good film. Yes. I enjoyed myself watching this and will probably watch it several more times in the future. It for more does not live up to the other two trilogies as a whole, but it also sticks the landing better than a Game of Thrones was able to with it’s epic. There was clearly care here and passion.

Of all the three films in this trilogy, this one felt the most like Star Wars to me. I would recommend anyone go and see this film. Even if you were put off by the Last Jedi. It’s an enjoyable time that does everything it can to deliver everything we wanted to see.