Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Today (the 17th of December 2025) marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens here in the UK. With it came a brand-new era for the franchise. I thought the occasion would be a great opportunity to talk about the film, its legacy, what it got right… and where it went wrong. So that’s what we’re gonna do today!
Three years earlier, the Walt Disney Company had purchased Lucasfilm, and with it, the rights to the Star Wars franchise. Ever since that moment in 2012, fans had been wondering what might lie in store – and when it was confirmed that 1983’s Return of the Jedi would be getting a sequel… I think it’s fair to say that the fan community was *beyond* excited! As Star Wars prepared to turn the page on its controversial prequels, and with a new creative team in charge, there was plenty of room for positivity in the months leading up to the release of The Force Awakens.
Bob Iger and George Lucas signing the documents to confirm the sale of Lucasfilm in 2012.
I think I’ll start by talking briefly about my personal history with the Star Wars franchise, and how I found my way to the fan community – or, at least, to its periphery! In the early ’90s, at the insistence of a schoolfriend, I watched the original trilogy on VHS. By this point, I was already a huge Trekkie, and I remember being a bit underwhelmed on that first viewing. Perhaps I was comparing Star Wars to “my” fandom, and getting a bit tribal with it… I dunno! But I soon came to appreciate the original trilogy and the story it told, and quickly branched out to play the Super Star Wars games on the SNES, TIE Fighter on PC, and later, games like Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron on the N64.
The prequel trilogy was another story, however, and I was left decidedly underwhelmed by both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. In this era, it was really only Knights of the Old Republic that kept me engaged with my Star Wars fandom. Revenge of the Sith was better, in some ways, but the prequel trilogy as a whole was a disappointment. If you’d asked me about Star Wars in 2012, that’s what I’d have told you. I was sceptical of a new film at first, but I was also encouraged when George Lucas stepped away and passed the torch to a new generation of filmmakers. When Disney promised to expunge the old Expanded Universe – much of which, from what I’ve seen, reads like low-quality fan fiction – I felt that was the right call. Disney was setting up a totally fresh setting for their new trilogy that wasn’t going to be constrained by decades’ worth of other stories, nor by being a prequel that had to tie in with what’s already been established. That was a hugely positive thing for me.
A trio of posters.
By the time details of the film were being announced, I was cautiously optimistic! I remember feeling a little conflicted about J.J. Abrams’ involvement; he’d done such a great job rebooting the Star Trek franchise at the cinema that seeing him “jump ship” to Star Wars felt like a bit of a blow. Remember, this was before CBS had announced that Star Trek would be returning to the small screen, and with the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary approaching… I wasn’t thrilled to lose a filmmaker of Abrams’ calibre. But Star Trek’s loss seemed to be Star Wars’ gain, with Abrams being able to take the same approach and “reboot,” for want of a better word, the franchise for a new generation.
Above all, I hoped that The Force Awakens could put the disappointment of the prequel trilogy behind us, and tell a more interesting and engaging story than those films ever had.
So… did it do those things?
What’s the legacy of The Force Awakens ten years later?
The Force Awakens is a film that we absolutely cannot judge fairly without placing it in context. As a result of that context – i.e. the last ten years’ worth of Star Wars projects since it premiered – The Force Awakens is probably the only film I can think of where my opinion has shifted so dramatically since that first viewing in December 2015.
Because I’ll be honest: I walked out of the cinema ten years ago with a great big smile on my face! After the disappointment of the prequel trilogy, a film that re-played Star Wars’ “greatest hits” felt like just what the doctor ordered, and I remember feeling that, while the film obviously *was* derivative and harkened back to 1977’s Star Wars in a huge way… that didn’t seem like a terrible idea. Re-establishing the core of what Star Wars is, and showing that to a new audience as well as to returning fans, is what a reboot is supposed to do. And The Force Awakens felt like a solid foundation for Disney to build a new era of Star Wars on.
Kylo Ren’s helmet.
There were stormtroopers. There was an “evil empire” ruled by an enigmatic, scarred leader. There was a helmet-wearing Dark Side user who was the scion of a powerful family. The Jedi were nowhere to be found. There was an orphan from a desert planet who got swept up in a rebellion. There was a “trench run” against a planet-killing superweapon. Han Solo and Chewie were back in the Millennium Falcon. And Princess Leia was still leading the rebellion. Everything that Star Wars had been in its original form was here, reimagined and repainted, ready for that new generation of fans to fall in love with.
