The Rise of Skywalker: The Biggest Yikes of the Year

Before I begin, I want to preface by saying, I desperately wanted to like this movie. In fact, I was absolutely pressed to like this movie. After a long and disappointing year of terrible remakes, big-budget flop adaptations, and the complete destruction of what was once the greatest show on TV, I really realllyy needed this and ultimately... ya girl was not only let down but I left the theater feeling disrespected. What was advertised to me as the conclusion of a somewhat rocky but decent enough trilogy, was instead a 12-year-old boy's star wars fanfic with all of the plot-holes, universe inconsistencies, and poor decisions that you would expect from someone who has not yet entered high school. To put it bluntly, the Rise of Skywalker was an immature, unfinished mess and we have no one to thank but JJ Abrams.

There is so much wrong with the Rise of Skywalker that I don't even know where to begin. As soon as I got out of the movie I called one of my best friends to discuss and I couldn't even articulate to her how I was feeling. Days later and I barely can so I'll just start with a question:

Did that movie hurt? Like, did anyone else feel physical pain from watching it??


Well I sure did. In fact, I left the theater with the worst post-movie headache I've ever had and I believe it has to do with the pacing and overuse of effects in this movie. The entire first half of the movie is rapid-fire scenes with no time to settle or think and all of those scenes are accompanied with some sort of obnoxious light or discombobulated motion. Truly by the time we got to the death star remains, I felt like I had been jumped by a pack of grown men. Like I hadn't paid back a debt I owed to the mafia and now I'm lying in an ally with my legs crossed like the arms of a disappointed mother. This movie stuffs so much bad exposition and nonsense into so little time and to be honest, it's only because the story is absolute rubbish. If you were allowed to think during the movie, you'd realize that very little actually holds up and it makes sense why they felt they had to squeeze so much in. They were trying to fix the movie as they were making it, and they managed to physically hurt me in the process. This is not a movie I could watch twice unless they put aspirin in the popcorn butter.

Effects aside, the movie itself... girl what the hell was that?? No seriously like, what did I watch and why was it made. The Rise of Skywalker is literally the follow-up to a second movie that never happened. It felt like I was watching a poorly timed comeback in an argument. Every single interesting or different idea Rian Johnson put into the Last Jedi was completely retconned out and what was left was beat over the head with predictability. To get a better understanding, let's compare using personal politics and say the Force Awakens is a moderate republican, hometown guy. He goes to college, somewhere in the East and becomes the last Jedi, a democrat that has centrist leanings. However, he has a few jaded years after school and spends a little too long in some questionable Facebook groups and now he's morphed into the Rise of Skywalker, a conservative tea party member whose still not sold on the whole 'climate change' thing. This is how hard the tone of each and every movie shifts and it's jarring to watch and even more upsetting when you realize that there was no plan in place for this multi-billion dollar franchise. No one that was in charge of writing these movies engaged with each other meaningfully and it SHOWS. 2015 JJ Abrams and 2019 JJ Abrams don't even seem connected and that is just so mind-blowing.  If you're wondering how Disney and all their media supremacy allowed something so irresponsible to happen, you aren't alone.

As you can probably tell if you've made it this far, even though I was deeply disappointed with this movie I'm trying not to spoil it. I want you to be able to make your own decisions based on what you see (because you're going to see it, these movies are box-office behemoths for a reason) but I'm just going to tell you right now, if you wanted to see something unique and different from the original star wars trilogy, you should skip this movie. Everything is rehashed poorly. The force, that had become oddly bloodline pure despite it's description across all properties, is now a bona fide birthright, passed down through the royal bloodline like a glittering crown. The villain, literally the A1 Day1 villain all the way from 1977. You want a basic hero's journey about our hero being afraid of their own power?? Oh, it's in there too. Even the cis heteronormativity which is still present in everything, is ESPECIALLY egregious in this movie and if you actually see it, it becomes evident right away. I've never seen something that tried soooo hard to be exactly what you'd expect but here we are.

There is still so much I could talk about in this mess of a movie. So much that really aggravated me from the character arcs, to the lack of understanding of the literal number of living beings in the galaxy (chile...), to the outfits but one thing I will say is that now that the shock has worn off, I'm starting to feel what I felt the morning of May 20th, 2019: Relief that it's over.