Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Y’know, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that this particular article would’ve been a better fit for April Fool’s Day rather than Star Wars Day. But I’m committed now… so here we go!
Happy Star Wars Day, friends! May the Fourth be with you… and all that. This year, I thought it could be a bit of fun to mark the occasion by revisiting one of my least-favourite Star Wars films – and probably one of the worst films I’ve ever seen – 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.
X-Wings and Star Destroyers on a promotional poster.
It was in late 2019 that I embarked on the project that eventually became this website, and for a sometime Star Wars fan, that was a bit of a strange period. The Last Jedi had proven to be massively controversial within the fan community, and the discourse around that film had become incredibly toxic. Solo: A Star Wars Story had flopped, I really wasn’t keen on the first season of The Mandalorian, and it seemed as if the only bright spark in the franchise was Jedi: Fallen Order. I desperately hoped that The Rise of Skywalker could do the impossible by bringing the fan community back together and ending the sequel trilogy on a high.
Though I consider the Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries to be the worst piece of Star Wars media that I’ve seen, The Rise of Skywalker isn’t far behind. It was an atrocious film, one that I’d seriously consider putting on a list of “the worst films I’ve ever seen.” But re-hashing what I didn’t enjoy about the film isn’t the purpose of today’s exercise!
Surely this can’t be a visual metaphor…
Because it’s Star Wars Day, and in the spirit of positivity, I want to talk about some of the things The Rise of Skywalker got right – or at least got less wrong. Despite my overall feelings about the film, its story, the thought process that went into creating it, and more… there are some highlights worth mentioning. You might remember some of these if you read my two separate articles about the film in 2020 and 2021, but I’ve also added a couple of points that I didn’t mention in those earlier pieces.
In my essay titled In Defence of Luke Skywalker, I talked about how the depiction of Luke’s depression in The Last Jedi was generally well-written and conveyed an important message. It may not have been what fans wanted or expected from Luke Skywalker – particularly folks who’d bought into the old Expanded Universe stories, which depicted him as a flawless all-conquering superhero – but it was powerful and it resonated with me. The idea that anyone, even someone heroic, can fall victim to the “black dog” of depression is an important message, and it was well-told in The Last Jedi.
Luke’s depiction and death were controversial aspects of The Last Jedi.
The Rise of Skywalker undid most of that, unfortunately. But it couldn’t entirely erase what had come before. If you take Luke’s story across the sequel trilogy, you can read it as recovering from depression – and that is a positive, hopeful, and uplifting message. The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi show Luke at his lowest: suffering a catastrophic defeat, almost giving in to a dark impulse, grieving the loss of his students, failing at his life’s mission to restore the Jedi Order, and succumbing to depression. He retreated to Ahch-To to die.
But after the events of The Last Jedi, Luke found a reason to believe again. And The Rise of Skywalker takes that concept and expands upon it, showing us Luke – in ghostly form – happier, more connected to the Force, and more willing to lend a hand when the galaxy needed him. To drag out the depression metaphor from The Last Jedi, this is the recovery phase. Not everyone who suffers with depression gets to that point, but seeing it depicted on screen like this can give hope and inspiration to people in that situation.
Rey with Luke’s ghost.
Sticking with deceased characters, Han Solo got more of a send-off in The Rise of Skywalker than he did in The Force Awakens. Han’s death was shocking in that film, but its suddenness was immediately followed up by action set-pieces and the “trench run” over Starkiller Base – meaning we didn’t get to sit with the impact of it for very long. Bringing Han back – albeit for a role that was clearly intended for Leia – was somewhat cathartic, and getting to spend a little more time with him was a net positive for the film.
Because this sequence was told from Kylo’s perspective, we got to experience some of the feelings of grief, loss, and regret that he felt at killing his father. We can debate whether such an action is ever forgivable or redeemable, but The Rise of Skywalker wanted to give Kylo a redemption arc akin to that of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Seeing this vision of Han Solo helped with that, or at least didn’t detract from it. And Adam Driver put in a stellar performance in these sequences – as he did across the entire film, really.
The Rise of Skywalker gave us a bit more closure on Han’s death.
I know we’re trying to be positive about The Rise of Skywalker and this next point is very much a backhanded compliment (at best), but it’s my article so I’m gonna include it! The line “somehow Palpatine returned” has become one of those “so bad it’s good” moments for me. It wasn’t when I first watched the film, but the more I’ve sat with that line the funnier I find it to be. I still think everyone involved with writing, approving, and directing this line should be blacklisted from the entertainment industry for life… but on days when I don’t want to take Star Wars too seriously, or where I’m so depressed I need a good laugh, “somehow Palpatine returned” is there for me.
The line has also become one of my go-to examples of poorly-written dialogue, as well as an example of Star Wars’ overreliance on other works of media to set up important narrative beats in mainline films. Not only that, I think there’s something encouraging and even inspirational about this line. “Somehow Palpatine returned” reminds me that I’d have to do an exceptionally poor job to write something worse, and that there’s apparently a very low bar for pitching scripts for big-budget films. So maybe my Hollywood dreams haven’t entirely evaporated, eh? Jokes aside, this line is awful, and it’s become emblematic of the failures of The Rise of Skywalker and the sequel trilogy as a whole. But it’s also unintentionally hilarious as the film’s writers and Disney’s executives tell on themselves; no one could be bothered to write an explanation for Palpatine’s stupid resurrection, and this storyline was set up as part of a merchandising tie-in deal with the video game Fortnite. For all those reasons and more, it’s an excellent example of what not to do in filmmaking.
“Somehow Palpatine returned.”
To get back to something a bit more genuinely positive and inspiring, I’d like to highlight Lando Calrissian’s role in The Rise of Skywalker. I don’t know why Lando was absent in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but Billy Dee Williams made the most of his return to the role in the third instalment of the sequel trilogy! In fact, I could’ve happily spent a lot more time with Lando; watching him heading out across the galaxy, rallying the citizens to the cause would’ve been quite something to see.
Lando’s last-second arrival at the head of a massive fleet was pretty much the only moment in The Rise of Skywalker where I felt a twinge of emotion. I’m a sucker for a “desperate last stand” kind of story, and seeing the ordinary citizens of the galaxy rising up in unison against Palpatine and the Sith felt good in the moment. As Poe, Finn, and the rest of the Resistance seemed to be on the cusp of defeat, Lando raced in to save the day, leading the galaxy in a unified last stand against autocracy and fascism. The scene where he and his fleet dropped out of hyperspace was powerful, and was probably one of the best individual moments in The Rise of Skywalker.
Lando arrives to save the day!
Although I wish the sequel trilogy as a whole had done more with the idea of a Force dyad, some of the moments between Rey and Kylo were at least interesting. There was also some creative cinematography employed as Rey and Kylo had visions of one another despite being far apart. The scene where Rey was in Kylo’s room was one such moment, and I think the way the film transitioned between two different locations was creative.
I would’ve liked to have gotten more of an explanation of the Force dyad; how it came to be and what else Rey and Kylo could’ve done with it would have been fun to see. The idea of two characters with totally opposing points of view and objectives having this unintended bond – one they couldn’t rid themselves of – was also an interesting concept in theory, and I think we saw at least some of that potential in The Rise of Skywalker.
Kylo and Rey formed a rare Force dyad.
Finn’s story was not great in The Rise of Skywalker – or really across the sequel trilogy as a whole. But as a concept, the idea of a rogue stormtrooper breaking free of his indoctrination was interesting. And The Rise of Skywalker made at least a bit of an effort to expand upon that with the new character of Jannah – another defector that Finn encountered during the mission to Endor.
If Luke Skywalker’s story was an analogy for depression and mental health, Finn and Jannah’s can be seen as deprogramming from a cult or escaping an autocratic society. There are real-world parallels that are interesting – and open to interpretation. I don’t think The Rise of Skywalker was perfect in its execution of this idea, but I will give the film credit for trying, and for expanding our knowledge of ex-stormtroopers and the reasons why some might defect or abandon their posts.
Finn with fellow ex-stormtrooper Jannah.
Sticking with Finn, his “bromance” with Poe was certainly an enjoyable part of his story and characterisation, and one which was in focus in The Rise of Skywalker more than it had been in The Last Jedi. The two worked well together, and although I felt Oscar Isaac was rather phoning it in with his performance, the same can’t be said of John Boyega. Boyega did his best to carry this character relationship, and I could’ve happily spent longer with Finn and Poe.
There are a few other acting performances that stand out to me. I think being able to separate one’s thoughts about a performance from how we might feel about the script or narrative decisions is important – so it’s worth crediting actors and actresses who give it their all, even when they’re part of a train wreck! I mentioned Adam Driver above, and he’s literally never been anything less than outstanding in any film I’ve seen him in. One day he’s going to win one of the big awards – mark my words.
Kylo on the battlefield.
Though the sequel trilogy was never meant to be Palpatine’s story, Ian McDiarmid clearly relished reprising his role, and threw himself into it. Palpatine dripped with malice every time he appeared on screen. I may loathe what the film did with General Hux, but I’d be remiss not to include Domhnall Gleeson’s performance as being praise-worthy. Hux’s pure hatred for Kylo really came through thanks to Gleeson’s work, and even though the storyline was a tough sell, he clearly gave it his all. Kelly Marie Tran, though only on screen for a couple of minutes, did well with the material she had, and I think it’s a shame we didn’t get to spend more time with Rose.
So I think that’s about it.
I wish I could tell you that it was fun to revisit The Rise of Skywalker. But at the very least, I think we managed to find a few notes of optimism amidst the wreckage; small things here and there that achieved some measure of success, struck the right emotional or narrative chord, or just didn’t fail as comprehensively as the film around them. Maybe you enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker more than I did – and that’s great. The Star Wars franchise should be big and diverse, and there’s plenty of room for differences of opinion when it comes to the best and worst parts. Nothing about this is “objective,” at the end of the day!
Looking at a wreck. Seems fitting, eh?
There’s more Star Wars to come – which is genuinely good news! Andor’s second season is currently airing, a second season of Ahsoka is planned, and there are several upcoming films on the schedule, too. Upcoming films include pictures based on Rey and Lando, a spin-off from The Mandalorian, a new trilogy, and the intriguing-sounding Star Wars: Starfighter. So despite the controversial reception the film got, The Rise of Skywalker didn’t doom Star Wars’ future prospects!
I hope this has been a bit of fun to mark Star Wars Day – or at least something a little different. I wanted to try to take one of the worst films in the franchise and talk about some of its better aspects, partly as a challenge to myself and partly because it’s Star Wars Day. Thanks for reading, and May The Force Be With You!
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is available to stream now on Disney+ and is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Wars franchise – including The Rise of Skywalker and all other films and properties discussed above – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for practically the entire Star Wars franchise.
I don’t know who first came up with the format, but I really like the way tier lists work. Instead of trying to rank every film or episode in a series in perfect order, we can just give them a grade – which is a nice and easy way of expressing how we feel! So today, I thought it could be fun to make The Official* Star Wars Tier List… of all the shows and films that I’ve seen, at any rate.
I first came to Star Wars in the early 1990s, when I watched the original trilogy at the insistence of a schoolfriend. He had just bought the films on VHS, and even though I’d been getting into sci-fi with TV shows Star Trek: The Next Generation, Space 1999, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and films like Flight of the Navigator, E.T., and Back to the Future, somehow Star Wars had completely passed me by. I might’ve seen a few toys in the shops, but that was all. I grew up in a rural part of England in the ’80s and ’90s – but I was too young to have seen any of the Star Wars films at the cinema, so I just hadn’t engaged with the franchise at all.
I first watched the Star Wars trilogy on VHS in the early ’90s.
I was aware of the Star Trek-versus-Star Wars rivalry that fans at the time were still battling out, and as such I recall being unimpressed with Star Wars on that very first viewing. I felt it was somehow in opposition to “my” fandom – Star Trek: The Next Generation – and that some of its storylines were pretty basic and violent compared to what I guess I considered to be the more sophisticated and “grown-up” Star Trek. But that attitude didn’t last long – and after watching the films a couple more times and playing Super Star Wars on the SNES, as well as spending more time with my Star Wars-loving chum, I was officially a convert! I was a Star Wars fan!
And a Star Wars fan I remain to this day – even if I haven’t loved everything that the franchise has put out in the thirty-plus years I’ve been following it. But that’s a brief summary of my history with Star Wars to give you a bit of background as we put this tier list together.
Let’s fill out this tier list together!
Before we jump into the list, a couple of important caveats. As I always say, all of this is the entirely subjective opinion of just one fan. If you hate all of my rankings, if I put a film you hate way too high, or a series you adore way too low… that’s okay! Nothing about this is in any way “objective,” and while I will try to justify my rankings and explain why I placed each production in its tier, you are free to disagree vehemently. There should be enough room in the Star Wars fan community for civil discussion and polite disagreement.
Secondly, I will be ranking a number of Star Wars films, television shows, and – perhaps somewhat controversially – video games. I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself some of the best Star Wars stories have come from interactive media, and there are a couple of Star Wars games that I genuinely believe surpass the films and TV shows in terms of the quality of their storytelling, characterisation, and so on. It wouldn’t feel right to exclude those stories from this tier list… so I’m not!
We won’t be including every single Star Wars production this time!