What’s more, The Force Awakens’ director and producers seemed to be going out of their way to recapture the way Star Wars looked prior to the prequels and George Lucas’ awful “special editions.” Gone was the janky, not-ready-for-prime-time early 2000s CGI. And to replace it, Disney had commissioned physical props, puppets, and even robots. BB-8, the cute little spherical droid, *actually works!* That’s an actual, physical droid, not a video-gamey CGI monstrosity. As a child of the ’80s, who grew up on films like The Neverending Story and Flight of the Navigator, which had excellent puppets, props, and prosthetics… I absolutely *adored* the way The Force Awakens looked, and I still have a huge respect for J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, and the rest of the folks at Disney and Lucasfilm for leaning much more heavily on physical creations over CGI.
BB-8 was a physical prop.
If The Force Awakens had been a one-and-done film, that’s where this essay would end. The film recaptured the magic of Star Wars in a way that the prequels had failed to do, the new owners of Star Wars had successfully killed off the fan-fiction-y Expanded Universe, and put to bed the idea that *everything* with the Star Wars name attached should be considered canonical, and the original look and feel of the franchise, from its ’70s and ’80s heyday, had been successfully recreated. Add into the mix some fun new characters – a rebelling Stormtrooper, whose humanity wouldn’t let him take part in atrocities, a young, clearly powerful Force-wielder, a phenomenal pilot, and the son of Han Solo and Leia, now fallen to the Dark Side – and you had all of the pieces in place for an entertaining story.
Unfortunately for The Force Awakens and its legacy, though, this isn’t where things end.
J.J. Abrams, who penned and directed the film, is a big believer in the “mystery box” style of storytelling: set up an intriguing mystery, then let it unfold. But while Abrams is great at *starting* these kinds of stories… he doesn’t usually seem to have an ending in mind. And because of the way Disney and Lucasfilm set about making the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Abrams and his “mystery box” were simply the wrong choice for the first part of the story. And even as I stepped out of the cinema wearing that silly grin ten years ago, the cracks in the foundation of this story were already beginning to grow – cracks that would eventually lead to the complete and utter ruination of Disney’s sequel trilogy. The Force Awakens was a fundamentally flawed story – but the damage those flaws would do wouldn’t become obvious for a few more years.
J.J. Abrams at the film’s premiere.
J.J. Abrams had written questions into his script that he did not have answers for. In fact, not only had he not written a solution to his “mystery box,” but there really wasn’t a way for this story to unfold – when the baton was inevitably passed to Rian Johnson and Colin Trevorrow – that even made sense. Abrams screwed over Johnson and Trevorrow (who would later leave the project that became The Rise of Skywalker) by writing the beginning of a story that had no plan, no middle, no ending, and that was, in a word, inept. It is the “original sin” of the sequel trilogy, and while fans may dislike The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker far more than The Force Awakens, it was here, in 2015, that the sequels’ undoing had already been set in stone.
“Luke Skywalker is missing!” announced the film’s opening crawl. But without establishing *why* Luke had disappeared – nor even really explaining the extent of his legend and legacy in the galaxy at large – The Force Awakens set up a mystery that had no explanation. And by leaving the choice for why Luke had squirrelled himself away on a hidden planet to the next film and the next writer/director, Abrams abdicated the tremendous responsibility that Disney, Lucasfilm, and generations of Star Wars fans had placed on his shoulders.
Concept art of the Millennium Falcon.
I wrote several years ago that it boggles my mind how an accomplished group of filmmakers – people who created and worked on titles like the Indiana Jones trilogy, Lost, Jurassic Park, E.T., and many more – could have made such a genuinely bone-headed, idiotic, stupid decision when approaching the sequel trilogy. The Force Awakens was never envisioned as a standalone film, it was always meant to be the first instalment of a trilogy. And a trilogy that plans to tell a single story *needs* someone in overall creative control. J.J. Abrams, with his penchant for starting stories he has no intention of finishing and doesn’t know how to finish, was the wrong choice for that role. But Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, and Disney CEO Bob Iger should have known better – and should have taken a more structured, planned approach.
The decision to split up the writing and directing of the three sequel films was taken before work got underway on The Force Awakens – and even at that early stage, the damage was done. Splitting up the trilogy in this way was *always* going to be the wrong decision, and the predictable result is a trio of films that jump around in terms of tone, story, and even characterisation, as each of the subsequent instalments tries to undo something from its predecessor. And I do not exempt The Force Awakens from that criticism – it is the foundation upon which the trilogy should have been built, but because it was so weak and derivative, and because the decision was taken to split up the filmmaking process, it would be firmly tarred with the same brush even if it had been a perfect standalone title.
Which it wasn’t.
Poe, Leia, and Kylo on promo posters for the film.
