I have a confession. I felt really good while watching The Rise of Skywalker. I went into the theater with the same mindset I would have had if I were the same child that started this new trilogy. And you know what? It was extremely cathartic. But even with this mindset, there were still some glaring problems.
I’m going to start this with the only defense I’ll provide this movie: I really like Rey’s character and Daisy Ridley’s performance. All of the other actors and actresses definitely tried, but even they weren’t skilled enough to work with the horrible writing.
Before anyone goes and complains about Rey for the 3000th time, I would like to say something people can’t seem to wrap their head around… REY IS NOT A MARY SUE. She wasn’t a flawless character in The Force Awakens and she isn't flawless now. People complain about her power level in this movie and how she’s able to heal a wound that should have killed somebody and how that makes her overpowered. I would like to direct you to all of the exposition from previous movies as evidence that she isn’t. In The Last Jedi she takes all of the ancient Jedi texts and studies them, all while she trains with Luke, and continues her training in The Rise of Skywalker. It is reasonable to assume she knows this.
Also during each lightsaber fight with Kylo Ren she grew progressively angrier and angrier. Daisy Ridley is excellent at portraying anger and the fight choreography helps this scene. She wails on him and eventually defeats him… but it’s immediately undercut by her Force Healing.
Which leads me to talk about the overwhelming amount of fake-out deaths in this movie. Having one annoys me, having two is pushing it. This movie has FOUR fake-out deaths. There’s a scene where Chewbacca, a character who is an integral part of the Star Wars series, has a death scene where there’s no feasible way he could be brought back. And it’s so solid, it’s insulting when it’s revealed, “Oh! He was just on another completely different ship… there was no other ship in the fake-out death scene.
That’s the largest problem with this movie… the script. It feels like it was written by an angry fanboy that hated The Last Jedi and the entirety of Reddit.
In fact, that’s the problem with the entire trilogy. The writing process for this trilogy went movie-by-movie instead of planning out the entire trilogy at once. Sure, it’s not as bad as the prequels, but at least that trilogy was written with a beginning, middle, and end. Writing each movie separately could’ve ended up decently, I liked where they were going with The Last Jedi, but there was no way to go without alienating a portion of the audience. It felt like a weirdly definitive way to end the series. Sure, the good guys didn’t win in the end, and we don’t know a majority of answers to questions fans have been asking for years. But at the same time, there’s still hope for the galaxy to resist the First Order; the legend of Luke Skywalker and his death would have reignited the will to fight for generations to come.
But instead of taking a more logical approach to the final chapter, the writers wanted to appease as many fans as they could. And nobody likes it, because they sacrificed artistic integrity for some extra millions of dollars they would have gotten anyway.
I could talk about my personal nitpicks: the lack of Rose Tico (the actor who plays Merry in Lord of the Rings gets more lines than she does and we never learn his name), how they brought back Emperor Palpatine despite him falling several hundred (possibly thousand) feet and exploded in Return of the Jedi, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it same-sex kiss (which they cut out for Singapore), the writing to make Finn and Poe seem out-of-character, the writing to make Finn and Poe to seem more straight despite the actors clearly leaning towards the homosexual side of things, giving Finn a second or third love interest (depending on how you read the subtext), giving Poe a love interest, making Poe the only Latino character in this trilogy a former drug dealer (come to think of it most of my problems are about Finn and Poe), and the fact that they made Rey fall in love with the man who did nothing but emotionally abuse her the entire trilogy.
All of these problems and nitpicks culminate in what is the worst movie in the trilogy, but not bad enough that it’s the worst in the series.
I’m going to start this with the only defense I’ll provide this movie: I really like Rey’s character and Daisy Ridley’s performance. All of the other actors and actresses definitely tried, but even they weren’t skilled enough to work with the horrible writing.
Before anyone goes and complains about Rey for the 3000th time, I would like to say something people can’t seem to wrap their head around… REY IS NOT A MARY SUE. She wasn’t a flawless character in The Force Awakens and she isn't flawless now. People complain about her power level in this movie and how she’s able to heal a wound that should have killed somebody and how that makes her overpowered. I would like to direct you to all of the exposition from previous movies as evidence that she isn’t. In The Last Jedi she takes all of the ancient Jedi texts and studies them, all while she trains with Luke, and continues her training in The Rise of Skywalker. It is reasonable to assume she knows this.
Also during each lightsaber fight with Kylo Ren she grew progressively angrier and angrier. Daisy Ridley is excellent at portraying anger and the fight choreography helps this scene. She wails on him and eventually defeats him… but it’s immediately undercut by her Force Healing.
Which leads me to talk about the overwhelming amount of fake-out deaths in this movie. Having one annoys me, having two is pushing it. This movie has FOUR fake-out deaths. There’s a scene where Chewbacca, a character who is an integral part of the Star Wars series, has a death scene where there’s no feasible way he could be brought back. And it’s so solid, it’s insulting when it’s revealed, “Oh! He was just on another completely different ship… there was no other ship in the fake-out death scene.
That’s the largest problem with this movie… the script. It feels like it was written by an angry fanboy that hated The Last Jedi and the entirety of Reddit.
In fact, that’s the problem with the entire trilogy. The writing process for this trilogy went movie-by-movie instead of planning out the entire trilogy at once. Sure, it’s not as bad as the prequels, but at least that trilogy was written with a beginning, middle, and end. Writing each movie separately could’ve ended up decently, I liked where they were going with The Last Jedi, but there was no way to go without alienating a portion of the audience. It felt like a weirdly definitive way to end the series. Sure, the good guys didn’t win in the end, and we don’t know a majority of answers to questions fans have been asking for years. But at the same time, there’s still hope for the galaxy to resist the First Order; the legend of Luke Skywalker and his death would have reignited the will to fight for generations to come.
But instead of taking a more logical approach to the final chapter, the writers wanted to appease as many fans as they could. And nobody likes it, because they sacrificed artistic integrity for some extra millions of dollars they would have gotten anyway.
I could talk about my personal nitpicks: the lack of Rose Tico (the actor who plays Merry in Lord of the Rings gets more lines than she does and we never learn his name), how they brought back Emperor Palpatine despite him falling several hundred (possibly thousand) feet and exploded in Return of the Jedi, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it same-sex kiss (which they cut out for Singapore), the writing to make Finn and Poe seem out-of-character, the writing to make Finn and Poe to seem more straight despite the actors clearly leaning towards the homosexual side of things, giving Finn a second or third love interest (depending on how you read the subtext), giving Poe a love interest, making Poe the only Latino character in this trilogy a former drug dealer (come to think of it most of my problems are about Finn and Poe), and the fact that they made Rey fall in love with the man who did nothing but emotionally abuse her the entire trilogy.
All of these problems and nitpicks culminate in what is the worst movie in the trilogy, but not bad enough that it’s the worst in the series.