Finally, I won’t be including any production that I haven’t seen for myself. What would be the point in pretending to rank a series or film I haven’t seen, after all? At the end I’ll make a note of these, but for reasons that I hope are obvious they aren’t going on the list.
I will be giving each Star Wars production one of the following grades: S, A, B, C, D, and F. These work like grades you might remember from school: F-tier is reserved for the worst of the worst, D-tier is pretty bad but a step up, C-tier is mediocre but not terrible, B-tier is generally good, A-tier is pretty great, and S-tier is the absolute cream of the crop! I will rank each production that I’ve seen/played in release order, beginning with the original Star Wars in 1977 and going through to 2024’s The Acolyte – which is the most recent Star Wars production at time of writing.
Phew! With all of that out of the way, let’s jump into the list.
Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) 1977 Tier: A
I think we have to rank the original Star Wars pretty highly, right? This is the film that created the entire franchise; without it, Star Wars wouldn’t exist. It introduced us to some great characters, established a setting that was crying out to be expanded upon, and above all told a really engaging story about the Rebel Alliance, the evil Empire, and a young man caught in the middle of it all. Luke Skywalker is a wonderful protagonist, point-of-view character, and introduction to this world.
The Death Star trench run has become iconic, as have the designs of ships like the X-Wing and Millennium Falcon. The characters of Ben Kenobi, Princess Leia, and Han Solo all felt like they had their own personalities and motivations, seeming to be real people inhabiting this fictional setting. The villainous duo of Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin had weight, meaning our heroes felt like they were in constant danger. All in all, a wonderful start to the franchise and a film I’m always happy to revisit.
Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back 1980 Tier: S
I’m not alone in considering The Empire Strikes Back to be Star Wars’ high-water mark, and I think you’ll see it right at the top of many folks’ ranked lists! And it’s easy to see why: this is a fantastic film. The opening scenes on Hoth set the tone for a story where the villains are on the march, and everything our heroes accomplished last time is at risk of being undone. Luke is able to follow in his father’s footsteps and pick up his Jedi training with the absolutely iconic Yoda, while Han and Leia are betrayed on Cloud City.
The Empire Strikes Back also contains one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema: when Luke finds out that Darth Vader is his father. This was a pretty shocking twist, and one that reframed much of the story. Lightsaber duelling stepped up about ten notches in this film, and we were also introduced – albeit briefly – to Darth Vader’s master: the Emperor. Iconic designs like the AT-AT and Snowspeeder debuted here, and the Battle of Hoth is still one of the most tense and exciting that the franchise has ever produced. No doubt that The Empire Strikes Back is a top-tier Star Wars production.
Episode VI: Return of the Jedi 1983 Tier: C
On that first viewing of the Star Wars films that I told you about, my friend’s father insisted that Return of the Jedi was a crap film and a poor way for the trilogy to end. And this was not an uncommon view at the time: a second Death Star already feels pretty derivative, the conflict at Jabba’s palace drags on too long, and the Ewoks were an army of teddy bears that disrupted the Emperor’s carefully-laid plans! I wouldn’t say Return of the Jedi is “bad,” but I would say it’s nowhere near as good as its predecessors.
Return of the Jedi also retconned the relationship between Luke and Leia. I maintain that this decision was a mistake, one that’s been compounded by subsequent productions. Having Luke be Vader’s son was a shocking twist that worked; having Leia be Luke’s sister was an attempt to replicate that… but it didn’t live up to what had come before and doesn’t make a ton of sense, either. Return of the Jedi is also the film that introduced “from a certain point of view;” an overly complicated work of semantic gymnastics to justify the retcon in The Empire Strikes Back – and something that was not only entirely unnecessary, but that has also proven damaging to other stories as the franchise has doubled-down.
The Super Star Wars trilogy 1992-1994 Tier: B
The first part of this trio of SNES games was my first introduction to Star Wars in the video game realm – and it was a lot of fun. These games are challenging 2D platformers, and they don’t always succeed at faithfully adapting the story of the films! In order to make some Star Wars scenes and settings fit the 2D platforming mould, some pretty big liberties were taken and the games diverge from those stories in a significant way. However, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had jumping and blasting your way across a variety of Star Wars environments… or at least there was in the early ’90s!
X-Wing and TIE Fighter 1993/1994 Tier: B
Although undeniably dated by today’s standards, I loved playing TIE Fighter in the mid-90s. I didn’t go back to play X-Wing for several years (I didn’t own a copy at the time), but when I did I enjoyed that game, too. Both of these titles really let players feel like they were genuine starfighter pilots in a galaxy far away – even more so if you played with a joystick! These games were tremendous fun… but also pretty difficult! I imagine returning to them nowadays would be pretty hard, and I admit that I’m definitely cruising on my gamer nostalgia here!
Shadows of the Empire 1996 Tier: A
Shadows of the Empire was one of the first games I bought after getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1997, and I had a blast going on my very own Star Wars adventure. Shadows of the Empire introduced a brand-new character – Dash Rendar – and dropped him into the story of The Empire Strikes Back. After playing through the Battle of Hoth, Dash has his own adjacent adventure that sees him team up with all of the heroes of the original trilogy while battling against the likes of Boba Fett and IG-88.
This was the first game to really give me the sense of being part of the Star Wars galaxy on my own terms, and I think that’s because of how well-written Dash is as a protagonist. He feels like a real character with his own story to tell, and unlike in games like Super Star Wars, where you’d play as Luke and other characters, introducing someone brand-new really expanded the story. It was a ton of fun to go on this adventure through some wonderfully diverse levels – and the combination of gameplay in space and on the ground was neat, too.
Rogue Squadron 1998 Tier: B
Another classic from the Nintendo 64, Rogue Squadron felt like a huge step up from TIE Fighter thanks to its 3D models and more diverse levels. It was also a lot easier than those other titles, with a better control scheme and more forgiving gameplay. There were also different spaceships to pilot: the X-Wing, of course, but also the A-Wing, Y-Wing, and Snowspeeder, each of which had different weapons that could be useful in different missions.
Episode I: The Phantom Menace 1999 Tier: F
I went back and forth on this, trying to decide if The Phantom Menace does enough to scrape its way into D-tier. But unfortunately it doesn’t, and the film remains one of the low points of the Star Wars franchise for me. I remember the buzz and excitement The Phantom Menace generated on its release in cinemas… and I also remember the controversy and disappointment it caused.
I’ve addressed this before, but the short version is that The Phantom Menace kick-started a story that just didn’t need to be told. We knew everything we needed to know about Anakin, Palpatine, and Obi-Wan Kenobi from the original trilogy, and seeing the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker just wasn’t necessary. The Phantom Menace also contained some poorly-written dialogue, a convoluted storyline, some questionable character inclusions, and more. However, I will give the film credit for successfully bringing a whole new generation of Star Wars fans on board – and that, more so than anything else, was its objective.
Episode I: Jedi Power Battles 2000 Tier: B
Although less well-remembered than Episode I: Racer these days, Jedi Power Battles was a surprisingly fun action-platformer. The film it was based on may have been a disappointment, but Jedi Power Battles turned out to be a genuinely good time. I picked it up on the Dreamcast, and playing it co-op with a friend on the couch was a lot of fun (especially after a few drinks!)
Jedi Power Battles expanded the roster of characters, with some minor and background Jedi from the film becoming playable. As with Shadows of the Empire above, taking on different roles and playing as new and unknown characters felt pretty good, and the additional characters played well with the game’s expanded story. All in all, a fun romp – albeit held back by the source material’s weak story.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones 2002 Tier: D
Attack of the Clones was Star Wars’ chance to redeem itself after The Phantom Menace… and if that was its objective, the film failed miserably. The writing and dialogue could be shockingly bad (“I don’t like sand,” anyone?) and the film’s overreliance on green screens and CGI that just wasn’t at the level it needed to be has meant it’s aged incredibly poorly. Seriously: the original trilogy, made more than two decades earlier, looks a heck of a lot better than Attack of the Clones, which looks like a Dreamcast-era cut-scene in places.
Attack of the Clones also continued Star Wars’ annoying trend of making every major and minor character related to someone else. In this case we meet Jango Fett – father of Boba Fett and the “template” for the Kaminoans’ clone army. I like watching Palpatine’s scheme unfold, and Count Dooku – played by the late great Christopher Lee – is a fine addition as a villain. But overall, the film still struggles. Attack of the Clones also has characters and story beats that were either set up or expanded upon in comics or other spin-off media, and this left it feeling somewhat incomplete when the credits rolled.
Knights of the Old Republic 2003 Tier: A
Now we’re getting somewhere! Knights of the Old Republic helped me to fall in love with Star Wars all over again and put the disappointment of the first two prequel films to bed. There are prequel-era references throughout, of course, but KOtoR told a story that stood on its own two feet, fully separate from the characters of both the original films and prequels for the very first time. I absolutely adored this adventure, and creating my own character and taking them across the galaxy was just fantastic.
KOtoR’s innovative light side-dark side system was a blast, giving the game more replayability. The companion characters and villains were all absolutely incredible, and the variety of levels and missions on offer was outstanding, too. And the twist! I genuinely did not see the game’s big revelation coming until almost the last second, and when it was revealed I can vividly remember sitting on my couch, holding my Xbox control pad with my mouth just hanging open in shock. After the Vader-Luke reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, KOtoR’s twist is the best the franchise has ever pulled off.
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords 2004 Tier: S
As great as the first KOtoR had been, its sequel was even better. Despite being a rushed game with some content having to be cut, the story is just absolutely phenomenal, with stunning planets to visit, a war-torn protagonist still suffering the effects of their service and choices they made, and a stellar cast of secondary characters who all feel like real people. My Star Wars love is Visas Marr, by the way, and her arc from Sith assassin to Jedi apprentice is one of the best and most touching in any Star Wars production to date.
There are some wonderful set-pieces in KOtoR II, as the Jedi Exile travels the galaxy in search of the few remaining Jedi Knights and the Sith Lords who had been hunting them. Boss fights against these Sith – and the final climactic fight against Darth Traya – are tense and a ton of fun, and the game’s story is gripping from start to finish. Twenty years later and I’d still love nothing more than to get a proper sequel to this game.
Battlefront and Battlefront II 2004-2005 Tier: B
The original Battlefront games – before EA sunk its money-tainted claws into the series – were great fun. I’m not really a multiplayer gamer, and I like games with strong narratives first and foremost, but there was a lot of enjoyment to get from both of these games. Even the levels focused on the prequel trilogy were solid, and fighting wave after wave of enemy soldiers was something that most games at the time didn’t offer – not like this, at any rate.
In multiplayer was where Battlefront and Battlefront II really excelled, though, and if you could find three friends to play with on the couch, you were definitely in for a fun night!
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith 2005 Tier: C
The final part of the prequel trilogy went some way to redeeming the story, and was certainly a cut above what had come before. There are still issues with visuals and CGI as well as some clumsily-written dialogue, but there are also some tense and exciting moments as the Jedi Order falls and Anakin loses himself to the dark side. The main lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan runs way too long for me, but other fights earlier in the film – including against Grievous and Count Dooku – were pretty great.
A critic far smarter than I am once suggested that an extended Revenge of the Sith could have replaced the prequel trilogy, and I don’t think that’s a bad idea on the whole. There would’ve been more time for Anakin’s premonitions and slide to darkness to be shown, and for Palpatine’s manipulation of the situation to play out. All in all, though, Revenge of the Sith may not be perfect, but it’s by far the best part of the prequel trilogy.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga 2007 Tier: A
I wasn’t sure whether to include this game, but it’s a ton of fun so why not? This compilation brought together the two earlier Lego Star Wars titles into one package – and with Star Wars apparently complete as a six-film series, it took a comedic romp through the entire story. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga was just overstuffed with content – so many characters to unlock, things to collect, and areas of levels that weren’t accessible on a first run. The lack of dialogue and mumbling also made the game feel light-hearted and funny – and after the relative disappointment of the prequel trilogy, putting a different spin on Star Wars to make it fun and entertaining again was just what I needed!
Episode VII: The Force Awakens 2015 Tier: D
In 2015, I adored The Force Awakens. Returning to Star Wars’ “greatest hits” seemed to be just what the doctor ordered as a new era for the franchise got underway. However, with the benefit of hindsight the film’s weaknesses come into full view. The decision to have Luke Skywalker go missing – with no reason for why he’d disappeared being written – was a mistake, and with the death of Han Solo, any chance of reuniting the trio of heroes from the original trilogy was gone. The film is also incredibly derivative to the point of outright copying: a young Force-sensitive person from a desert planet joins a rebellion against a faction of space fascists and helps them blow up a planet-destroying super-weapon. There’s even a “trench run,” for goodness’ sake.
Unfortunately, The Force Awakens was a weak foundation upon which to build the rest of the sequel trilogy, and the decision to allow each writer/director free rein to do whatever they wanted led to a jumbled narrative mess. There were positives in The Force Awakens – the character of Finn, for instance, and his story of defecting from the First Order and overcoming his indoctrination, as well as a story that involved an older Han and Leia reuniting to try to save their son. But there were too many missteps and mistakes – and I just can’t forgive that the film squandered so many of the opportunities that a Star Wars sequel should have had.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 2016 Tier: S
I didn’t really have high expectations for Rogue One when I heard about it. A prequel all about stealing the Death Star plans just didn’t sound all that exciting – but I was wrong about that! Jyn Erso made for a wonderful protagonist, and her story took her from being apathetic and sitting on the sidelines to leading the mission that inspired the Rebellion. Cassian Andor was such a great character that he ended up getting his own spin-off. The decision to kill off practically all of the main characters was also incredibly bold for this franchise.