What I felt had been the film’s biggest strength on that first viewing a decade ago now, in retrospect, feels like one of its most egregious faults and its most significant weakness. By choosing to replay, almost beat-for-beat, 1977’s Star Wars, the film fails to do what any sequel can and should aim to do. Questions that fans had all the way back in 1983 about what the galaxy would look like after the Empire’s defeat not only didn’t get answered, they were totally ignored; sidelined, as Abrams and co. tried to re-tell the same story as before, just with a different coat of paint.
Think about where Return of the Jedi had ended: the Emperor and Vader were dead, theoretically ending the Sith once and for all. The Death Star had been destroyed, and the Rebellion had won the Battle of Endor… but the Empire still existed in much of the rest of the galaxy, and there was no guarantee that the Emperor’s death would mean there could be a return to democracy. And with the deaths of Obi-Wan and Yoda, only Luke could carry on the legacy of the Jedi Order.
Kylo Ren with Snoke.
The Force Awakens basically ignored all of that. In the aftermath of the Emperor’s death, the remaining Imperial factions basically gave up, and the New Republic took control of much of the galaxy. But then, in secret, some Imperial survivors founded the First Order – ruled over by Snoke, a mysterious Dark Sider. Snoke’s apprentice was the helmet-wearing Kylo Ren, the grandson of Vader. And Luke’s Jedi were nowhere to be seen, with his first attempt to train students ending in disaster. This set up a remarkably familiar story about a Dark Side power on the march, a rag-tag group of rebels (sorry, “the resistance”) trying to stop them, a planet-killing superweapon, and a youngster from a desert planet who gets swept up in all of it thanks to a droid carrying an important document.
Is that all Star Wars is? And… is that all Star Wars ever can be? J.J. Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy seemed to think so a decade ago.
And their attitude remains in the franchise to this day. The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, Rogue One, Solo, Andor and The Bad Batch, all of which have been created since 2015, rely on increasingly minor characters and smaller and smaller pieces of the *only* real story that the Star Wars franchise has ever told: the so-called “Skywalker Saga,” which should really be called the “Palpatine Saga,” since he’s the only character who seems to have acted of his own volition and who had any control over events. That’s the legacy of The Force Awakens ten years later: a franchise that has doubled- and tripled-down so hard on nostalgia plays and copying what came before that it’s become narratively exhausted and just plain *boring*.
TIE Fighters and a castle in concept art created for The Force Awakens.
Thanks to the decision to have Kylo kill Han Solo at the climax of the story – a genuinely shocking moment at the cinema – The Force Awakens robbed Star Wars fans of the opportunity to get *any* on-screen interaction between the three heroes of the original trilogy: Luke, Han, and Leia. Han and Leia got some scenes together, and Luke and Leia had a moment in The Last Jedi. But we never got to see Han and Luke together, nor the trio reunited. And that’s really quite sad, if you think about it.
Obviously no one could’ve known, when The Force Awakens entered production, that Carrie Fisher would pass away before the sequel trilogy was complete. But it seems to me that Abrams, Kennedy, and the rest… didn’t really think about how the new trilogy could or should use its legacy characters. There was no Lando Calrissian until The Rise of Skywalker, nor any acknowledgement of his existence. And while The Force Awakens made it clear that Leia and the Resistance believed Luke Skywalker needed to be brought back into the fold… we never really got a good explanation as to *why*.
General Leia of the Resistance.
So as we mark the film’s tenth anniversary… I don’t think there’s all that much to celebrate, to be blunt about it.
The story that The Force Awakens began was supposed to expunge what Star Wars had got wrong, and lay the foundations for a better future. But if you look at the state of the fan community today, the sequel trilogy is disliked, on the whole, *at least* as much as the prequels had been a decade ago, if not more. By playing it too safe, copying too much of what had come before, and failing to really answer any of the questions that a sequel should have been able to, The Force Awakens ended up being a poor film, a weak start, and a major contributing factor to Star Wars’ undeniable decline in the 2010s and 2020s.
We’re at a point now where practically no new Star Wars projects elicit the kind of excitement as The Force Awakens had done a decade ago. Oversaturation is part of that, sure – I haven’t even watched all of the various Disney+ Star Wars shows, because there’s just too many of them at this point. But a big part of it is also that this franchise feels rudderless. By doubling- and tripling-down on repetition, The Force Awakens set the tone for Star Wars’ current direction, and after the controversy of projects like The Last Jedi and The Acolyte, the temptation must be for Disney and Lucasfilm to do more of the same – which feels wrong for a franchise with such a well-constructed and interesting setting.
Finn.
“Fundamentally flawed.” That’s my two-word summary of The Force Awakens a decade later. It was, I do not deny, a well-intentioned film, and there was merit in the idea of “resetting” some of Star Wars after the prequel trilogy. But by playing things *so* safe, and by basically copying many of the plot points from the original trilogy and A New Hope in particular, Star Wars was left with nowhere to go.
