Sequels, Star Wars, and Dissatisfaction

This is a bit of a ‘whole sequel trilogy’ review — it’s not spoiler heavy, but it will ruin key beats from The Rise of Skywalker so tread carefully.

My longstanding practice whenever a Star Wars film is released is to take myself along to the midnight premiere. This has been the case for every release in my lifetime, from the Special Editions of the original trilogy, through the prequels, and now the sequel trilogy produced under Lucasfilm’s new home at Disney.

I am a fan of Star Wars.

And as the (now familiar) adage goes: nobody hates Star Wars more than fans of Star Wars.

We’re now approaching 24 hours since I saw the latest and supposedly final instalment of the Skywalker Saga, The Rise of Skywalker. And while I am conscious of the fact that my initial take on a movie that I’ve seen (usually drunk) at midnight tends to evolve over time, I’ve spent a whole day now dissecting it online and with friends, and I want to get some thoughts down while I have both free time and care and inclination to do so.

So let’s begin at the end: what do I think of the sequel trilogy, and how do I see those films in relation to the rest of the Star Wars juggernaut?

Needless to say, there will be spoilers from this point onwards.

The Rise of Skywalker is a competent piece of science fiction, and science fiction is my favourite genre of film. There are special effects. The force does interesting things. Space ships. Lightsabers. It ticks the boxes as a film that should, on its own, be a thing that I would go and see. And I will definitely go and see it again.

A number of reviewers have already suggested that Rise of Skywalker feels like an apology for the controversial The Last Jedi. In the lead-up to the film, director JJ Abrams and actor John Boyega threw some super low level shade at The Last Jedi, saying that Rian Johnson made particular creative choices that they might not have. Until I saw Rise of Skywalker, I had actually agreed with them. But later films change the way we read the former, and my opinion of The Last Jedi has evolved over the past few years (more on that later).

Abrams is a director who I absolutely love for his ability to produce things that I think are brilliant (eg. Star Trek, Alias, Fringe, Lost, Damon Lindelof, etc). When The Force Awakens was released, I loved the visual style, but also the fact that Abrams was clearly attentive to the feel and the force of nostalgia that drives a property like Star Wars. His respect for the history and fandom, driven by his own childhood love of Star Wars, was clear. That heavy-handed approach to nostalgia worked for The Force Awakens, which was the first new Star Wars film to pick up the narrative in the galaxy far far away after the events of Return of the Jedi.

The trailers for The Force Awakens made us cry. The soundscape — tie fighters, lightsabers, musical motifs, the engine of the Millennium Falcon — so much distinct and familiar noise that I returned to weekend after weekend when I was young. The visual aesthetic of the ships was moved along — still notably Star Destroyers, but sleeker and darker somehow, maintaining the relationship to the Empire but handing the mantle of evil dark side to the First Order.

That slavish nostalgia was what made me bounce out of The Force Awakens impressed, and sustained my enjoyment of the film even as I read so many reviews — still glowing — note that it was essentially a remake of A New Hope. I knew it was — it’s almost beat for beat an exact replica — but I was cool with that. I like Star Wars. I am happy to have such a brilliant film updated with slicker special effects! It’s still got Han and Leia and Luke was in it for a moment! C-3PO is there mincing around, how wonderful!

But over time, that nostalgia becomes a problem. It doesn’t advance the source material much, and worse — it undoes or undercuts what came before. The flaws in The Force Awakens become apparent after the third or fourth watching (I know, I know).

For example, the ‘Hosnian System’ is the capital of the New Republic, and it is blown up moments after the first mention of it. The absurd bigger Death Star — Starkiller Base — is a planet-sized weapon (apparently a moon is not big enough), which fires multiple beams of energy (which it collects by draining literally an entire sun) across…what distance exactly? These beams, all of which emanate simultaneously from a single aperture, destroy all of the planets of this unknown and uninteresting capital system of the New Republic, and we are meant to care.

It’s no Alderaan.