There are so many great moments and sequences in Rogue One that we’d run out of time trying to list them all! The mission to Jedha was incredible, characters like Krennic and Saw Gerrera have become iconic, and while I never felt that the destruction of the Death Star needed an in-universe explanation, learning how it came to be sabotaged was genuinely interesting. An unexpected story that expanded upon the lore of Star Wars in a really fun way.
Episode VIII: The Last Jedi 2017 Tier: A
The Last Jedi is a great film. It isn’t as great as it wants to be, and there are places where it misses the mark or where its storytelling gets too in-your-face. But it represents a brave attempt to take the franchise in a different direction, far away from the copycat narrative of its predecessor. Some of the things introduced here really work well and expand our understanding of the Star Wars galaxy. I really like the Holdo manoeuvre, for example, and how the film took a look at the galaxy’s mega-rich citizens who are content to sit out the war, knowing that whichever side wins they’ll still come out on top.
Moreover, the film puts two big twists on the story of the sequels. First, Rey turned out not to be descended from a known character. For me, this made her far more interesting and set her up as a protagonist in her own right. Secondly, Kylo rejected any pull to the light side and tried to seize power for himself, setting himself up as the ruler of the First Order. Both of these twists worked exceptionally well… before they were immediately undone in the final instalment of the trilogy.
Solo: A Star Wars Story 2018 Tier: C
There’s nothing wrong with the main thrust of the plot in Solo: A Star Wars Story… but nothing about the film feels all that special or interesting, either. The story basically doubles down on Star Wars’ prequel problem; we just didn’t need to see this chapter of Han Solo’s life to understand who he is or what his priorities are. We’d already been able to infer all of that from his earlier appearances, and while we learned a bit more about Han in a strictly factual sense… none of that really mattered.
I also loathe the resurrection of the obviously-dead Darth Maul and his insertion into Disney-era canon. Star Wars has continually struggled to let go of characters – even relatively minor and unsuccessful ones – and to see Maul popping up as a “crime lord” of all things was just… ugh. I hated it. The central heist at the film’s core was good enough and there were some solid moments of characterisation. But the film was let down by its fundamental premise.
The Mandalorian 2019-Present Tier: C
The Mandalorian has some fun scenes and great design elements, introduces some creative new characters, takes us to new worlds, and tells a story that dives deeply into a little-known faction. But for me, The Mandalorian didn’t really hit the mark. Its premise of following “the adventures of a gunslinger beyond the reach of the New Republic” sounded spectacular… but within two episodes the show brought the Force back into play. Things only got worse from there, with Luke Skywalker eventually showing up in person to hammer home that this series can’t escape the clutches of nostalgia.
Worse, though, was the protagonist himself – who seemed, for the first season-and-a-half at least, to have no understandable motivation for doing… anything. Mandy seemed to act at the behest of a room full of TV writers, and it showed, with massive story points like betraying his client to save Baby Yoda coming from nowhere. The series is also too short, with Seasons 1 and 2 barely amounting to the runtime of just one season of television – and sharing two halves of a story that would’ve been a lot better if it had played out in a single season instead of two. Things have improved and the series has grown on me, but I can’t escape the feeling that there’s some wasted potential here.
Jedi: Fallen Order 2019 Tier: A
I had a great time with Jedi: Fallen Order. After the disappointments of both The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker (which I watched before playing the game), I was glad to see that I hadn’t entirely fallen out of love with Star Wars. Cal’s story of re-establishing his connection to the Force, rediscovering his Jedi side, and going on a rip-roaring adventure across the galaxy was great, and I felt like I was right there with him thanks to some outstanding voice acting and animation work.
Jedi: Fallen Order also gave me what is probably my favourite Star Wars video game moment: piloting an AT-AT! This sequence is one of the best in the game and is just perfectly-paced. There are a few points that come together to deny Fallen Order S-tier status, though: overuse of Super Mario 64′s sliding mechanic, having to both re-play levels and backtrack through them after finishing an objective, and a confusing false choice early in the game all took some of the shine off of what was an otherwise fantastic experience.
Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker 2019 Tier: F
What an atrocious film. The Rise of Skywalker jumps around, barely spending more than a few seconds per scene, desperately trying to undo the big story points from The Last Jedi. It basically tries to cram two films’ worth of plot into the runtime of a single title, and so many of the storylines it tries to include just fall flat on their face. The clumsy insertion of Palpatine into a story that was never meant to be his not only ruins this film, but manages to make the rest of the sequel trilogy and even the original trilogy feel worse in retrospect.
The Rise of Skywalker betrays or completely misunderstands most of the characters it includes, like Kylo, Rey, and General Hux, undoing key parts of their stories and characterisations. It ignores altogether major characters like Rose and Finn, relegating them to the sidelines and having no idea how to use them. And finally, it contains probably the single worst line of dialogue in the entire Star Wars franchise: “Somehow Palpatine returned.” I don’t like to single out individual writers or creatives for criticism, but I genuinely hope that the people who wrote that line, approved it, and got it into the film never work in the entertainment industry again.
Star Wars Squadrons 2020 Tier: B
Squadrons feels like an updated TIE Fighter or Rogue Squadron – and yes, those are compliments! Thanks to major advances in graphics, sitting in the pilot seat of a starfighter has never looked more beautiful, and the game really succeeds at capturing that sensation in a way few titles ever have. Narratively there wasn’t a lot to say, but the story was worth following to its conclusion, and the side characters were solid in their own ways. I haven’t fired up Squadrons for a while, but I really should jump back in and have another go – it really is the best Star Wars simulator out there right now.
The Disney+ Lego Star Wars Specials 2020-Present Tier: A
There have been three Lego Star Wars specials made for Disney+ at time of writing – though a fourth is arriving imminently. And all of them have been great fun! I like the less serious tone of these specials, and how each one so far has had a seasonal theme. Terrifying Tales also did more to give backstory to Ben Solo and the Knights of Ren than the entire sequel trilogy had done, and it was quite cathartic to see that!
Star Wars shouldn’t be taken too seriously all the time, and these Lego specials really lean into the more fun, light-hearted, and casual side of the franchise. At the end of the day, Star Wars is supposed to be entertaining – and if there’s one thing I can say about the Lego Star Wars specials it’s that they absolutely entertained me!
The Book of Boba Fett 2021 Tier: A
I really did not expect to like The Book of Boba Fett. Boba himself always felt like a non-entity to me; a minor character elevated, somehow, through high sales of his action figure, but who did nothing of consequence in the original films and who died incredibly easily in his only big fight! The series also had a huge hurdle to overcome: how did Boba survive dying in Return of the Jedi? I wouldn’t have chosen to greenlight The Book of Boba Fett if I’d been in charge!
But I was wrong, and I found a surprisingly entertaining series with heart. Boba’s adventure on Tatooine was just plain fun in a way that I really hadn’t been expecting, and this miniseries about a character I’d always been underwhelmed by was much, much better than I could have expected. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and in some ways it felt closer to The Mandalorian Season 3 than a standalone project. But I had fun with The Book of Boba Fett for what it was, and I enjoyed its contribution to the Star Wars galaxy.
Obi-Wan Kenobi 2022 Tier: F
Obi-Wan Kenobi has done the impossible: it has eclipsed both The Phantom Menace and The Rise of Skywalker to become my least-favourite Star Wars project of all time. The series was already going to tell the least-interesting chapter in Obi-Wan’s life, but it ended up completely ruining his character and undermining one of the most powerful moments in A New Hope. It’s the textbook example of why prequels and mid-quels have to be handled with care, and honestly I could write a book about all the things this series got wrong.
In principle, the idea of Obi-Wan leaving Tatooine to rescue Leia could have worked, but it would’ve needed to be a completely different story, one that kept Darth Vader completely out of it. Bringing back Vader for yet more lightsaber duelling with Obi-Wan just felt desperate and tacky, and the entire series fell apart. It was unnecessary in the first place, poorly-written, and with a central premise that completely undermines Ben Kenobi’s role in A New Hope.
Jedi: Survivor 2023 Tier: D
I was properly excited to get a sequel to Fallen Order and to get back out in the Star Wars galaxy with Cal and the crew of the Stinger Mantis. But the story Jedi: Survivor told was pretty weak and convoluted by comparison. The sheer randomness of parts of the story – like Greez just accidentally building his cantina atop ancient Jedi ruins – went a long way to undermining it, the surprise return of Master Cordova completely fell flat, an ancient Jedi sealed in a bacta tank for centuries was kind of silly, and a “lost” planet that no one could reach just felt like a boring macguffin. Fallen Order gave Cal a quest that I could follow and that seemed to flow naturally from point to point. Survivor felt much more artificial and constructed.
The game was also let down, in my view, by a reliance on open-world level design that just didn’t fit the story. The supposedly hidden, off-the-beaten-path settlement of Ramblers Reach was located a stone’s throw from two huge Imperial bases and the headquarters of a pirate warlord, and the Jedi outpost on Jedha was walking distance from two massively important areas, too. And of course, there was a traitor in Cal’s group who was so incredibly obvious from his first second on screen that he might as well have had the words “secret bad guy” tattooed across his forehead. The game being released way too early while unfinished and full of glitches didn’t help matters, either.
The Acolyte 2024 Tier: B
So we come to The Acolyte – the latest Star Wars series at time of writing! Although it proved to be controversial, I generally liked what I saw in this one-and-done series. Stepping away from the “Skywalker saga” to tell a story in a different time period is something I’d been wanting to see on the big or small screen for a long time, and a focus on the Sith was also something interesting. I don’t think The Acolyte hit all of the high notes it was aiming for, but it was decent nevertheless.
If Star Wars is going to survive long-term, stepping away from familiar characters and the time period of the Empire will be necessary, and The Acolyte is the franchise’s first real attempt to do so. That is admirable, even if it comes a bit late in the day! The story also framed the Jedi Order in somewhat of a negative way, showing how it can fall prey to internal politicking, emotion, and disagreement – all of which were themes that were present in the prequel and sequel trilogies.
So that’s it!
It’s Old Ben Kenobi!
I’m pretty sure that those are all of the Star Wars films, games, and TV shows that I’ve spent enough time with to place on this list. You’ll note some absences: the animated Star Wars shows of the 2000s/2010s, as well as Andor, Ahsoka, and the Force Unleashed games, to name but a few. I haven’t watched or played everything in the Star Wars franchise – and I probably won’t get around to all of them. That’s why they’re not part of this list.
Let’s take a look at how the final tier list looks:
You can open this image in a new tab if you want a closer look!
Putting this tier list together has been great fun, and it’s been interesting to revisit some of these Star Wars projects. It’s been a long time since I so much as thought about the TIE Fighter game, and I haven’t re-watched the likes of The Mandalorian Season 1 since it premiered, so going back to them has certainly been something different.
I hope none of these opinions proved to be too controversial! At the end of the day, I’m a Star Wars fan – but I don’t enjoy every single thing that has been produced for the franchise. Still, whether we agree or disagree on what the highlights are, I think you can see that there are more positives than negatives in this wonderful space epic!
All that remains to say is this: May the Force be with you! And I hope you’ll check back soon for more Star Wars discussion here on Trekking with Dennis.
*Obviously this list is not official in any way. The title is a joke!
Most films and TV shows in the Star Wars franchise can be streamed on Disney+ or purchased on DVD, Blu-ray, or digitally. Some games discussed above are out-of-print, others may be available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and/or Nintendo consoles. The Star Wars franchise – including all films, games, and television shows discussed above – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker premiered in December 2019, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2020 that I was able to see it. As I’ve explained on a few occasions, my health now prevents me from taking trips to the cinema, so I had to wait until it was available to watch digitally. It’s now been a year since I published my review (or should that be tear-down?) of the film, so I thought I’d revisit it and see what, if anything, has changed in that time.
Attitudes can soften with the passage of time, and a film or series that was once considered dire can find a new audience later on. The Star Wars franchise itself contains great examples of this: not only can we point to the growing popularity of the prequel trilogy, especially among fans who first saw those films when they were children, but even Return of the Jedi, which was once considered the weak link in the trilogy, is now held up alongside the original film and The Empire Strikes Back, with most fans not differentiating between any parts of the Original Trilogy.
Remember when everyone hated and derided the Ewoks?
Part of this is to do with age and when fans first encountered Star Wars, of course. And one year isn’t a lot of time to allow passions to settle, so perhaps I’m entering this with too high hopes! But despite that, I hadn’t re-watched The Rise of Skywalker since I first reviewed it until a couple of days ago, and if nothing else I was curious to see if I still found the film to be as bad as I did then.
Here’s my basic summary from last time: The Rise of Skywalker has problems with pacing and editing, with the film rushing from story beat to story beat never allowing the audience to catch a breath and process anything that’s happened. That makes it feel like nothing more than a mindless action film on par with the worst parts of series like Transformers or Sharknado. Then the film went out of its way to overwrite basically everything that happened in The Last Jedi.
Promo art for The Rise of Skywalker.
Whether you like The Last Jedi or not – and I do respect that there are strong feelings on this – you have to accept that, in a three-part trilogy, the third film simply cannot waste time doing this. By trying to overwrite The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker ended up having to condense two films’ worth of story into one title – something which goes some way to explaining the awful pacing issue noted above.