Most stories… end. And they should be allowed to end. In-universe, obviously there was work to do for Luke, Han, Lando, and Leia after the Battle of Endor. But given everything we’ve seen since – both the fan-fiction mess of the Expanded Universe, depicting a flawless, all-conquering hero in Luke Skywalker, and now the sequel trilogy with its repetition of the original story – I’m increasingly of the opinion that there shouldn’t have been a Star Wars sequel. Return of the Jedi wasn’t a perfect film, but it killed off Palpatine and Vader, gave the Rebellion a huge win, and saw Luke embrace the legacy of the Jedi. That’s where the story needed to end.
Concept art of Rey arriving at Ahch-To at the end of the film.
In the 21st Century, though, it seems as if no story is allowed to come to a dignified end. And that kind of explains why The Force Awakens came to be in the first place. Rather than create something new, Disney wanted to buy something successful – something that, they believed, would print them endless amounts of cash. It worked with Marvel, so why not Star Wars, too? We’re seeing the limitations of that approach now, and The Force Awakens is really just the first chapter in a sad decline – not only for Star Wars, but for Marvel, Disney’s animated films, and more. Disney’s attitude at the moment is one of franchises, sequels, and remakes. Originality has left the building. And that isn’t *all* the fault of The Force Awakens by any stretch. But the film is symbolic of a moment in time, a moment where things began to change – and not for the better.
So, yeah: ten years ago, I had a great time with this film. Rey, Finn, and Poe were all fun characters that I felt we were just beginning to get to know, and I was curious to see where this story would go and how the First Order would be defeated. But the flaws in that story were already on display, and now that we know how badly off the rails the sequels went, and how poorly-planned the entire project was… it adds a lot of context to The Force Awakens. And it makes it pretty hard to go back and watch the film at all, in all honesty.
I continue to hope for better things from the Star Wars franchise. And there have been some projects over the last decade that worked: Rogue One, for example. But as we mark the tenth anniversary of this landmark film… I can’t help but feel there are way more negatives than positives. Star Wars will continue, of course – there are new projects on the horizon in 2026 and beyond. But are you as excited about *any* of them as you were ten years ago for The Force Awakens? I’m not. And that’s part of this film’s legacy.
Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens is available to stream now on Disney+. The film is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Wars franchise – including The Force Awakens and all other 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 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 the Star Wars franchise, including Return of the Jedi, The Last Jedi, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and the video game Jedi: Survivor.
A couple of years ago, I shared six of my “hot takes” about Star Wars. But it’s always fun to stir the pot, so I’ve come up with six more! These are all controversial takes that I have on Star Wars; opinions that seem to be a minority position based on my limited engagement with the fan community. I thought it could be entertaining and interesting to share some more of these with you today!
This is just for fun, and while I do genuinely hold all of these opinions – I’m not just making up stuff for the sake of clickbait – there’s no need to get into a big argument! Everything we’re going to talk about here is subjective, not objective, and I’m keenly aware that I’m in the minority. They’re called “hot takes” for a reason, so feel free to disagree with me vehemently on any or all of the points I raise!
If you want to check out my first set of “hot takes,” you can find them by clicking or tapping here. Otherwise, this is your last chance to nope out if you don’t want to read some potentially controversial Star Wars opinions!
“Hot Take” #1: The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best Disney+ Star Wars series so far.
Promo poster for The Book of Boba Fett.
I went into The Book of Boba Fett with low expectations. I’ve never been wild about The Mandalorian, thanks in no small part to its decision to bring the Force and Luke Skywalker into a story that was originally pitched as “the adventures of a gunslinger beyond the reach of the New Republic.” Boba Fett has always felt like a non-character to me ever since I first watched the original trilogy in the early ’90s. Add into the mix Disney and Lucasfilm grossly overplaying the nostalgia card in the sequel trilogy, and I truly did not expect to get anything out of The Book of Boba Fett whatsoever.
But I was surprised to find an exciting and interesting story that was just plain fun. It was a nostalgia overload for sure, but it managed to keep me entertained regardless – and by the time Boba and his friends were fighting for their very lives on the streets of Mos Eisley, I was gripped. Maybe it’s because of those low expectations that I had such a good time with it… but whatever the reason may be, I thoroughly enjoyed the series.
Like a bantha!
When I compare it to the other Star Wars offerings that I’ve seen on Disney+, it tops the charts easily. The Mandalorian isn’t great, in my opinion, and I find the show’s protagonist difficult to root for because of how utterly monotone he is. I once described Din Djarin as an “unemotional helmet-wearing slab of nothing;” a character who seems to act at the behest of a room full of TV writers, and not because of any motivation or character trait that I can detect.
