We Can End This Destructive Conflict

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

starring Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Joonas Suotamo, Keri Russell, Billy Dee Williams, Naomi Ackie, Mark Hamill (as a ghost), Carrie Fisher (an actual ghost), Ian McDiarmid, Richard E. Grant, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran (fucking barely), Dominic Monaghan(?), some robots

directed by J.J. Abrams, who sucks


I've got some very strong opinions, the HOTTEST OF HOT TAKES about to fire your way at light speed from very close range in a way that will in no way alienate fans or hardcore sci-fi dorks, I'm sure. It will also be HEAVILY LADEN WITH SPOILERS, some of them you'd fucking thank me for if you knew them beforehand because of how stupid they are. OK, I think I've already established A Tone. Anyway, there's your warning.


Fanboys get a bad rap. It's become a bit of a pejorative in some fandoms, but I think if you really look at it up close, you'll see that it's because mostly they're assholes.

I'd like to say they're misunderstood or unfairly maligned by a sensationalist online media only too willing to amplify those parts of a subculture who make the most noise and in the ugliest way possible. But what's the percentage we need, the critical mass required before we can hold the total responsible for the actions of a part? The sequel trilogy alone has already resulted in hounding one of its stars (an Asian woman) off social media, a clumsy boycott campaign against another one who had the audacity to be cast as a stormtrooper while also being a black British man and an even clumsier petition campaign to wish away the middle film (Episode VIII) because it wasn't reverent enough to the straight white dude at the center of the previous episodes. At a certain point, I think we're entitled to reach definitive conclusions about the types of people generating some of the signal out of the background noise.

Sometimes it's enlightening when the noise dovetails neatly with another social or societal force at the same time, like for instance how the backlash against the John Boyega casting fit nicely with the growing narrative of the online alt-right, the quaint term we used to use to euphamize those we now just know as fascists. In that case, Star Wars gave us a sorting tool we could use to separate out a population and understand it in some common or relatable terms. It's one thing to try to understand the rumblings of a social undercurrent. Having it flow openly to the surface in the form of stormtrooper-specific but still obvious and overt racism is edifying, if not clarifying.

Or also for instance sometimes the dovetailing occurs between a force and a person, as it did with this newest movie, between all of the ugly, entitled, imbecilic, spoiled, obnoxious, self-important dirt-clods packed with dipshits and mouth-breathers and writer-director-producer J.J. Abrams, who sucks.

I have to say, I really loved The Last Jedi. It's not a perfect film, but according to Martin Scorsese, anything that doesn't use a Rolling Stones instrumental behind a tracking shot of a violent straight man walking along a streetscape at some point isn't up for consideration as "cinema" anyway. So it was never going to be perfect. But yes, even against The Empire Strikes Back, a film I mistakenly watched on Disney+ right before going to see Rise of Skywalker much to the latter's detriment, Last Jedi falls well short, but you know what it was? It was a movie about characters and ideas. There was no McGuffin to chase, just some people under life-and-death pressure responding in (sometimes maddening) human ways. Also there was some space-magic and talking robots. But that's what makes it Star Wars. That movie asked questions like "who is Poe Dameron" (a balls-forward dumbass), "who is Leia Organa" (a tired-ass lady trying not to get blown up for like the 4,267th time), "who is Luke Skywalker" (a tired-ass dude trying not to endanger the galaxy by being the worst at his one job), "who is Kylo Ren" (an out-of-his-depth super-prodigy with entitlement issues, a classical Freudian oedipal streak and a bit of nihilism) and "who is Rey?"

Of all those questions, only the last one had any real plot relevance.* And in the end the Rey question was a beautiful bait-and-switch because the answer was she was nobody. The thing Star Wars needed most, I would argue, was for Rey to be nobody. An example that not everything has to be about these, like, six people in the entire galaxy. Reinforced by the last scene of some rando VERY NON-SKYWALKER slave kid force-grabbing his broom, this was supposed to be The Whole Fucking Point. Kylo Ren (who got all the best lines in that installment) told her: you're nothing. But not to me. You don't have automatic inclusion in this story because of some insistence of connection to previous stuff. She mattered as a character in the context of other characters, in the universe, in the story. Last Jedi was a story about people connecting (or failing to connect) with other people.

Colin Trevorrow got fired from the director role for Episode IX in 2017 when everyone realized he was the director of Jurassic World, which is terrible, and in a definite non-panic move, Lucasfilm hired the director of Episode VII to take over the project, J.J. Abrams, who sucks.

To be fair, I didn't always used to think J.J. Abrams sucks. I never watched Felicity or Alias, but Lost was alright for the first few seasons, even if the ending was historically stupid. And Mission:Impossible III is responsible for turning that whole franchise around from being a silly and bad Tom Cruise vanity vehicle to being a slick and exciting Tom Cruise vanity vehicle.

When I watched Rise of Skywalker, when did I get the first inkling that this would be the first ever Star Wars movie I would have genuine disdain for? Probably in the very first line of the iconic opening crawl where an entire SUPER CRITICAL plot line about the re-emergence of the long-dead Emperor Palpatine is just kinda hand-waved into existence after having zero hints or build-up to it over two entire previous films and dozens of other book and comic book tie-in media. The message was clear and immediate: fuck your investment in anything you've seen or read. We're just going to start from scratch with some shit we just came up with and you're just going to have to deal.