I am normally not particularly picky about the physics of science fiction films. Why should I care about whether a planet-sized weapon functions properly when I have no problem accepting the existence of lightsabers, the force, or Jar Jar Binks? But cinema demands of us a suspension of disbelief, and when moments come that shake you out of that, it’s not nitpicking: it means that the plot device is flawed.

Of course in this ultra nostalgic creation there would be a fatal flaw in the planet — a neatly placed explosion would, of course, short circuit this gigantic super weapon. Naturally the heirs to the Galactic Empire learnt absolutely nothing from the destruction of not one but two Death Stars. In fact, even the second Death Star was more stupidly designed than the first: get through the shields and all you apparently need to do was fly into the middle of it and fire wildly. A two metre-wide secret weakness in the first Death Star is arguably a much more secure design.

Not only that, but the death of Han Solo by his son was telegraphed two million light years away, and likewise Kylo Ren/Ben Solo’s eventual turn back to the light in Rise of Skywalker was obvious from the moment Han plummeted off that ledge.

And look, that’s fine. Star Wars has never been known for its especially nuanced approach to storytelling. It’s formulaic — George Lucas literally built the original trilogy around Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. But you’ve got to shake things up from time to time. Lucas was apparently unimpressed with The Force Awakens, he thought that it wasn’t creative enough. And from the moment I read that, I realised that he was right — and I thought more fondly of the prequel films, which — for all of their stodgy and terrible dialogue — were unbelievable feats of imagination. More on that later.

Rian Johnson’s instalment followed, and The Last Jedi was polarising. I walked out of the cinema unimpressed. On second viewing, I was even less impressed. The problem with this film wasn’t an overindulgence in nostalgia. I think Johnson got the balance just right, cameoing Yoda at the right moment and in a sufficiently surprising way that it didn’t feel like pure fan service. Johnson’s crime, apparently, was that The Last Jedi deviated too strongly from fan expectations. The movie was loved by critics and reviled by many fans.

My primary criticisms of The Last Jedi relate to bizarre plot choices, rather than the asinine complaints about ‘social justice warriors’ ruining the film. A whole bunch of desperate incels and losers across the internet apparently had a whinge about the number of women cast in key roles. They bullied actress Kelly Marie Tran. I imagine some were probably annoyed about Leia — being female — using the force to save herself from the vacuum of space. I’m really not sure what motivates a person to make this critique of Star Wars. These criticisms are baseless crap.

My assessment of The Last Jedi has shifted over time, and many of the things that I thought about the plotting have changed over time. For example, I took huge exception to the entire Finn/Rose side jaunt to the casino planet Canto Bite. While the world itself was a nicely fleshed out Star Wars setting, and the side mission is a staple of Star Wars canon, the function of the whole mission was apparently just to give Finn and Rose a way to fuck up and alert the First Order to the Resistance’s escape plan. That is, by normal standards, a really huge waste of time for two major characters. But I think as part of my re-assessment of the film, I’ve come around to the idea that that is an innovative narrative device in itself. Imagine sending two heroes on a mission and they literally could not screw things up further by doing so!

Where I think The Last Jedi did go wrong was at the level of the basic premise of the movie: ships, running out of fuel, being chased by the enemy, unable to jump to hyperspace. (If you have seen the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica, you get the idea). Star Wars has never mentioned fuel in their films, ever. This was the first time, and suddenly the resistance ships — which had just lifted off from their base of quite some time — are unfueled and incapable of more than one jump to light speed? That’s too contrived to maintain suspension of disbelief.

But on top of that, there is enough fuel on smaller ships for individuals (Finn and Rose) to sneak away on a mission for a day or so and return…by light speed? Why doesn’t everyone on the ships just bail on smaller ships? And why did they keep their medical frigate running to keep up until it ran out of fuel? Wouldn’t it be better to just transfer that fuel to the biggest ship? And why didn’t the First Order just light speed away, and then light speed right back in their faces? The Empire does it multiple times across the original trilogy, with thirty years’ inferior technology, so closely calculated in fact that a rebel ship is destroyed agains Darth Vader’s shields in Rogue One.