Obi-Wan Kenobi was a show so utterly dire that it put me off Star Wars for months afterwards! Trying to write a review of that appalling mess was likewise so unpleasant that I ended up taking a break from writing anything at all here on the website – and I still haven’t finished that review! The mere thought of going back to Obi-Wan Kenobi just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Inside the Sarlaac monster…
I haven’t seen Andor yet – thanks, in no small part, to Obi-Wan Kenobi causing me to turn away from the Star Wars franchise for a while! But I suppose when I get around to watching it it could dethrone The Book of Boba Fett. As could The Acolyte – a project I’m definitely looking forward to as it promises to step back in time to a wholly different era of the Star Wars galaxy.
But The Book of Boba Fett isn’t just my favourite Disney+ Star Wars show by default. The others have their problems, sure… but The Book of Boba Fett could’ve been just as bad. I was surprised at just how entertaining it was, and how a character I had no interest in was able to be transformed into a genuinely fun protagonist. There were themes of loss and revenge as Boba navigated Tatooine’s criminal underworld, but my biggest takeaway was how positive, fun, and light-hearted the show could be. I admit that I’m surprised to see that it wasn’t received more positively by other Star Wars fans.
“Hot Take” #2: “From a certain point of view” is patent nonsense and always has been, and Star Wars is made worse by continually trying to justify it.
What a crock of shit!
Are you old enough to remember when Return of the Jedi was regarded as the weakest Star Wars film? Before the prequels came out, that was the general consensus! When I first watched the Star Wars trilogy it was at the insistence of a friend, and his father was adamant that Return of the Jedi was an awful film and a poor way for the story to conclude. So it seems that divisiveness in the fan community is nothing new – but more on that later!
One of the reasons for Return of the Jedi being held in lower esteem than its two predecessors is the clumsy and just plain stupid line from Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker that coined the phrase “from a certain point of view.” I’ve always considered this explanation to be absolute dog shite, making no sense whatsoever. And Star Wars has since doubled- and tripled-down on this idea… when it really should be ignored and pushed aside.
Luke asked Obi-Wan how his father died in Star Wars.
Let’s step back and set the scene. In Star Wars (a.k.a. A New Hope, the first film in the series), Obi-Wan Kenobi explained to Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader “betrayed and murdered” his father. That line was unambiguous and not subject to interpretation! But by the time The Empire Strikes Back rolled around, the decision had been taken to retcon the relationship between Vader and Luke, transforming them into father and son – leading to one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema.
As with many other things in Star Wars, though, something that should’ve been left alone… wasn’t. We could’ve ignored what Obi-Wan said in that first encounter, accepting that the retcon overwrote it. It would’ve been an inconsistency, sure… but it would have been one that the story could’ve survived. There are also legitimate in-universe reasons for Obi-Wan not wanting to tell Luke the truth; he could’ve apologised or explained his reasoning and left it at that.
The Obi-Wan Kenobi series revisited this idea.
But instead we got this ridiculously convoluted work of semantic gymnastics, with Obi-Wan justifying his lie – and it was made into a lie by the retcon in Empire – by trying to claim that, somehow, Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader aren’t the same person. Even though they’re literally the same person, with the same body, “soul” or essence, Force abilities, and so on. Anakin made a decision to defect from the Jedi to the Sith… but it doesn’t mean he stopped being Anakin. Even thinking about it in the most abstract and poetic terms… he’s still the same person.
Since this line was uttered, Star Wars has continually stumbled by trying to justify it and make the concept stick. The prequel trilogy made a big deal about Palpatine granting Anakin his “new” Sith identity, and the aforementioned Obi-Wan Kenobi series also tried to double-down on this idea, with Obi-Wan saying that the man he knew “is truly dead.” But… he isn’t. He’s different, sure. But he isn’t dead. This whole “from a certain point of view” idea just doesn’t work for me. It didn’t when I first saw it in Return of the Jedi thirty-plus years ago, and every attempt that the franchise has made to lean into it hasn’t helped. I wish Star Wars would quietly drop this idea and move on!
“Hot Take” #3: Franchise fatigue is beginning to set in.
This is just a snapshot of part of the Star Wars category on Disney+.
Though not as oversaturated as Star Trek has been in recent years, I’d argue that Star Wars is very much in danger of running too hot. Too many shows and films in too short a span of time is going to lead to franchise fatigue – and while there will always be fans who will turn up for every new project, the more casual audience that any series relies on will begin to drift away.