Then there were story beats left unexplained or unseen. Palpatine’s message to the galaxy informing them of his (incredibly dumb) plan. Where was it? Surely we needed to see that on screen for ourselves instead of just seeing the reactions of other characters or reading it in the opening crawl. Oh, that’s right: Palpatine’s incredibly important message that set up the entire story of The Rise of Skywalker was only available to players of battle royale video game Fortnite. You read that right – Palpatine’s message was recorded, but thanks to a marketing tie-in with Fortnite it could only be heard in that game.
You could hear Palpatine’s message – the driving force behind the entire plot of the film – but only if you played Fortnite.
How did Lando Calrissian, making his return to the franchise two films too late, manage to recruit literally the entire galaxy for a mission to attack Palpatine? He just turns up at the end with the biggest fleet the film franchise has ever seen at his back, with no explanation given and not even a single frame dedicated to how he managed to convince everyone to join him. That might be a film worth watching.
The decision to get rid of the backstory established for Rey in The Last Jedi was fan-servicey and dumb. It was as if writer/director JJ Abrams spent twenty minutes looking at fan-fiction online and said “that’ll do,” then ham-fistedly inserted it into the script. Palpatine’s plan to launch a huge fleet of starships from his hidden base might make sense… but announcing it to the galaxy before the ships are in position and while they’re still vulnerable to attack doesn’t survive any degree of scrutiny.
Rey’s backstory was overwritten in The Rise of Skywalker.
I could go on, but this summary is already too long. In short, I considered The Rise of Skywalker to be an irredeemably bad film, the worst film I saw in all of 2020. So have I changed my mind now I’ve seen it again? Spoiler alert: no.
I won’t be all cliché and tell you it was worse this time around, but as I re-watched the film that was supposed to conclude the “Skywalker Saga,” the disappointment I felt a year ago is still there. The passage of time has not magically made bad storytelling good.
To provide some context, I also put myself through the torrid chore of re-watching The Phantom Menace, the film I considered Star Wars’ worst prior to The Rise of Skywalker. It’s been a while since I saw The Phantom Menace, and I likewise wondered if my attitude had shifted any. Both films are unenjoyable, but they fail for fundamentally different reasons. The Phantom Menace has a story that was carefully designed from the ground up. The problem was that story was disappointing and unnecessary fluff. The Rise of Skywalker has no real story, with the plot being made up of a cobbled-together mix of side-quests, failed twists, and fan-fiction.
I re-watched The Phantom Menace as well. It’s been a shit few days for films, to be honest.
Having re-watched both films, the one thing I would say has probably changed since last time is this: as much as I don’t enjoy The Phantom Menace, and indeed the prequel trilogy overall, The Rise of Skywalker is probably worse.
One thing I commented on last time that I definitely want to bring up again is the Sith dagger maguffin. This one prop is arguably the most important in the entire film, being the driving force behind a significant portion of what we’ll generously call the “plot.” But it just looks awful. The blade looks nothing like metal at all, not even old rusted metal. It’s made of some kind of plastic or foam rubber, and that’s incredibly obvious every time it’s shown on screen. In a film which otherwise manages to nail the visual effects, this prop should have been done better. And when it became apparent to the producers how bad it looked, some digital effects could have been added in post-production to smarten it up, at least in frames where it’s clearly visible on screen.
I have a second monitor which is a different make to my primary display, and I tried looking at the dagger there to see if it looked any better; perhaps it looked uniquely bad on my screen for some reason. I also tracked down still images and photos of the dagger to see if the Disney+ version of the film had some kind of weird visual quirk. But having investigated as much as I can (or can be bothered for a film this crap) I have to conclude that the Sith dagger, a maguffin integral to the story of the film, for whatever reason looks bad on screen. Other weapons in Star Wars look fine, and even in The Rise of Skywalker practically all of the other props were inoffensive. But this one, the most important one, manages to look like a cheap child’s toy; something you’d pick up in the bargain bin of a discount supermarket to keep a kid entertained for a few minutes.
For such an important prop, the Sith dagger looked awful.
Finn and Rose were both unceremoniously dumped by The Rise of Skywalker as its focus shifted to trying to mimic Luke and Vader using Rey and Kylo Ren. Both characters had potential in their first appearances, yet nothing ever came of that. Rose was the mechanic who lost her sister to the war and wanted nothing more than to do her bit to fight for freedom, yet she was insultingly given a few seconds’ worth of screen time and chose not to accompany Finn and Rey on their series of side-quests.
Finn was the first Stormtrooper we’ve spent much time with in Star Wars’ main canon. There was scope for his story of overcoming indoctrination and fighting back to turn into something genuinely inspirational, but he was relegated to a minor role that seemed to mostly consist of shouting at Rey – so much so that it became a meme. Finn was one of the “big three” – the three main characters of the trilogy, or so we were told. Yet while Poe and Rey got some attention in The Rise of Skywalker, Finn was essentially sidelined for the entire film. He played third fiddle to Rey and Poe, never really able to come into his own. It was a waste of a character – but that could be said of many characters across the sequel trilogy, really.
“Rey!” shouted Finn, repeatedly. For two-and-a-half hours.
John Boyega, who plays Finn, has been vocal about this, suggesting that Star Wars wasn’t sure what to do with his character. And I sympathise with that, because while Finn had some degree of character development, it all happened in the first few minutes of The Force Awakens, much of it wordlessly, and after that he just felt like a spare part.
The treatment of Rose was frankly just offensive, though, and it’s this decision that deserves the most criticism. Kelly Marie Tran, who plays the character, had been subjected to an absolutely vile torrent of abuse online in the weeks after The Last Jedi premiered, all of which came from complete morons who are incapable of separating their feelings about a fictional character from the actress who plays her. Though director Rian Johnson stuck up for Tran, as did some of her co-stars, Star Wars as a whole was largely silent. The decision to give Rose such a minor role was clearly the franchise pandering to those sexists and racists who went after the actress, and honestly that’s just appalling. Almost everything else wrong with The Rise of Skywalker concerns plot, characterisation, and so on. But this is something that actually affected a real person, and whatever you may think of Rose’s character in The Last Jedi, the decent thing for Star Wars and its producers to do would have been to take a stand in support of their actress. Cutting her from The Rise of Skywalker is nothing more than pandering.
Rose was entirely sidelined.
For some reason, The Rise of Skywalker needed to have a “shocking twist.” And this played out in perhaps the dumbest, most obvious way possible. General Hux was the First Order zealot we met in The Force Awakens. He works alongside new character General Pryde, and the film clumsily sets up that there’s a spy in the First Order. Naturally, the audience are supposed to think it’s Pryde. But no! In a truly stunning turn of events, Hux is the mole, feeding information to the Resistance because of his hatred of Kylo Ren.
Not only was the setup for this poorly handled in a jam-packed film that simply didn’t have enough time to set up a “mystery” of this nature, but the absolute stupidity of Hux being the traitor leaves me at a genuine loss for words. Seriously – ever since I first saw the film I’ve had a piece in my writing pile tentatively titled “General Hux,” with a vague plan to talk about how truly bizarre and stupid this character betrayal was. But every time I start it I genuinely cannot get more than a few lines in. The decision to go down this route is staggeringly dumb in a film that’s already overflowing with ridiculous character and storytelling decisions. I don’t even know where to start or how to unpack this utter nonsense.
Hux’s character betrayal was awful and didn’t even achieve its purpose as a “shocking twist.”
Hux, more than any other character in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, was steadfastly loyal to his cause. Even if we can accept the premise that his personal dispute with Kylo Ren had soured him, surely the arrival on the scene of Palpatine offered a better way out for Hux than betraying the entire First Order. And betraying the organisation to which he had dedicated his life when it was on the brink of victory makes no sense. It’s a “lesser of two evils” situation, from his perspective. Kylo might be someone he viscerally hates, but the First Order is more than just one man, and Hux’s desire to impose “order” on a chaotic galaxy is his driving force.
And so we come, inevitably, to Palpatine.
Even if everything else that was wrong with The Rise of Skywalker went away – and that would be no mean feat considering how much of an abject failure practically every aspect of the story was – Palpatine’s insertion into a story that was clearly never meant to have anything to do with him would ruin whatever remained. There’s no getting away from that.
Palpatine ruined the film.
Palpatine was not part of The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi, and the sole reference to him in the latter film was a throwaway line. JJ Abrams and others involved with the production of The Rise of Skywalker absurdly tried to claim that Palpatine’s return was “always the plan,” but that simply is not true. If it was the case, it was set up so badly across the previous two titles that everyone involved with writing, directing, and managing Star Wars should resign in shame and never try to tell another story again. But it wasn’t true. JJ Abrams arrived on the scene after The Last Jedi, and with Snoke dead and Kylo at the head of the First Order he clearly had no idea what to do or where to take the narrative.
Abrams was obviously in love with the idea of re-telling the basic story of Return of the Jedi, just as he’d re-told A New Hope four years previously. Rey was substituted in for Luke, Kylo Ren for Vader, but there needed to be a “big bad,” another villain at the top to make Kylo’s redemption and return to the light possible. In Abrams’ original vision for the trilogy – if such a vision existed, which is debatable – that villain was Snoke. But with Snoke dead and Kylo having assumed the mantle of Supreme Leader, the sequel trilogy’s story had already gone in a radically different direction. This was not something that could be halted or renegotiated; it had already happened.
Snoke’s death and Kylo’s elevation to the role of Supreme Leader could’ve led to The Rise of Skywalker going in a very different direction.
Instead of trying to tell a new story, or adapting the existing one to make it work with new or existing characters, the disastrous decision was made to bring back Palpatine. I can’t emphasise enough how utterly stupid this is. The one thing any fictional universe needs to have is internal consistency. It’s fine to have the Force, a magical power to move objects, perform mind tricks, etc., but when it’s been established roughly what’s possible, internal consistency kicks in and future stories have to be constrained by what’s already been established. This is a basic tenet of storytelling and of fiction in general.
Palpatine died. At the end of Return of the Jedi he was absolutely 100% dead. Not only that, but his absence in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, coupled with the rise of Snoke and the First Order instead of some continuation of the Empire, emphatically and solidly confirmed that Palpatine was dead. Say it with me folks: “Palpatine was dead.”
This moment in Return of the Jedi clearly and unambiguously showed Palpatine’s death.
Not only does The Rise of Skywalker bring him back, his return is not explained. Did he survive the Death Star’s explosion? Was he reborn? Is he a clone? All we got is an ambiguous line that isn’t even new for The Rise of Skywalker – it’s a word-for-word copy of a line spoken by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith: “the dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.” The Rise of Skywalker can’t even be original with its shitty dialogue.
The worst line in relation to the Palpatine clusterfuck was spoken by Poe: “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” That line encapsulates how The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t care one bit about the detail of its story, and how the film is content to treat its audience like idiots. Rather than lingering over this point, the film skips ahead and then races through the rest of the plot. Perhaps the writers and producers knew that no explanation for Palpatine’s return could ever make even the tiniest modicum of sense, so they just opted not to add one. I would say that’s bold, but actually it just compounds how dumb the original decision was. If even the writers can’t find a way to explain or defend this awful story point, then it’s an awful story point.
“Somehow, Palpatine returned.” A contender for the title of worst-written line of dialogue in the franchise.
As I mentioned earlier, Rey’s backstory had been established in The Last Jedi. It wasn’t to everyone’s liking, perhaps, but considering the other sources of controversy that film generated, I think most fans were at least tolerant of it as the first stage of explaining her power and origin. The idea of the Force trying to balance itself by elevating Rey to match the growing power of Kylo was a theme present in both prior parts of the trilogy, and when Kylo explained Rey’s parents were “nobody” in The Last Jedi, that settled things.
That explanation worked very well, and it meant that Rey was in a unique position in Star Wars. Though we’ve known many Jedi characters, the main ones we met were Anakin and Luke, and the familial relationship between them demonstrated that the Force can be passed down from parent to child. But not every Jedi has to be the offspring of another Jedi, and there was something powerful in “Rey the nobody” that The Rise of Skywalker trampled in its mad rush to fetishise and copy the Original Trilogy.
Kylo Ren delivered the shocking(ly awful) news to Rey – and to us as the audience.
Rey’s background as the daughter of nobody special meant her rise and her skills were her own. She achieved the position she was in – and her status as a Jedi – on merit. By removing this key part of her character, The Rise of Skywalker throws away something incredibly valuable: the message that anyone can be a hero. For young people – and especially young girls – sitting down to watch the film, the idea of Rey as a heroine to aspire to, someone who came from nowhere and saved the galaxy, was stripped away, replaced with the laziest and most clichéd of all fantasy tropes: destiny.
Rey’s inheritance as a descendant of Palpatine explained her power. That was it. The Force in Star Wars’ cinematic canon functions like an aristocracy, with power passed from Anakin to Luke and Leia, then from Leia to Ben Solo, and from Palpatine to Rey. Gone is the concept, embodied in the “broom boy” scene at the end of The Last Jedi, that the Force can be present in even the most lowly individuals. What replaced it was fate, destiny, and the power of bloodlines – an amazing and powerful message cast aside for a cheap fan-fiction theory.
Rey learns her true origin… for the second time.