The premise is shaky, but it does lead to some cool visual set-pieces like ‘The Holdo Manoeuvre’, where Laura Dern’s character suicide hyperspace jumps her ship into a gigantic Star Destroyer. Everyone in the cinema gasped. I gasped. I was not emotional though: how could I feel sad for the loss of a character who had been on screen twice? Better to have had Admiral Ackbar do it (rather than kill him off screen) to add to the gravity.

And the character choices were also deeply problematic. Killing Supreme Leader Snoke might have seemed like a piece of genius, but it came off as anticlimactic — we never found out who or what this creature was, and it seemed like an over-engineered way to make Kylo Ren the big bad. Similarly, Ren’s announcement to Rey that her parents were ‘nobody, just junk traders’ lands with a dull splat (maybe because I find Adam Driver fairly uninteresting, and Kylo Ren an unconvincing, stupid character). We’ll get to the retconning of that reveal in just a moment.

Johnson was keen to shake things up, to enable Star Wars to do things differently, and while I think Star Wars fans like being comfortable, it’s important for a franchise to add a little new flavour from time to time. But in doing so, there were times — the aforementioned kamikaze run — where he probably could have paid a little service to fans and still maintain his edgy premise. Revealing Rey’s parents to be ‘nobodies’ was exclaimed by people online as a revelation: “anyone can use the force, it’s not about the Skywalker dynasty or the Jedi, it’s opened it right up!” But wasn’t that exactly the case in The Phantom Menace? The Jedi were a force-using dynasty, and suddenly there’s this random boy on Tatooine — the biggest shithole in the galaxy until Abrams created an exact replica named Jakku in The Force Awakens (seriously, why bother? Just set the thing on Tatooine)!

I think, with hindsight, The Last Jedi is going to end up like The Empire Strikes Back as the most acclaimed instalment of this trilogy. It’s an assessment that took time to come about the Empire, and it’s taken me time to come to that position as well.

And so we arrive at The Rise of Skywalker, with Abrams returned to the director’s seat to steer the ship home, and make up for fan disappointment with The Last Jedi. But in attempting to do so, he overcorrected.

[SERIOUS SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEW MOVIE NOW]

The Rise of Skywalker is frenetic. It moves at a billion kilometres an hour (unlike The Last Jedi which transpires in an unknown amount of time over a very small span of space). The first fifteen minutes rapidly introduces the idea that a) Emperor Palpatine is still alive and hiding out on the ‘Sith homeworld’ (thus bringing full circle JJ Abrams’ re-use of every single element of the original trilogy in film order), b) that they need some strange Sith knife (which conveniently aligns perfectly with the thirty-year-old wreckage of the second Death Star) to find said homeworld, and c) that Rey has force lightning and force healing.

There’s a Rey problem in this film, and it centres on Palpatine (so, ironically, two of my favourite and most compelling characters in all of Star Wars). Where Kylo Ren told Rey her parents were ‘nobody’ in The Last Jedi, JJ Abrams has added a big silly ‘WHOOPS! Forgot to mention that your GRANDDAD is the Emperor!!”. I think this development is fine — in fact, I think it worked really nicely for Rey’s mythology and for the broader narrative from Episode I through to Episode IV. That Palpatine — probably the most adept force user there is — underpins the entirety of the Skywalker saga suits me well. And it sets up the Skywalkers and the Palpatines as two opposing force dynasties (contra the democratising idea Johnson creates in The Last Jedi).

But it’s unearned. There was no real foreshadowing aside from the trailers (and apparently the extended universe of books endorsed as new canon by Disney), and when did Palpatine get around to having kids? That’s not good narrative coherence. It reminds me, to be honest, of the poorly setup ‘fall’ of Daenerys Targaryen: it’s an acceptable place to take the character but not when you’re rushing to make it happen. The Rise of Skywalker was, like the final season of Game of Thrones, a rushed mess.