I'm not certain I buy that this was all an act of cowardice, of Lucasfilm (basically just Kathleen Kennedy at this point) and Abrams, who sucks, taking the stupid criticism of stupid people who missed the entire point of Last Jedi and decided to shitcan all of it, all the subtlety, all the nuance, all the character development. My main and primary frustration is that this film only works one of two ways: as a direct sequel to Episode VII or as a standalone side-adventure film not related to anything previous, but specifically NOT as a readable follow-up to Last Jedi. Return of the Jedi wasn't "good" by a lot of objective measures, but it was at least a culmination, a landing point of gravity's rainbow traced along the trajectory arc shot from the original Star Wars. This Rise of Skywalker lacks any connection to anything previously established except the accidental coincidence of the characters having the same names and faces as ones in other movies. And as such, it sucks.

I think it's entirely possible that the lack of any creative vision, any filmmaking courage, any original thought only accidentally looks like a capitulation to the worst impulses of a gross minority of a fandom. I think the Occam's Razor answer to the problems with Rise of Skywalker is that J.J. Abrams sucks. You can see it in the way that Kylo Ren puts his stupid cosplay helmet back together (after smashing it in a way that made sense and was interesting in Last Jedi), in the way he binned the idea of Kylo Ren leveling up to be the Main Bad after killing Snoke in a way that made sense and was interesting in Last Jedi by shoe-horning in Palpatine, in the way he backpedalled as fast as a human can backpedal away from the idea of Rey being anonymous by making her the offspring of, I don't know, Jeff and Cindy Palpatine (previous unseen or unmentioned and not at all lingered on in any way here or elsewhere), the way he stuck in Keri Russell's character who had exactly fuck-all to do because he liked the character design from the production team (just like Captain Phasma, the already forgotten) but threw Rose Tico into the garbage can, the way the "plot" now revolved around a series of completely random McGuffins and the way it wasn't enough for there to be a magic'ed up a fleet of 10,000 star destroyers, they had to ALL HAVE PLANET-DESTROYING LASERS ATTACHED TO THEM. Because if you're J.J. Abrams and you suck, the only way your science fiction movie can be interesting is to have planet-destroying technology as the threat (see also everything Star Trek and Star Wars he's ever touched).

You might not have liked Last Jedi, but it was a simple story of people trying not to be killed. It was personal. Once the first star destroyer fired a laser that blew up a whole planet in Rise of Skywalker, I was completely done. Really, they're going to erase all livable planets in the galaxy? That's not a threat and it's certainly not a compelling story. That's just like a couple hundred people sitting in a theater watching someone work on a long-ass math problem that ends with them multiplying by zero. Everything is nullified. Everything is impersonal. Maybe Rey will turn Team Dark Side! Maybe Kylo Ren will turn Team Good Boy! Meanwhile, a nameless spaceship blows up another nameless planet and all the nameless people on it. Which part am I supposed to give a shit about again?

Last Jedi tried to say "fuck all this Dark Side/Not Dark Side bullshit, let's make our own future." Rise of Skywalker countered with an almost exact retelling of the throne room scene from Return of the Jedi but with the one huge difference of being made on a mostly CGI set this time. And just to hammer you over the head with it, the actual previous throne room set appears in this film as well.

I want to say emphatically that J.J. Abrams sucks. And also that, somehow, he got absolutely stellar performances from his principle cast. This is the best acting work done in a Star Wars film, which, I know, Hayden Christiansen joke goes here, ha. Daisy Ridley is transcendent. Adam Driver (who has the silliest arc) is consistently way above the material, present and human. John Boyega alternates between humor and humanity with a deftness and ease that wasn't always there in Episode VII. Oscar Isaac is all charisma and activity, probably the only character allowed to grow directly from Last Jedi in any recognizable way, even though he gets stuck again shouting out progress exposition in the deeply uninteresting final space battle-palooza.

Was it great to see Ian McDiarmid go ham on some poor, unsuspecting, computer-generated scenery as a galaxy-level bad guy in a way only he (respect to Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort) could? Hey, sure. But there are a thousand plot variations that would have been more compelling than how it was presented. In all, for all the heat generated by talented people doing the most with their prodigious gifts, it's all a gauzy salve spread over the lens to blur everything behind the performances for 2.5 hours (give or take). We have The Mandalorian and an Obi-Wan Kenobi series coming and a Cassian Andor show, plus Star Wars: Resistance is still showing and the Clone Wars cartoon is returning in 2020. Star Wars is fine. But this was supposed to be the last movie in the proper plot line, the trunk from whence all branches spring. What we got was a Charlie Brown pine tree Scotch taped to the sawn-off trunk of what should have been a redwood. Disappointed though I am, I'm definitely not done with Star Wars. And even though I haven't checked what his next project might be, the main takeaway from this film is I'm likely done forever with J.J. Abrams, who sucks.

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*up until the very last scene, where Luke and Kylo Ren square off in the All-Galaxy Rope-a-Dope Championship Final Match, which is always won by the guy who isn't actually there.