The climactic battle involving Palpatine’s fleet and Finn and Poe’s Resistance forces is incredibly dumb and makes no sense. Not only was the idea of fighting on the exterior hull of a starship so phenomenally stupid, but the very concept of a fleet that doesn’t “know which way is up” and has such a patently obvious weakness was ridiculously poorly handled.
Star Wars has previously introduced us to forces and machines that seem overwhelming, only to offer a “million-to-one shot” way to destroy them; at this point it’s almost a trope of the franchise, being present in two of the three original films and The Force Awakens. But in all prior cases – even with The Force Awakens’ Starkiller Base, which was a patent rip-off of the Death Star – it was handled so much better and made more sense in-universe.
A moment of brainless action designed for the trailer and pre-release marketing material.
Palpatine’s fleet is the only fleet ever seen in Star Wars to require some kind of external navigation aid; this concept is just plain dumb for a technological civilisation. Not only that, but the idea that without this maguffin the ships will be trapped and unable to move is awful. Really, irredeemably awful.
What this all means is that Palpatine’s fleet looked superficially large and intimidating, especially in the film’s trailer and other marketing material, but was ultimately incredibly easy to defeat; cardboard cut-out opposition for our heroes. What could have been a satisfying victory over seemingly overwhelming odds felt incredibly cheap and hollow as a result.
The Sith fleet was clearly designed to be easily defeated.
As mentioned above, Lando’s last-second arrival with half the ships in the galaxy at his back was designed to be a feel-good moment; “we the people” rising up against tyranny. But because we didn’t get to see any of Lando’s recruitment efforts, nor understand why the galaxy would turn out to help him when they ignored Leia at the end of The Last Jedi, it was nothing but an incredibly hollow moment that felt more like a deus ex machina than a rousing victory.
Given the lukewarm reaction to the sequel trilogy, Disney’s roadmap for upcoming Star Wars projects seems to be putting this era on hold. But if they ever do choose to revisit the sequel era in future, one story I think would be absolutely worth exploring is Lando’s mad rush to bring the galaxy together and lead them to Exegol – of all the things in The Rise of Skywalker, that might be the one story worth digging into.
How did Lando manage to get so many people to back him? Might’ve been worth showing a bit of that on screen, no?
I’ve already written far more than I intended to for what was supposed to be a short revisit to a crap film, so I think we’ll wrap things up. I didn’t even touch on the ridiculous Force healing power that Rey developed, nor how the plot seemed to take our heroes precisely where they needed to go by completely random chance. We also could talk about the dumb limitation imposed on C3PO and how he couldn’t translate the dagger, Palpatine growing Snoke-clones in a tank, and the fake-outs of Chewbacca’s death and C3PO’s memory wipe. There are so many ridiculously poor elements of The Rise of Skywalker that they don’t all fit in a single essay.
In summary, then, the film is still just as bad as it was first time around. Though visually impressive most of the time, especially when compared to the shoddy CGI of the prequel trilogy, and with a couple of successful moments of comedy, the film is a complete and total narrative failure. It was an appalling and disappointing end to the so-called “Skywalker Saga” – which should really be called the “Palpatine Saga,” apparently, since he’s been manipulating everything from behind the scenes and is thus the only character who has been able to act of his own volition.
Despite some adequate performances from its lead actors, The Rise of Skywalker remains a truly dire film and an unenjoyable watch from beginning to end.
In 2017-18, when some Star Wars fans were vocal about their hatred of The Last Jedi, I was pleased that I was still enjoying Star Wars. But The Rise of Skywalker threw a wrench into the whole sequel trilogy, and was so bad in the way some of its storylines unfolded and concluded that it makes both of its predecessors – and to an extent the Original Trilogy as well – significantly worse and less enjoyable to go back and watch.
Even though I’m not a big fan of The Mandalorian, there are some Star Wars projects on the horizon that seem to have potential, despite the fact that the franchise is still very much living in the shadow of its Original Trilogy. I’ve expressed on a number of occasions my wish to see Star Wars break away from that and try something new, and I remain hopeful that it will happen one day. Even though The Rise of Skywalker was a disappointment and a complete narrative failure, there’s still life in Star Wars as a franchise. I recently enjoyed Jedi: Fallen Order, for example, and I’m very much looking forward to its sequel. And at Christmas last year, The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special was good fun on Disney+.
Despite the failure of The Rise of Skywalker and my disappointment in the film, I remain a Star Wars fan. Having returned to the film to give it a second look, I’m now content to put it back on the shelf and concentrate on what comes next for the franchise. There’s no need to revisit this film again, and this will probably be the last time I ever watch it.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is available to stream now on Disney+. The film is also available on Blu-ray and DVD. The Star Wars franchise – including The Rise of Skywalker and all other titles listed above – is the copyright of LucasFilm and The Walt Disney Company. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the whole Star Wars franchise, including The Rise of Skywalker.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy accomplished absolutely nothing. Okay, maybe that strictly isn’t true. I can think of a lot of things it accomplished, from modernising the aesthetic of the franchise to helping fans disappointed in the prequels move on. The sequels also helped make the franchise far more mainstream today than it has ever been, with a larger and more diverse fanbase. But that isn’t what I meant.
In terms of the overarching narrative of the franchise, Star Wars is in exactly the same position as it was in 1983 after Return of the Jedi – and for the most part, that’s actually intentional.
In my review/tear-down of The Rise of Skywalker, I went into detail about how JJ Abrams seems to have been desperate to use that film to try to remake Return of the Jedi – using story elements that were simply not suited for that purpose. Setting aside my plot complaints – notably the return of Palpatine – The Rise of Skywalker ended in identical fashion, and has left the Star Wars galaxy in basically the same place it was almost forty years ago.
Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi – the story of Star Wars has circled back to this point.
One thing fans of the original trilogy (like myself) were so keen to see in the sequels is what happened to the galaxy in the aftermath of the Emperor’s death. Did a New Republic ultimately take control, as depicted in the (awful) Expanded Universe? Did Luke succeed in setting up a new Jedi Order? What happened to Han and Leia – did they get together? There were many questions of this kind, and the sequel trilogy set out to answer them.
The answers we got in The Force Awakens were at least potentially interesting. After the incredible disappointment of the prequels, which were released between 1999 and 2005, I was content for The Force Awakens to re-tell some of Star Wars’ “greatest hits”. Even though, in retrospect, I would absolutely argue that it crossed the line between paying homage and ripping off many aspects of the originals – A New Hope in particular – in 2015 I was fine with that.
But if we look back at The Force Awakens today, in 2020, the groundwork for what would be a cheap recycling of the Star Wars story, ultimately taking the franchise nowhere but back to where it was, are on full display. We have a hidden and secluded old Jedi master, paralleling Ben Kenobi from A New Hope. We have an authoritarian state with a planet-killing superweapon, which of course parallels the Empire and the Death Star. We have a mysterious old dark side user who has a helmet-wearing apprentice, blatantly paralleling the Emperor and Vader. We have a rag-tag group of Resistance fighters – led by Princess Leia. And we have Han and Chewie regressing to their pre-A New Hope roles as non-caring smugglers.
However derivative that setup may have been, even by the end of The Force Awakens there was scope for Star Wars to go in a different direction and end up in a different place by the end of the trilogy. The Last Jedi tried to pull the franchise to a different point – most significantly by taking Kylo Ren away from the copycat-Vader path toward redemption and making him, not Snoke, the ultimate evil villain of the story.
The Rise of Skywalker, to my surprise, I must admit, spent a significant amount of time undoing what had been set up in The Last Jedi and tried – unsuccessfully – to remake Return of the Jedi from a very different starting point, cramming unsuitable story elements into that mould and relying on the deus ex machina of Palpatine’s inexplicable return to allow Kylo to follow Vader’s path to redemption.
Kylo Ren was forced to take the same path as Darth Vader.
The Rise of Skywalker established that the First Order was in control of almost all of the galaxy by this point in the story – akin to the Empire’s powerful position in Return of the Jedi. Just like in that film, the Resistance’s destruction of one fleet and the death of one leader does not, in itself, constitute overall victory – there is still a war to be won against the remaining forces of the First Order, just as the Rebels after Return of the Jedi had to continue the war against the Empire. The resolution to this war was not seen on screen and, frankly, victory cannot be guaranteed. The destruction of the Sith fleet at Exegol didn’t do anything to the First Order’s other fleets and forces, and while Palpatine may have been a “power behind the throne” for much of the First Order’s rise, his death is far less meaningful to the average First Order soldier or supporter than his fake-death was to Imperial officers after Return of the Jedi.
With the galaxy still under First Order control, the Resistance have their work cut out if they’re to follow Leia’s example and try to recreate the Republic for a second time. Even without a Supreme Leader, the First Order poses a significant challenge.
The First Order’s two potential leadership figures – Palpatine and Kylo Ren – both died in The Rise of Skywalker. Palpatine’s second death – if indeed it is a death and not another ruse – obviously copies his death in Return of the Jedi. And Kylo’s was also a copy of Vader’s death in Return of the Jedi – dying in Rey’s arms as Vader had died in Luke’s.
With her Jedi masters – Luke and Leia – dead, Rey is the sole survivor, as Luke had been at the end of Return of the Jedi. The Jedi Order must now be recreated from this one remaining young person, and Rey’s task is now identical to the one Luke faced all those years ago. Where will she go to establish her Jedi temple? How will she find force-sensitive children (or adults) to train? How long will it take for the Jedi to be restored? All of these questions were faced by Luke, and now they fall to Rey.
The Sith have been finally defeated. As they should have been after Return of the Jedi. With no remaining dark side devotees following the deaths of Snoke, Kylo, and Palpatine, the question of what happens to the Sith and the dark side rears its head. Will that knowledge be forever lost? Will someone new find out about the Sith and try to recreate their teachings? And of course the burning question: is Palpatine really dead? All of these questions existed in 1983 too.
In some circumstances, a cyclical story can feel good. It can make sense and it can have a powerful message, saying something like the rise of evil is a problem we always need to be on guard against. But it doesn’t feel good with Star Wars. In the aftermath of The Rise of Skywalker, three major storylines have taken a circular, copycat path and landed right back where they started: the state of the galaxy and who governs it, the future of the Jedi Order and how it may be rebuilt, and the demise of the Sith and the dark side. In all three of these cases, Star Wars is in exactly the same place as it was after Return of the Jedi.
The “Rey Skywalker” scene from The Rise of Skywalker was widely mocked and became an internet meme.
This feels cheap and lazy. The creators of the sequel trilogy – and I’m looking at JJ Abrams in particular – didn’t actually answer any of the questions posed by the ending of Return of the Jedi. Instead they pulled a bait-and-switch, remaking the original trilogy with a different trio of main characters and a few minor spot-the-difference story threads. With The Rise of Skywalker overwriting key points from The Last Jedi, we can almost disregard that film entirely from the trilogy. It tried to be different, but the differences it brought to the table didn’t last. Instead we have two copycats, and by remaking those same stories and putting the new characters into situations that are repeats of what came before but with a slightly different veneer, the trilogy ends with the same questions as before. What will happen to the galaxy? What will happen to the Jedi?
We didn’t get real answers to those questions in the sequels. We got a pretend set of answers that simply lifted all the same elements present in the original trilogy, gave them a new coat of paint, and plopped them down in the answer column.
What happened to the galaxy after the Empire? A new Empire, called the First Order, showed up. Oh and it was being controlled by the old Emperor who only pretended to have died.
What happened to the Jedi Order? Luke made a new one and then it got destroyed again! And that happened almost entirely off-screen, so the only part we got to see was Luke being a hermit like Old Ben Kenobi.
What happened to the Sith and the dark side? Well remember how there was an ancient, scarred dark side user who had a helmet-wearing apprentice? Yeah, well there’s two more guys like that. Oh and one of them, in a shocking plot twist, is related to other main characters!
Okay… so what will happen to these storylines? Surely something different that what we saw in 1983, right? Nope! The First Order will have a fleet of planet-killing ships destroyed and Palpatine and Kylo and Snoke will all die! But the rest of their forces are intact and probably still in charge of the whole galaxy. The Jedi Masters will all die leaving only one Jedi left! And the dark side is… I dunno. Gone, maybe? Or maybe it’ll come back when we need another villain. Who knows?
The future of the Star Wars galaxy is as unclear today as it was in 1983. Not only are the questions that we have identical to those that we asked after Return of the Jedi, but the “answers” to those questions the first time we asked them has been to simply re-tell the same story in a worse way, dragging it full-circle right back to the same point.
Considering where it started and where it ended up, the whole sequel trilogy has been a waste of time. The first two films may be enjoyable as standalone pieces of cinema, but in the broader context of a large, ongoing story set in a massive fictional universe, it accomplished absolutely nothing. The three new films could’ve not been made and nothing would have changed.
The Star Wars franchise is the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker and for other films in the Star Wars franchise.
Health problems make it impossible for me to get to the cinema these days, and as a result it usually isn’t until films are released on home video or streaming services that I’m able to see them. In some cases, such as with the Star Wars franchise, the prevalence of online spoilers means I know the premise and plot before I’ve seen the film. With The Rise of Skywalker I was not impressed with what I’d read, and I adjusted my expectations accordingly. Something similar happened a couple of years ago with The Last Jedi, and despite expecting to be let down by that film, I came out of it feeling pleasantly surprised – so there was a glimmer of hope!