The final space battle was a mess too. Whenever Star Wars lays out a giant battle, it takes the time to zoom from the overarching chaos to the micro level dogfights, and then broadens into a set piece moment: think of the Executor super star destroyer crashing into the second Death Star, think of the hammerhead corvette in Rogue One, think of the crashing of General Grievous’ command ship in Revenge of the Sith.

The final battle in Rise of Skywalker is a comparative mess. They need to blow up a transmitter on the ground. Why? Because the giant fleet of Star Destroyers — all of which are now outfitted with planet-destroying weapons — can’t steer out of the atmosphere without it. Admiral Richard E Grant switches to a transmitter on his Star Destroyer. So they destroy that single dish on one side of a symmetrical Star Destroyer. Why doesn’t the First Order (or Final Order, whatever it is called now) just switch to another transmitter? Why don’t all the Star Destroyers have this transmitter? Why does the transmitter on the ground work, and the transmitter on a Star Destroyer higher up in the atmosphere work, but everything in between doesn’t? How can you build a fleet of ships, bigger than anything ever seen before, all of which are equipped with PLANET DESTROYING GUNS, but apparently they can’t navigate a kilometre up without a single radio dish?

Suspension of disbelief cancelled.

There is no set piece, save for a reinvigorated Palpatine really cutting loose with the force lightning (I enjoyed this, but anything Palpatine does I enjoy).

And it all just ties up a little too conveniently, and the way it does this is by necessarily betraying the possibilities that Johnson set up in The Last Jedi. I didn’t like the idea of the Resistance being reduced to a Millennium Falcon full of people — but suddenly they’ve got a base and a fleet? And all it takes in order to rally the galaxy was a quick swing through in the Falcon by Lando Calrissian? Suddenly, thousands and thousands of people are willing to join the fight in vast ships with guns? Where the hell were all these people when Leia sent her call for help in The Last Jedi?

The film has some nice visual moments, but nothing outstanding — it is fairly routine science fiction faire these days (as opposed to the distinct visual styling of The Last Jedi and the extremely well executed ‘Empire era’ war drama of Rogue One). Abrams focused on tying the saga up neatly in a bow — I might leave the final revelations and plot details preserved in case people read this before they see the film. Those details are quite honestly broadly irrelevant, except to say that I like where they landed on Rey’s character, even though it needed a lot more set up in order for it to work.

Which kind of gets at the broader problem of the sequel trilogy: it felt too much like they were making it up as they went along. Kathleen Kennedy, in charge of Lucasfilm and essentially to Star wars what Kevin Feige is to Marvel, assured fans that the return of Palpatine had been intended all along. But had the whole trilogy been mapped so that it was so conspicuously similar to the original trilogy? I don’t think so — else Rian Johnson’s instalment wouldn’t have caused such a flurry. Abrams noted publicly that Johnson didn’t pick up some of the threads he had laid in The Force Awakens (what threads exactly?)

On top of that, the sequels didn’t develop rich worlds and characters in the way that the George Lucas-helmed trilogies did.

For all of the criticism laid on the prequel trilogy, it can’t be denied that they are supremely imaginative works of fiction. Lucas is a shocking script writer: the ‘love’ scenes between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala are agonising, and that’s with a great actress like Natalie Portman doing her best. But Lucas creates a banger of a mythology, and he imagines a galaxy teeming with culture and life and complexity. In the same number of films as the sequel trilogy, Lucas spawns worlds, civilisations, rich supporting characters, and this is reflected in the impact on meme culture. The sequel trilogy has yielded us Monte Carlo and Tatooine Lite. There are very few memes to come from the sequel trilogy. There are no memorable lines.

What is the sequel trilogy’s equivalent to the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? Where are the Mace Windus, the Jar Jar Binks, the Qui Gon Jin, the Maul, the Dooku, the Grievous? There’s no rumination, no character building. Finn and Poe are undercooked. They are too closely similar: look at the trio of Han, Leia and Luke and how distinct they are, versus the millennial excitability of Rey, Finn and Poe. I half expect them to stop to take a selfie next to a downed stormtrooper.