I think we’re already seeing this, at least to a limited extent. Solo: A Star Wars Story was the first film in the franchise to make a loss at the box office, and it was released only a few months after The Last Jedi. On Disney+, too, it seems that more recent shows and seasons have attracted less attention and excitement. Fewer people turned up for Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett than had for the first season of The Mandalorian, for instance.
A Star Destroyer as seen in the opening shot of Star Wars in 1977.
Since the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm went through more than a decade ago, Star Wars has hardly been off our screens. The sequel trilogy came along in the back half of the 2010s, with Rogue One and Solo in cinemas as well. And since the launch of Disney+, there have been new live-action and animated shows every year. With several of these projects overlapping each other or being spin-offs that rely on older films or shows to set them up, keeping up with Star Wars and knowing what’s what and who’s who can feel like a full-time job!
With Disney+ in poor shape financially, the corporation is relying heavily on its biggest brands to bring in and retain subscribers. But the likes of Star Wars and even Marvel are in danger of burning out; turning away audiences due to convoluted interconnected storylines or just because there’s a desire to look for something new and different. A few years ago, a massive audience would’ve been hyped for a live-action Star Wars series. But now? I can almost hear the collective sigh as yet another season gets sharted out onto Disney+.
I haven’t seen much excitement for the likes of Skeleton Crew recently…
I genuinely don’t know what the solution is here. The truly hard-core Star Wars fans will, of course, keep showing up for any and every new project. But how long can the franchise rely on those folks if a wider audience of more casual viewers can’t keep up or loses interest? As Disney recently found out to its cost with the Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Disney World… there are only so many of those hard-core fans.
Maybe you don’t feel a sense of franchise fatigue just yet – and that’s okay. If you don’t, I’m genuinely happy for you! But with so much Star Wars content on the horizon, with new series, films, and video games coming every few weeks… how long can that last? How long will it be before you say, “eh, I think I’ll skip this one and watch something else?” In my opinion, no franchise can keep up this frenetic pace for very long. Star Wars has already been pushing it for several years, and I wonder when it will have to slow down.
“Hot Take” #4: Jedi: Survivor was crap.
Battling battle droids in Jedi: Survivor.
I absolutely adored Jedi: Fallen Order when I played it. Going on that adventure with Cal Kestis and the crew of the Stinger Mantis was fantastic, so I was incredibly excited for the game’s sequel in 2023. But as you’ll know if you read my review of the game… I really didn’t like it. Mechanically and narratively, the game failed – and that’s before we get into the bugs and glitches that have come to define its poor launch.
An open-world design is not something that suits every game, and Jedi: Survivor was made significantly worse than its predecessor by attempting to go down this route. The clumsily-designed maps, particularly on the main planet of Koboh, really got in the way of the story and immersion. It made no sense to me that Cal and his friends would hide out in a “quiet, out-of-the-way” settlement like Ramblers Reach… when that settlement was a stone’s throw from both a massive pirate base and two Imperial outposts.
The game’s open-world design put Ramblers Reach literally a few metres away from the Empire and pirates.
In terms of story, I found Jedi: Survivor to be an unimpressive relation to its illustrious predecessor. Cal was teamed up with a character who was obviously, from almost his first second on screen, a “secret bad guy in disguise.” This plot point was so flagrantly telegraphed that it might as well have been lit up in neon. And the return of Master Cordova, a character who played a huge role in the story of the first game, was handled incredibly poorly.
There were some narrative highlights: Cere’s story took her full-circle, for instance, and while I could see Bode’s betrayal coming from a mile away, Cal’s reaction to it was genuinely emotional. But the foundations of this story felt weak and almost random, with Cal stumbling into a random cave, Greez accidentally building his cantina atop ancient Jedi ruins… and a convoluted plot involving an ancient Jedi sealed in a bacta tank and a “lost” planet that no one knew how to reach. Compared to the story of Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor came up short.
A duel in Jedi: Survivor.
Obviously we can’t discuss Jedi: Survivor without commenting on the game’s shockingly poor condition. I’ve uninstalled it now and haven’t touched it since September, so I can’t comment on its current state. But I saw the reviews Jedi: Survivor received upon launch and chose to wait several months before jumping in – only to find that it was still in an absolutely appalling state, with bugs, glitches, frame-rate problems, stuttering, and low-res textures all getting in the way of the experience. The fault for this lies with publisher Electronic Arts, who chose to force Jedi: Survivor to be released before it was ready.
At the beginning of 2023, I genuinely expected Jedi: Survivor to be in contention for my “game of the year” award. Instead, for a variety of reasons it ended up as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. A sequel is in the works, and while I’m going to be much more sceptical this time around… I have to at least cross my fingers and hope for something better.
“Hot Take” #5: The sequel trilogy won’t ever be retconned out of existence.