Sadly, it was not to be. The Rise of Skywalker is saved from being my least-favourite Star Wars film simply by the existence of The Phantom Menace – and at times, it’s a toss-up as to which film was worse. At one point while I was sitting down to watch The Rise of Skywalker, one of my cats sat in front of the television and proceeded to lick her arsehole… it was by far the most entertainment I got in the entire two-and-a-half hours.
The first teaser poster for The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
Let’s start with what I did like. There are some points in The Rise of Skywalker worth praising, despite my overall feelings. Firstly, most of the visual effects, especially the CGI and digital artwork, were outstanding. There’s no denying that The Rise of Skywalker is a visually impressive film; from its space scenes to the various settings on the surface of planets, many of the visual effects and set dressings were good. Compared to the incredibly rough late-90s/early-2000s CGI present in the prequel films and the updated original trilogy, digital effects have come a long way – The Rise of Skywalker thus stands up alongside the other two films in the sequel trilogy, as well as Rogue One and Solo, as being good-looking. There were some individual visual elements and props that I felt didn’t hit the mark, but we’ll deal with those later.
Next, there were a couple of genuinely funny moments where The Rise of Skywalker’s humour hit the mark. The scene in the serpent’s den where Rey ignites her lightsaber only for Poe to turn on a flashlight was quite amusing, and did win a chuckle.
I’ve always been a sucker for heroic stories about last stands – so despite the various plot complaints that I’ll come to in a moment, the desperate last-ditch effort by Poe and Finn’s rebel forces did manage to elicit some of the feelings it was clearly aiming for. And the scene where Lando arrived with a last-minute rag-tag collaboration of ships and people from across the galaxy did feel good in that moment. This kind of story – a heroic, seemingly doomed last stand where the day is saved at the eleventh hour – is one of my favourites, and even though it’s been told numerous times across different types of media through the years, it still has the potential to be exciting and emotional.
Adam Driver is a phenomenal actor, someone who I’m sure will win one of the top awards one day. The Star Wars franchise really lucked out to land someone of his calibre to play Kylo Ren, and he didn’t disappoint in The Rise of Skywalker in terms of his performance. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate the performance from the character, especially if the plot is a mess, but despite my misgivings about Kylo Ren’s storyline, Driver gave it his all and the film was significantly better for his presence in it.
Adam Driver has been outstanding as Kylo Ren across all three films.
Despite his limited screen time, I also enjoyed Richard E Grant’s performance as General Pryde. He is the kind of steadfastly loyal member of the “old guard” who I wish we’d seen more of in the previous two films. The First Order was, in some ways, presented as a youth-led rebirth of the ideology behind the Empire, but it was clear even in The Force Awakens that there needed to be more people than just Snoke who had lived through the Empire’s reign and wanted to reinstate it. The First Order could really only have come to exist because of people like General Pryde, so an acknowledgement of that was definitely worthwhile.
Finally, I appreciated the fact that, in a film that was otherwise completely overwhelmed by attempted nostalgia, there were new locations to visit instead of having the characters always retreading old ground. The planets of Pasaana, Kijimi, and of course Exegol are all new to the franchise, and the first two in particular were interesting locations.
Now let’s get to what I disliked – which, unfortunately, is the majority of the film and its story.
Palpatine has returned… somehow. That’s all the explanation he gets, yet his return presents a massive issue not just for this film, not even for this trilogy of films, but for the entire “Skywalker Saga”. I’ve written about this previously, but the inclusion of Palpatine, and the revelation that he’s been the driving force behind the entire plot of the sequel trilogy, means that the Skywalkers aren’t the focus of their own story. Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, and now Rey Skywalker (she adopted the name at the end of the film in a widely-mocked scene) aren’t really protagonists any more thanks to the return of Palpatine. They have no agency over their own stories, because it turns out that Palpatine was behind the scenes manipulating everything and everyone – the three main characters of the three Star Wars trilogies were just along for the ride; their stories were something that happened to them as opposed to something that they actually did. As I wrote previously, the “Skywalker Saga” should really be titled the “Palpatine Saga”, since all of the stories are his and he’s the only character who actually acts of his own volition.
Star Wars ceased to be Anakin, Luke, and Rey’s story and became Palpatine’s over the course of a tedious two-and-a-half hours, transforming the story at a fundamental level. And for what? What purpose did the return of Palpatine actually serve? The biggest factor in play is nostalgia, something which The Rise of Skywalker absolutely drowned in. The only other reason he was drafted back in was because JJ Abrams and the rest of the creative team couldn’t think of another villain.
There was clearly a desperate desire on the part of JJ Abrams for Kylo Ren to be redeemed – following the path of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which The Rise of Skywalker was trying so hard to emulate. But even more so that Darth Vader, Kylo was irredeemable. He’d made his choice in The Last Jedi to commit to the dark path and claim the mantle of Supreme Leader for himself, and there was no going back for him. This is, after all, the character who murdered Han Solo in cold blood – are we supposed to forget about that?
Snoke’s death in The Last Jedi – which was Kylo’s moment of clarity and final commitment to the dark side – created a huge problem for JJ Abrams, who was evidently wedded to the idea of Kylo’s redemption. This concept, that Kylo could be redeemed and come back to the light, is part of a broader problem with the two JJ Abrams-led Star Wars films: they’re copying their predecessors. The Force Awakens crossed that invisible line between paying homage to A New Hope and outright ripping it off, and when it comes to many elements in The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo’s redemption included, it’s crossing that same line with Return of the Jedi.
The Rise of Skywalker shoehorned Palpatine into a story that was never meant to be his.
Kylo didn’t need to be redeemed. His storyline took him from wavering dark side devotee, desperately living in his grandfather’s shadow, right up to being Supreme Leader – something even Darth Vader never managed. He overthrew his master and claimed all of that power for himself, and in that moment he committed to the dark path. There should have been no going back from that, and the turnaround makes almost as little sense as General Hux’s betrayal of the First Order. Adam Driver plays Kylo perfectly as angry and entitled. He wouldn’t be a good leader; he lacks all the characteristics. But that didn’t stop him craving the position, and when he saw a chance to turn on Snoke he did; Snoke was little more than a foil for Kylo’s rise. His turnaround in a film which already suffers greatly from pacing issues feels like it comes from nowhere; there’s simply no time for exploration or development of that moment. One second he’s evil dark side “I’ll turn you evil too just you wait and see” Kylo, the next minute he’s back in the light as Ben Solo. There’s no process, no nuance. It’s black-or-white, with the flick-of-a-switch to change sides. Apparently that’s how the Force works: you’re on one side or the other, and switching is easy as pie. That’s despite the originals, prequels, and the first two sequels showing that to absolutely not be the case.
As you know if you’re a regular reader, I like to nitpick. And the biggest nitpick I have regarding the Palpatine plot is this: how the heck did he survive the Death Star blowing up? He was thrown down a deep shaft in the Death Star right before it exploded – and depending on what you read and where, that may have led directly to the station’s main reactor core. But let’s say that he did survive the destruction of the station somehow – why did he wait over thirty years to re-emerge? Why not simply hop on the nearest Star Destroyer, fly back to his palace on Coruscant, and continue to reign as Emperor? Even in Star Wars’ new canon, it took well over a year from the destruction of the Death Star for the Empire’s forces to be finally defeated – ample time for Palpatine to re-emerge and provide the fracturing Imperial forces with much-needed leadership. It would be much easier for Palpatine to have retained control of much of the galaxy and rebuilt his Empire by defeating the rebels than to have to re-conquer the entire galaxy all over again with the First Order.
Staying with Return of the Jedi, are we supposed to believe that this was Palpatine’s “grand plan”? To govern as Emperor for twenty years, get thrown down a reactor shaft, be blown up, wait thirty years while Emperor of nothing, and then return to re-conquer the galaxy with a new fleet? That reads like awful fan-fiction, not to mention that it’s incredibly convoluted, even by the standards of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe – which has thankfully been overwritten.
Palpatine’s survival and re-emergence also deprives Darth Vader of his redemption and makes his sacrifice far less meaningful. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader’s dedication to the Sith and the dark side is finally overcome – the love he has for his son brings him back to the light for the final time, and by killing Palpatine he not only saves his son, but sets the stage for bringing peace and freedom to the galaxy. That’s a heck of a legacy, though it doesn’t negate two decades’ worth of dark side evil. However, The Rise of Skywalker undoes that incredibly powerful ending to Darth Vader’s story. His one great act of redemption now marks little more than the halfway point in Palpatine’s rule instead of its end, and the sacrifice he made turns out to be meaningless in the overall story of the franchise. At best, Vader set back Palpatine’s plans by a few years. At worst, he contributed to making them happen by being – as all the main characters seem to have been – an easily-led pawn in Palpatine’s evil schemes.
Palpatine manipulated the entire story of Star Wars to get to this climax, even growing Snoke in a tank… apparently.
I don’t believe for a moment the argument coming from JJ Abrams and others that Palpatine’s return was “always the plan”. There’s simply no evidence to support this claim in the two previous films. Snoke was the First Order’s Supreme Leader, and there was no indication that he was anything other than the person in charge. Especially in his second appearance in The Last Jedi, Snoke was this trilogy’s version of Palpatine – continuing the theme of JJ Abrams essentially copying characters and story points from the originals. Neither Abrams nor Rian Johnson acknowledged in any way the possibility that Snoke was merely a pawn, a clone, or someone who lacked volition.
The insertion of Palpatine is a classic example of a deus ex machina. JJ Abrams had a problem when he commenced work on The Rise of Skywalker. He needed Kylo Ren to follow Darth Vader’s model and be redeemed, but with Kylo being the Supreme Leader, and with no other villains in the story, the only way to get to that specific endgame was some kind of deus ex machina – dumping a bigger, badder, evil-er villain into the story at the last minute. Even within that unnecessarily limited framework, however, there were other options. Just off the top of my head here are three: Snoke returns in some form (ghost, cloned body, etc), an ancient Sith emerges in some far-flung part of the galaxy, or General Hux stages a First Order coup and claims the title of Supreme Leader for himself.
Palpatine’s return is really the major point that ruined the film. There were plenty of other areas where things went wrong – and don’t worry, we’ll look at all of them – but the fundamental flaw in the story was Palpatine being desperately shoehorned in by a writer/director who had no idea what to do or where to take the story. Even if all of the other issues with The Rise of Skywalker disappeared, Palpatine would still loom over the plot, stinking it up.
So I think we’ve covered in sufficient detail why Palpatine’s return failed so hard. But this wasn’t the only point where the name “Palpatine” caused a problem, as The Rise of Skywalker changes Rey’s past to make her his granddaughter.
The Last Jedi firmly established that Rey didn’t have a lineage and wasn’t descended from one of Star Wars’ established families or characters. There had been internet speculation for two years leading up to The Last Jedi that she would be related to someone – Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Palpatine, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jabba the Hutt, etc. – but The Last Jedi made it crystal clear that she wasn’t. This became one of the points of criticism of that film, and one part of the reason for the backlash and division it caused, but overall I actually liked that story point. Like other Star Wars fans, I’d been happy to speculate after 2015’s The Force Awakens who Rey might be related to. But I also had the ability to recognise that these fan theories – convincing though they may be – were just that: fan theories. And the likelihood of any of them being true was pretty low. As a result, when we got the answer to Rey’s family in The Last Jedi I was satisfied – and more than that, I felt it was a good idea.
I know not everyone liked the idea of Rey being unrelated to anyone in Star Wars, so let me just explain briefly why I felt this worked so well. One of Kylo Ren’s most significant points is his background. He sees his lineage as both something he’s desperate to live up to, and something he’s embarrassed about. He wants to be Darth Vader, but he’s living with a weight on his back as the son of Han and Leia – two of the most significant leaders in the Rebellion. He also feels that he has a birthright, that his ancestry being so powerful in the Force gives him some kind of right to rule. By contrast, Rey has none of that. Her baggage stems from not knowing her family, barely remembering them, and being abandoned and alone. There’s an immediate contrast between Rey and Kylo that works incredibly well.
Rey’s lineage – or lack thereof – as established in The Last Jedi is overwritten by The Rise of Skywalker.
Secondly, Rey’s origin in The Last Jedi had a very powerful message – heroes can come from anywhere. Destiny and ancestry don’t matter, what matters is a person’s own character and how they behave. No one has a birthright to anything, least of all power – whether that means power in the sense of ruling or magical power like the use of the Force. Of all of the points in The Last Jedi, this was the one worth keeping. Not only does undoing that require the use of stupidly complicated semantic gymnastics that make Return of the Jedi’s “from a certain point of view” actually seem to make perfect sense, but it undermines the one established fact about Rey’s character and weakens the overall story of Star Wars. Force powers can be inherited, that’s something we already knew going back to the revelation of Darth Vader being Luke’s dad. But JJ Abrams seems to think that means that all Force-sensitive characters – main characters, at least – need to have inherited their powers from another main character. The idea that Rian Johnson had, which was not just present in Rey but also in “broom boy” at the end of The Last Jedi, is that Force sensitivity can manifest in anyone.