To be clear: this is not a criticism of any one individual on the project. The cast are all individually very talented actors who I respect. JJ Abrams is probably my favourite director and creative in all of Hollywood. The franchise is one that I love — and one that I know is capable of producing great things, and doing it recently.

If you haven’t yet seen it, you need to watch The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series. They are in the tradition of Star Wars classic world building. They are a rich and teeming galaxy of characters and cultures. They expand and enhance the universe in which these stories are set. Likewise The Mandalorian is a genre-bending and brilliantly conceived TV show. I think Dave Filoni has a lot to do with the success of the Star Wars TV shows (he created the animated series and had input into and directed episodes of The Mandalorian). It’s no coincidence that he was one of the last big creative geniuses added to Star Wars under George Lucas’ creative direction.

And then there’s dogshit like Solo. This was the point where I think Disney realised Star Wars operates a little differently to Marvel — that they can’t churn movies out and hope to cash in on nostalgia forever. Han Solo is a character intimately tied to Harrison Ford — this film was never going to work. After Solo failed, Kennedy shelved a planned Boba Fett film (some say it morphed into The Mandalorian). A Boba Fett film would also have flopped, because what Star Wars does best is build a rich and imaginative world. Star Wars can be a character drama, but only within a broader mythology and context — the Anakin-Luke-Rey progression of the ‘Skywalker Saga’ wouldn’t function at all were it not for the rich supporting tapestry.

That’s why the sequel trilogy barely holds together: it wasn’t driven by the artistic and creative desire of a man like George Lucas. It was driven by Disney’s desire to cash in on cinema’s biggest franchise.

Disney has made the right call investing in Star Wars, particularly the television series it has developed. But those projects are informed by a broader creative vision — it’s that sort of vision which holds the sprawling meganarrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe together.

Where Star Wars falls over — and in particular where the sequel trilogy falls over — is on thinking that nostalgia is enough. The Rise of Skywalker simply undoes everything that came before and re-litigates the fall of the Empire. The sequel trilogy compresses the narrative arc of the first six films into a three-film reboot: the republic falls, the empire rises, one final Jedi is trained, a dark Jedi turns to the light, and the exact same Emperor is killed again.

So in a sense, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is much like the putrescent ‘live action’ remakes that Disney has been releasing. Not as bad, of course, because there’s still a degree of innovation (new characters, kinda new plots). But the stupid shot-for-shot digital remake of The Lion King is a perfect symptom of Disney’s cash-hungry approach to film-making. There was absolutely no creative justification for that movie whatsoever — it was simply an exercise in profiteering.

It shouldn’t surprise me that this sort of film gets made by Disney today. I rant often about social media coarsening our civic discourse, but I think that the acceleration of mass media — and our constant exposure to it — has reified nostalgia. We yearn for a time when things were slower, more contemplative, where art was art and not a simulation of art (what Adorno and the Frankfurt School would call the ‘culture industry’). Now, I am of course yearning for a time in my youth, which was well and truly decades after the Frankfurt School first started complaining about mass culture. And I don’t think it’s all bad: over the past fifteen years, television has become truly spectacular. Television allows rich world building, over long timescales, and as the budget and prestige of the medium has grown, so has the creative quality of its art.

I don’t think that cinema has suffered the same creative-nostalgic failure everywhere, but I think that it can be acutely felt in a franchise as epochal and enduring as Star Wars. Each trilogy captures a different time. The sequel trilogy is diminished by our obsession with nostalgia, and by the dollar signs Disney saw plastered over it. The Rise of Skywalker will haul in one or two billion dollars for the house of mouse. It won’t exceed the record set by Avengers: Endgame, and that’s because creative coherence and vision brings people back.

One final note, because I should end on a positive one. I think you should see The Rise of Skywalker. It is a good movie. It’s not the best Star Wars movie, but that’s a different story. C-3PO is magnificent, and Palpatine is deliciously evil and it’s so warped that I love it.

Star Wars is more than any one film, it is an empire (!), and long may it reign.