The Holdo manoeuvre is canon. Suck it, haters!
I’m not sure how hot of a take this really is, because I think most folks understand that Disney and Lucasfilm aren’t going to turn around one day and announce that the sequel trilogy is suddenly non-canon! But in some corners of the Star Wars fan community, this fantastical notion has taken root. I’ve heard some big-time fan blogs and channels with sizeable audiences pushing the idea that some or all of the sequel trilogy – and The Last Jedi in particular – are about to be “erased” from canon or overwritten.
Like any franchise, Star Wars has grown and evolved over the years. Stories, characters, and themes that may have been controversial or hated at first tend to be more accepted with the passage of time, as we’ve seen with both Return of the Jedi and the prequel trilogy. The same is sure to happen for the sequels, given enough time. Fifteen years from now, they’ll just be part of the furniture; inseparable from the rest of Star Wars.
Rey in The Force Awakens.
In 1999, I really didn’t like The Phantom Menace. In fact, the only part of the prequel trilogy that I even considered to be passable was Revenge of the Sith – and that dim praise comes with multiple caveats! But as time has passed, the prequels have been folded into the broader lore and canon of Star Wars quite effectively – to the point that I’d never even consider the idea of overwriting them at this stage.
Many of the fans who seem to be arguing most passionately in favour of the sequel trilogy being scrubbed are – somewhat ironically, perhaps – younger folks who first came to Star Wars when the prequels were in cinemas. The prequel trilogy was their way into the Star Wars fan community, so the idea that those films could’ve been disliked or hated as much as the sequels are today doesn’t seem to register for a lot of folks. But they were… and the fan community was able to recover!
“Somehow, Palpatine returned…”
I don’t know what the future holds for Star Wars. Maybe it will go on for years and years, producing new content all the while. Or maybe it’ll take another decades-long break before triumphantly returning, as it has in the past. But either way, the sequel trilogy will remain part of that story. It may not be beneficial to Disney and Lucasfilm to put it front-and-centre right now, particularly as fans seem to long for more stories set during the prequel era or the time of the original trilogy. But the sequel era is developing stories, spin-offs, and a lore all of its own – and building on that will be a key part of Star Wars’ future.
The idea that a billion-dollar trilogy of films, complete with spin-offs, merchandise, and more would ever be dumped or retconned out of existence is nothing more than a juvenile fantasy; the ultimate “cope” from folks who can’t stand those films. And look… I agree that the world would be a much better place if The Rise of Skywalker had never existed. That film was an absolute catastrophe! But it won’t ever be erased or overwritten – and I’m okay with that. I’m still content to give Star Wars a chance to impress me with what comes next.
“Hot Take” #6: Writing a sequel to Return of the Jedi that didn’t feel like tacked-on fan fiction was probably impossible.
The main characters at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Stories end. Every story eventually comes to an end, with its character arcs, sub-plots, and main narrative threads all being drawn to a close. And for better or worse, Return of the Jedi was the end of Star Wars; the final, climactic battle of the Palpatine-versus-Skywalker saga. The Emperor was dead, Imperial forces were implied to be in disarray, the threat of the Death Star had been removed, and it seemed as if the Rebel Alliance had won the day. After three films – or six, if we include the prequel trilogy – the story had come to an end.
And what an end it was! Saving the galaxy, destroying both Sith Lords, restoring the Jedi Order, and setting the stage for a return to freedom and democracy after two decades of oppressive autocracy is a great place for the curtain to fall and the credits to roll. And having seen both the impotent fan fiction of the old Expanded Universe and Disney’s sequel trilogy, one thing seems abundantly clear to me: that should have been the end. There just wasn’t space to add a new story after the events of Return of the Jedi.
The Death Star explodes above the forest moon of Endor.
It’s ironic that Disney is the company that purchased the Star Wars brand, because the sequel trilogy is a great example of what I like to call the “Disney sequel problem.” Every Disney film – of the classic and renaissance eras, at any rate – ended with a “happily ever after” moment, with the heroes celebrating a hard-fought victory and the baddies vanquished. It proved impossible to make a sequel to those kinds of stories that didn’t feel either tacked-on or derivative.
And both of those labels apply to the Expanded Universe and the Disney-created sequel trilogy. The First Order basically picked up where the Empire left off, and the revelation that Palpatine had been secretly pulling the strings the whole time completely undermined whole narrative arcs from the original and prequel films. The Force Awakens was basically a carbon copy of A New Hope, and The Rise of Skywalker tried its best to be Return of the Jedi. No part of the story was original, and as I wrote once, the entire sequel trilogy feels like a bait-and-switch. Instead of answering questions about the Star Wars galaxy that fans had been asking for years, the films simply re-told the same story with a different coat of paint.