The final answer to the question of “is Rey a Mary-Sue character?” seems to be that actually, yeah, she kind of is. I stuck up for Rey for a long time in discussions like that, and especially after The Last Jedi I pointed to her origin as an argument in her favour. I felt that we needed to see her story in full before rushing to judgement, that there would be a valid reason for her innate Force abilities. This reason was at least hinted at in The Last Jedi, with the line: “darkness rises, and light to meet it”, implying that Kylo and Rey’s status as a Force duo was somehow connected to her power. But nope, it turns out it was destiny. Destiny and ancestry. I find the “destiny” excuse to be such an overused trope in fantasy, and it’s disappointing that Star Wars would send its protagonist down that path.
Many people in Star Wars, including Rey actress Daisy Ridley and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, like to talk about Rey being a “strong female character” and use that to make some kind of pseudo-feminist point. But by saying the sole reason for her power is that she’s descended from someone powerful – a powerful man, in this case – she stops being the “anyone” character that young girls can look up to and feel inspired by. It’s no longer the case that any girl can grow up to be as powerful as Rey; she’s the galactic equivalent of a Disney Princess, whose power and authority comes from nothing more than her birthright. The Force is a great metaphor for aristocracy, apparently.
In a way, we can argue that this is a wider issue in Star Wars. The revelation of Vader being Luke’s dad was shocking and truly unexpected in The Empire Strikes Back, but the drawback to that big shocking moment was that Luke’s character changed from being a nobody from a backwater planet who happened to be in the right place at the right time to change the galaxy to someone who was fated and destined to play that role. The Star Wars franchise has leaned excessively into this trope, making practically every character somehow related or tied to every other character – something that happened a lot in the prequels in particular.
The final issue I have with Rey being a descendent of Palpatine is this – it’s fanservice. It’s as if JJ Abrams had read through a bunch of fan theories about Rey and said “hey, this one is popular so let’s use it”. It’s not so much that it’s nonsensical, but that it overwrites a major point from the last instalment. It’s a story beat that was clumsily dumped into the film for the sole purpose of pleasing the vocal minority of Star Wars fans who hated The Last Jedi. It’s corporate revisionism to attempt to placate upset fans, not an organic and natural story point. In fact that sentence could summarise basically the whole plot of The Rise of Skywalker – it’s corporate-mandated cowardice, caving to the angry reaction some fans had to the last film.
How else do we explain the greatly diminished role offered to the one significant character The Last Jedi introduced – Rose Tico? Kelly Marie Tran played the character well in both of her appearances, and in the aftermath of The Last Jedi found herself subjected to a campaign of online hate by the film’s detractors who, being brain-dead morons, could not separate the actress from the character. Some of this hate spilled over into racism and sexism, and Tran has been vocal about how the attacks affected her. For JJ Abrams, Disney, and the Star Wars brand to treat her with such blatant disrespect by writing such a minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role for her character is a disgrace. It was an attempt to appease that same group of angry fans by simply giving them what they wanted – the removal of a non-white female character. That was not the initial reason they may have had for disliking Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, but over the course of more than a year of aggressive attacks on the actress through 2018, while The Rise of Skywalker was in development, it became about more than just a character and the way she was written – and that’s something the Star Wars brand should have taken a stand on. Rian Johnson himself had been supportive of Kelly Marie Tran since her appearance in The Last Jedi, but I heard next to nothing from anyone else associated with Star Wars in support of her, even from Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, who likes to talk big about being a “feminist”. It seems that the higher-ups at Disney were content to throw the actress under the bus in an attempt to placate fans who were responsible for some truly vile sexist and racist statements. I guess sexists and racists still buy tickets and merchandise if you give them what they want.
Rose Tico was little more than an extra in The Rise of Skywalker, despite playing a large role in The Last Jedi.
On a somewhat-related note, I’m disappointed that Star Wars missed the opportunity for one of Poe or Finn to be gay. This is less about them being a couple; their bromance is a fun dynamic and I don’t think it needed to “evolve”. But I think we saw enough hints from the time they spent together in The Force Awakens that either of them could have been gay. Rose Tico complicates that particular plot point for Finn, but in The Rise of Skywalker, Poe is reunited with an old flame – and this new character was the perfect opportunity, as making them male instead of female would have changed nothing in the story. I don’t like to be all about “identity politics”, but it feels as though the franchise missed an open goal. Representation of LGBT+ people in all forms of media and entertainment is streets ahead of where it used to be. In Star Trek: Discovery, for example, we have a gay couple in Stamets and Culber. I don’t think it’s “absolutely necessary” for Star Wars to follow suit, but I’m left wondering why they didn’t. Was it another attempt to placate sections of the audience, particularly in less-tolerant parts of the world? We already know that one minuscule section of the film showing a same-sex kiss was censored in some markets. Did JJ Abrams and/or Disney want to make Poe gay but backed down in the face of opposition and lost revenue? I can’t help but wonder.
Let’s move on and look at a couple of the visual effects and aesthetic choices I felt didn’t work. Modern Star Wars films have, generally speaking, enjoyed great visuals, and as I mentioned already, those in The Rise of Skywalker were good on the whole. But there were some missteps. Firstly, the decision for Palpatine’s face to be illuminated by the flickering of lightning worked well in his first appearance to keep his face hidden until the right moment. Lightning for a villain is clichéd, but that doesn’t even matter when compared to the failure of the Palpatine plot overall. But the overuse of this lightning effect for practically all of Palpatine’s scenes rendered any impact it could’ve had completely impotent, and detracted from the look. In short, it was a cliché idea to begin with and it was thoroughly done to death.
Next, the Sith assassin’s dagger. For such an important macguffin, one that the characters spent a lot of time searching for then examining, it looked crap. It was made of foam-rubber or some other non-metal material, and that fact was painfully obvious on screen. Rather than looking like a dangerous fantasy-inspired weapon it looked like a cheap child’s toy. For one of The Rise of Skywalker’s main props that simply shouldn’t have happened, and if it looked that bad on camera then some digital effects should have been applied in post-production to improve its look.
A Stormtrooper holding the Sith Dagger macguffin.
We also need to talk about the scenes involving Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia. Fisher passed away in 2016 – a year before The Last Jedi was released – and her role in this film was always going to be a hurdle for JJ Abrams to overcome. Tying into the theme of the trilogy overall lacking any sense of leadership and direction – which I discussed in more detail in a previous article that you can find by clicking or tapping here – Leia’s role needed to be addressed. There was a year in which to adjust, in a relatively minor way, The Last Jedi in order to bring her role in the franchise to a different end. Instead, Kennedy and Johnson opted to leave her role untouched in that film, despite the opportunity for a more heroic death presenting itself and despite the fact that there was scant leftover footage for The Rise of Skywalker to incorporate. As a result, the scenes with Leia are clumsy at best, nonsensical at worst, and the fact that they’re lifted from a different film is painfully obvious. While having Leia die off-screen would have been difficult too, starting the film with her funeral and with every character talking about her could have been an option and I’m sure a suitably heroic tale of how she came to pass away could have been written. Look at how Star Trek Beyond paid homage to Leonard Nimoy’s character of Spock for a smaller-scale version of the kind of thing I mean.
Leia’s actual death in the film was a poor shadow of Luke’s in The Last Jedi. Luke appeared to Kylo in a vision, standing up to the First Order to buy time for the Resistance to escape. Leia simply called his name – once – didn’t appear in any kind of visual form, didn’t say anything other than his name, and then died. Compared to other options for Leia’s death, this was a let-down. My first choice would have been to rework The Last Jedi to see Leia killed off during the space battle. There was a pitch-perfect scene included in that film which would have allowed her a death that was dramatic, impactful, and that mattered. The second-best option would have been for Leia to have died off-screen and for her brief role as Rey’s Jedi trainer to have fallen to Luke – perhaps with the explanation that Leia had trained Rey in the intervening years off-screen. And if JJ Abrams was wedded to the idea of Leia reaching out to Kylo, that could have been included early in the film, or in flashback form.
While I understand that there was a desire on the filmmakers’ part to treat Leia and Carrie Fisher with respect, they had ample time from her death in 2016 to find a way to rework the story to get around it. Luke’s death in The Last Jedi could have been cut with minimal effort so that Leia died and Luke survived to train Rey. Or if Luke had to die in The Last Jedi his inevitable Force ghost could have been introduced far earlier in The Rise of Skywalker to allow for Leia to die off-screen and be commemorated with enough time left over for Luke to fill her shoes as Rey’s trainer.
There’s no escaping the awkwardness of Leia’s scenes in The Rise of Skywalker, unfortunately. In 2019 and 2020 we might forgive that as the memory of Fisher’s passing is still recent. But The Rise of Skywalker will not age well, and these scenes will look even worse in the years to come – not that I’m in any hurry to rewatch the film, of course.
General Hux’s role in The Rise of Skywalker goes completely against his character as established in the previous two films. Hux was one of two surviving named villains as of the end of The Last Jedi. Captain Phasma had been thoroughly wasted in both of her appearances, of course, and with Snoke dead only Kylo and Hux remained. Domnhall Gleeson played the role perfectly, as he had done in both previous entries, but the decision for Hux to turn on Kylo and spy for the rebels wasn’t a clever subversion, it was ham-fisted and indicative of the fact that the plot couldn’t be made to work with the available characters. JJ Abrams needed a spy in the First Order for story reasons, and with no one else available, it had to be Hux.
Hux’s decision to switch sides made no sense.
Hux had the potential to be a far more interesting villain. I already proposed the idea that he could have staged a coup against Kylo, thanks to the loyalty he commanded from his forces. That was one option. But Hux was a dyed-in-the-wool First Order zealot, so the idea that he, of all people, would change sides simply because he doesn’t like Kylo is just stupid. Illogical and stupid.
The climactic battle between Palpatine’s Sith armada and the rebels doesn’t make sense, and the story behind it doesn’t survive even a brief first glance, let alone a deeper examination. While some of these points stray into nitpicky territory, taken as a whole the entire sequence is one big failure.
I can believe, in the context of a fictional universe, that certain starships may be built that require an external guidance system. It’s stupid, and no other ship in Star Wars to date has had that limitation, but as a basic concept it’s not wholly unbelievable. But given that no other ship in Star Wars has been so limited, why would Palpatine make that decision? Giving the entire battlefleet a crippling limitation is stupid, and while it may be something that could happen, it’s not a mistake someone like Palpatine would be likely to make. The line that the ships “can’t tell which way is up” is similarly ridiculous, because all they’d have to do is go up… the opposite direction to the planet’s surface. They could figure that out by looking out a window if they had to.
This dumb storyline was included to allow Palpatine’s fleet to look large and thus visually impressive, especially in the trailers and other pre-release marketing, but without making it too powerful. Giving the ships an artificial and unnecessary limitation opened the window for the rebels to defeat them, allowing JJ Abrams to write scenes for Poe, Finn, and others that harkened back to A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. If the fleet were utterly invincible, then of course the story would not have been able to come to a happy ending. But good stories find ways for their protagonists to prevail without making stupid choices and putting them up against cardboard cut-out opposition.
The huge Star Destroyer fleet looked impressive, but made no sense and was easily defeated.
Next, we have the decision to have Finn and his group of rebels land on the outer hull of one of the ships. This was included solely for the purpose of looking visually “cool”, and for someone solely interested in brainless action I guess it did for a few seconds. But thinking about it, even for just a brief moment, it becomes obvious that all the starship would have to do to to get rid of them is… move. The smallest move in almost any direction would have sent them tumbling, and rolling or rotating the ship would have meant they’d have all fallen to their deaths. The fact that no one on the bridge of the ship considered that option is not credible.
Equipping all of the ships with Death Star cannons makes a degree of sense, and as an in-universe concept the idea that the technology could be manufactured on that scale isn’t stupid. But again, as with the number of ships this is something which seems impressive for all of ten seconds, but quickly fizzles out without the weapons causing major damage or having much of an impact on the plot. Everything about the fleet, from the scale of it to the weaponry it’s equipped with is impressive-looking but ultimately lacking in depth. It’s shallow and show-offy but without anything substantial to back it up.
One thing from the battle that I would have wanted to see is how Lando managed to rally people from across the galaxy to the rebels’ cause – especially considering Leia’s failure to do so at the end of The Last Jedi. Was it Lando’s winning personality that convinced everyone? Was it the threat of Palpatine? How did he bring together so many people in such a short span of time, starting from nowhere? How did he even know he needed to, or where to send them? This could be a whole film in itself – and would be far more interesting than The Rise of Skywalker.
Finally, and this ties into Palpatine’s role in the film in general, is why Palpatine broadcast his intentions to the galaxy before his fleet was ready or even in position to be ready. All that did was allow his enemies the opportunity to organise – which is what we see them do for the entire film. As I’ve already noted, this robs the characters of agency in the story as all they do for the entire film is scramble to respond to Palpatine’s threat. But why make the threat now? Why not wait 24 hours until his fleet had got into position – especially considering the inbuilt weakness in the fleet that made them vulnerable at their home base? It’s a storyline written to look tense and dramatic on the surface, but without any depth to it to pay off the tension and drama. It was designed in such a way as to look like a desperate last stand, but with an obvious path to victory for the rebels.
The “Rey Skywalker” scene at the end of the film was widely mocked online and became a meme.
One of the few original elements present in The Rise of Skywalker was the concept of using the Force to heal wounds and even revive someone who had died or was close to death. This power has been present in some Star Wars video games – where it makes a certain kind of sense as an in-game mechanic – but was new to the films. And it opens a lot of plot holes for other films in the series. If the Force can be used to heal and even revive the dead, how do we account for the death of characters like Qui-Gon Jinn, or even Darth Vader? And why would Anakin have been so terrified of his wife suffering complications in childbirth if the ability to heal even life-ending injuries was possible through the Force? If The Rise of Skywalker were a new and original film it would have worked, but as the ninth part of a series it didn’t.
The Last Jedi shook up the story of the sequel trilogy, and whether we like that or not – and I respect that there are strong feelings on both sides – it narrowed down the choices for where The Rise of Skywalker could go. However, JJ Abrams decided not only to ignore large parts of the second film in the trilogy, he set out to actively overwrite them. Whether this is because of the reaction to The Last Jedi or because Abrams couldn’t detach himself from his own version of the story isn’t clear – perhaps a combination of the two things.
Where The Last Jedi tried to take Star Wars in a different thematic direction, The Rise of Skywalker drags it back, kicking and screaming, and tries to remake Return of the Jedi using story threads that are no longer suited for that purpose. Unfortunately the story JJ Abrams wanted to tell couldn’t be crammed into that mould, and what results is a horrible mess. The clumsy and stupid insertion of Palpatine into a story that was never his ruins the entire film, and that’s without accounting for the many other storytelling failures. Furthermore, Abrams’ need for The Rise of Skywalker to overwrite parts of The Last Jedi with his own ideas about what could’ve happened to the characters and story in the previous entry means that The Rise of Skywalker feels like two films condensed into one – it’s trying to tell parts two and three of the sequel trilogy, but in the runtime of a single film. As a result, it feels rushed and incredibly poorly-paced. This is not helped by the action supposedly taking place over a single 24-hour period for the most part.
Someone far wittier than I wrote in a review of The Rise of Skywalker when it was still in cinemas that it feels less like a feature film than a collection of Vines or TikTok videos set in the Star Wars universe, and that for a younger generation, raised on six-second video clips, maybe the manic pace and choppy editing will just seem natural. I can’t say I disagree when it comes to the pacing and editing. The film rushes from point to point and from character to character with no time for the audience to digest anything that happens. It also suffers from the longstanding Star Wars problem of needing new characters and character variants to turn into merchandise. The inclusion of some of these characters complicates and confuses the plot, and pads out a story that needed no padding whatsoever in light of the decision to overwrite parts of The Last Jedi. But how else do we explain “Sith Troopers”? They’re just red Stormtroopers. Or Poe’s girlfriend? Two words: action figures.
Sith Troopers were in The Rise of Skywalker to sell action figures.
When the reaction to The Last Jedi was so mixed and some people were angry and upset, I was glad that I hadn’t fallen out of love with the rejuvenated Star Wars. I hoped that The Rise of Skywalker would bring most of those people back into the fold and that with The Mandalorian coming on Disney+, there would be great Star Wars content to come for a long time. I was wrong, and I now have a not dissimilar reaction to that felt by many fans two years ago. However, one bad film does not ruin a franchise, and as much as I dislike The Rise of Skywalker (and was bored to tears by the snore-fest that was The Mandalorian) I remain hopeful of better projects to come. Rogue One was one of my favourite films of all-time, and I even picked it for my top film of the 2010s when I put together a list back in December – you can find that list by clicking or tapping here, by the way. So there is still hope within the franchise and the brand – Star Wars can be good. But The Rise of Skywalker is not good. It is not good at all.
I wrote parts of this article a few weeks ago, the same day I watched the film. But because it was something I genuinely did not enjoy I found writing this review to be hard-going, and as a result it slipped to the bottom of my writing pile and it’s taken several attempts to get it finished. I don’t like tearing down a film like this, especially in a franchise like Star Wars that I do generally enjoy. But honestly, not since I watched The Phantom Menace have I come away from a Star Wars film so deeply disappointed. I’m surprised that a big-budget film could be this bad – and that the trilogy it wraps up could have been constructed so poorly by a major corporation and a group of accomplished filmmakers. It beggars belief that they messed up this badly.
All that being said, I will happily trek back to Star Wars when the next big release is ready, hopeful to see something better and more exciting than The Rise of Skywalker. And I’m happy to rewatch The Last Jedi time and again, as I feel that film really goes above and beyond to show what Star Wars can be when it’s not bogged down in overused tropes and sad clichés.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is out now on DVD and Blu-ray and may be available to stream on Disney+ (if not it will be soon, I didn’t bother to check). The Star Wars brand – including The Rise of Skywalker and all other titles mentioned above – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, as well as other films in the Star Wars franchise.
The final film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, releases tomorrow here in the UK. And it’s not unfair to say that there’s a lot riding on it for fans of the franchise.
Disney spent a lot of money to buy Lucasfilm – and with it the rights to Star Wars – back in 2012. Depending on what measure you use, they might’ve just about broken even by now, thanks to three successful titles at the box office, one headline series leading the charge for their new streaming platform, and sales of a ton of toys and merchandise. But breaking even isn’t good enough for a huge company, and with Solo: A Star Wars Story being the first title in the history of the franchise to fail to make its money back, there’s a lot riding on The Rise of Skywalker as far as Disney is concerned.
It’s also a critical time for fans.
The spectre of Palpatine looms over Rey and Kylo Ren on the promo poster for The Rise of Skywalker.
Personally I enjoyed The Last Jedi, though I think it works better as a standalone piece than it does as part two of a trilogy, or part eight of an ongoing series. The major shift in tone from The Force Awakens – as epitomised by the scene in which Luke Skywalker simply throws away his old lightsaber – is certainly jarring. And while I’m a fan of the film myself, I understand the criticism levied at it by some in the Star Wars fanbase.
The Last Jedi was, whichever side of the argument you’re on, an unquestionably divisive film. And unfortunately, one consequence of the controversy it generated is that fans have broken up into factions. Some fan groups have descended into pure hate, attacking Disney, Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, and even actors and actresses from the films. This insane amount of online negativity has damaged the Star Wars brand to an extent. The Rise of Skywalker has to find a way to get things back on track.
In the run-up to the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, some groups of fans were planning to boycott the film and its merchandise as a way to register their dislike of The Last Jedi and disapproval of the overall direction of the franchise. How many of them stuck to their guns and didn’t see Solo is something impossible to measure, but the negative feelings and ill-will undoubtedly hurt the film, which came out only five months after The Last Jedi.
What The Rise of Skywalker has to manage to do is bring back those fans. It has to give them a reason to want to show up at the box office, but more than that, it has to give the story a satisfying conclusion – one which can reunite the fractured fanbase.
I honestly don’t know whether it can.
Adam Driver as Kylo Ren.
The problem isn’t that huge numbers of people will stay away. I think that most Star Wars fans, even those who felt that The Last Jedi was a terrible film, will head back to the cinema this time around, if for no other reason than morbid curiosity. At the end of the day, this franchise has been running since 1977, and the first phase of its story – that of Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker – is finally coming to a close. That alone is reason to turn up and check out the film. Whether fans who found The Last Jedi to be a bad experience will find the conclusion of the story to be satisfactory is another question, however.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy failed to reunite its core three characters – Han, Luke, and Leia. By killing off Han Solo in The Force Awakens while Luke was still out of the picture, there was no opportunity for a reunion. And with the untimely passing of Carrie Fisher – as well as Luke’s supposed death in The Last Jedi – there’s now no chance to bring them back together even in a flashback sequence. In time, I suspect this will come to be viewed as a mistake. And as I wrote in my list of disappointments of the decade, the decision to have Luke going missing be the driving force for the plot of The Force Awakens will probably also be seen as problematic in hindsight.
There are, undoubtedly, missteps and mistakes to be overcome in The Rise of Skywalker. On the one hand, bringing back JJ Abrams for the film is a positive thing. He was, after all, responsible for creating characters like Rey, Poe, and Finn, and did initially draft out where those characters could go after The Force Awakens ended. But because the decision was taken to split up the storytelling of these films, giving each part to a different writer/director, Rian Johnson had the opportunity to ignore much of that story treatment when he wrote The Last Jedi – and that seems to be exactly what he did. Johnson was constrained by the concept of Luke being missing, but now Abrams is constrained by the ending of The Last Jedi too. And if it’s the case that the characters are in a completely different place than he intended them to be, then he basically will have had to write a whole new story for The Rise of Skywalker.
JJ Abrams is a good storyteller, and he can make films that are respectful of their place in a franchise but without feeling the need to entirely copy an existing story. His work on Star Trek Into Darkness shows this – that film pays homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan without copying it or overwriting it. But Abrams can also cross that line, and I’d argue that The Force Awakens strayed from being an homage to the first Star Wars film into copying it. Starkiller Base is, for all practical purposes, the Death Star, even down to the vulnerable hole at the end of a trench that a team of X-wings have to attack. When I first saw The Force Awakens I thought that kind of film is exactly what I wanted from Star Wars, especially after the disappointment of the prequel films a decade earlier. But looking back, it wasn’t the best take on Star Wars, and a little more originality would have been called for, as well as a better use of Luke Skywalker – or at the very least a reason for his absence.
“Mystery box” storytelling is what JJ Abrams has always done. He sets up a puzzle, a set of unexplained situations and circumstances, which draw in audiences and get people thinking. But he never writes a conclusion. His mysteries are beautifully set up – and then he disappears, leaving the ending to someone else. He did that in the television series Lost, which started well, but unfortunately became incredibly convoluted and ended with a controversial and, to many people, disappointing finale. So whether Abrams really was the right choice to bring the “Skywalker saga” to its end is something I’m not convinced of – at least, not yet.
The Rise of Skywalker has a difficult job to do if it’s going to be viewed as a success by both fans and detractors of The Last Jedi – and whether this division in the fanbase between the two camps will be temporary or permanent really does depend on how this film is received. If it manages to be a hit, then the fanbase can come back together and look forward together to new Star Wars projects. But if after release, fans remain divided into pro-Disney and anti-Disney camps, the biggest and best opportunity to heal that divide will have been lost. Also lost will be some fans – who will no longer turn up for new films and shows in the franchise. This happened to an extent with Star Trek, three times in fact: in 1987 with fans who didn’t want The Next Generation, in 2009 with fans who didn’t want the reboot films, and in 2017 when some fans didn’t want Discovery.
Any discussion of this topic would be remiss to not point out that some of the anti-Disney communities online actually make money – even a living in some cases – from their hate. And yes, a lot of it crosses the line from criticism into outright hate. For some of these YouTube channels, websites, and social media groups, controversy, division, and hatred are what drive clicks, views, and advertising revenue. If they were to come out and say “hey guys, The Rise of Skywalker was great and you should all go to see it!” they’d lose subscribers and viewers so fast they’d have nothing left. Many of the people who read and watch such content are there purely to see their own preexisting opinions reflected back at them, and the people creating this content know this. They know that their audiences expect a negative reaction to The Rise of Skywalker – and most of them will give them what they want, regardless of whether it’s what they actually think. And the reason is simple: attention and money.
With that in mind, The Rise of Skywalker has to go even further than any other title in order to be successful. It has to absolutely knock it out of the park, because if it does, maybe the overwhelming positive reaction from fans will force at least some of these people to concede. But if it’s only okay – and even if it’s good but not great – the online hate and anti-Disney sentiment will continue, because people are getting attention from the community and money from advertising on sites like YouTube for speaking out in that way.
It’s an uphill struggle then. But it’s one of Lucasfilm’s own making in a way – splitting up the story, and giving three different writers and directors essentially free reign to do whatever they wanted was an own goal. When creating any story, let alone one that has to be the follow-up to a genre-defining set of films, it’s important to take the time and plan it out. They needed to think carefully about legacy characters as well as plot out character arcs for the new ones. There’s no evidence that there was any proper planning or story work done – and that was a mistake.
Some of the story points which appear to be part of The Rise of Skywalker are questionable, too. Palpatine feels shoehorned in, especially given he was scarcely mentioned in the previous two films and had no impact whatsoever on their plots. A combination of fanservice, to appeal to those who hated The Last Jedi, and desperation, caused by the lack of a significantly imposing villain after Snoke’s death, seems to be why Palpatine has returned. Those reasons do not form the basis of a strong narrative, and the risk is that his appearance in the film will simply come across as cheap and lazy.
I’m sure Disney and Lucasfilm are aware of these issues, and others. There’s a lot riding on JJ Abrams and his storytelling, and in a very real sense The Rise of Skywalker will, for better or worse, set the stage for the next phase of Star Wars.
On a personal level, I really hope that the film will be a success. Not least because I want an ending to Luke and Leia’s stories that will be satisfying, but because I really want to see the division of the last two years put behind us as fans. There will always be disagreements over The Last Jedi – just like there are in Star Trek over who’s a better captain – but if the majority of fans can at least return to civility and get back to a place where new Star Wars projects generate almost universal excitement rather than arguments, I think The Rise of Skywalker will have done its job. Reviews from critics have come out in the last couple of days, and seem to be positive – but critic reviews for The Last Jedi were strong too, and failed to anticipate that film’s divisiveness. So we will have to wait and see.
If we can return to a place in the fanbase where debates are good-natured then that’s really going to be a positive thing. The negativity generated two years ago has been difficult to wade through, at times. There are enough things in the world today to divide people; we don’t need entertainment adding to that. Not when it’s supposed to be escapism and a distraction.
It’s my hope that The Rise of Skywalker will go a long way to mending fences, and that the Star Wars franchise can have a more united and secure future going forward.
The Star Wars franchise and The Rise of Skywalker are the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 