Kylo Ren and General Hux in The Force Awakens.
And I don’t see how it could’ve been different. After killing the Emperor and Darth Vader, there was no “big bad” left to defeat. Mopping up the leaderless remnants of the Empire would’ve felt anticlimactic, and replacing the Emperor with Snoke and Vader with Kylo Ren was just cheap and derivative. The same feelings would have arisen if a new Emperor had emerged, a new Sith Lord had been discovered, or the First Order had been given a different name to match one of the silly Expanded Universe stories.
Unfortunately, modern entertainment franchises can’t be allowed to come to a dignified end. They must be resurrected and kept on life-support at all costs, with new stories being churned out to suit the needs of corporate shareholders who are too cowardly to invest in new stories and characters. After saving the galaxy and defeating the Sith, Return of the Jedi left Star Wars with nowhere to go narratively – but Disney and Lucasfilm went there anyway.
So that’s it!
The Jedi Council.
I hope I didn’t upset too many people with this list!
There’s still plenty to enjoy with Star Wars, even if I’ve found a few things to pick on this time. In 2024, I’m looking forward to The Acolyte on Disney+ and to getting my hands on the remastered Dark Forces video game – so I’m still engaged with the franchise. I also like to keep up to date with big developments, and I’m sure that I’ll eventually get around to watching most of the live-action series and seasons that I’ve missed.
I hope this has been a bit of fun, and perhaps thought-provoking in places. Although these are “hot takes,” it wasn’t my intention to upset anyone or cause anger and division. The Star Wars fan community has more than enough of that! At the end of the day, we all have things we like and things we dislike in our favourite films and franchises.
Until next time… and may the Force be with you!
The Star Wars franchise – including all films, games, and other 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 the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
One of the most disappointing things about the Star Wars sequel trilogy was that it didn’t actually advance the overall story of the saga in a meaningful way. Think about where it began and ended: a Dark Side, authoritarian power had been defeated in battle, but the war was still to be won. Palpatine had been killed. The galactic government had been destroyed and democracy would have to be restored. One young Jedi survived and hoped to rebuild the Jedi Order. Questions that we had all the way back in the ’80s about what would come next after Return of the Jedi weren’t answered; they were given a new lick of paint and asked again.
All of which is to say that there’s a lot of potential in a story set after the sequel trilogy and the “final” defeat of Palpatine. Seeing what will come next for the Star Wars galaxy as it takes steps toward a restoration of democracy and a recreation of the Jedi Order – in some form, at least – is something I’ve been genuinely interested in seeing since I first watched Return of the Jedi all those years ago.
Rey is coming back to Star Wars… and soon.
I confess that I’m surprised to see Disney and Lucasfilm creating a “sequel sequel” so soon after The Rise of Skywalker. The trilogy proved divisive overall, and regardless of which part fans consider to be the worst, the general consensus is that these films weren’t as strong or enjoyable as they could and should have been. Returning to the sequels’ principal character is, therefore, a bold move.
I felt that there was a ton of potential in Rey as a character. The idea of a Force diad – light rising to meet the darkness – was an interesting one that the sequels, sadly, didn’t do justice to. However, as a young, inspirational character that others could look to for leadership, Rey had a lot going for her. Far from being just a “female Luke Skywalker,” as some dismissively suggested, there were nuances in Rey’s characterisation that took her to different thematic places – at least in the first two parts of the sequel trilogy.
Rey at the end of the sequel trilogy.
Although we’ve caught a glimpse of Luke Skywalker and his attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order, those sequences in both the sequel films and the Disney+ spin-off shows are impacted by the knowledge of the tragedy that will ultimately befall Luke and his new generation of Jedi. He tried his best, but ultimately all Luke could do was pass the torch to Rey – and the task of creating a new and improved Light Side order now falls to her.
That idea holds genuine appeal, as does seeing the galaxy recovering from decades of oppression and civil war. There’s the possibility of telling an inspiring and uplifting story all about finding hope in dark times, and rebuilding from a fascistic dystopia. These are things that have real-world parallels that could prove incredibly timely!
A massive fleet of Star Destroyers.
Is Rey the right character to take the lead in such a story, though? After a disappointingly regressive and arguably quite bland arc across the sequel trilogy, Rey ended in a pretty uninteresting place. As the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, Rey’s story seems to continue Star Wars’ disappointing trend of seeing the Force as a kind of metaphor for aristocracy; that those who are entrusted with power must derive that power from their bloodline, instead of discovering it on their own.
There’s also the question of whether the Jedi Order deserves to be reconstructed. In The Last Jedi, Luke was acutely aware of the failures of the old Jedi Order – and that’s also one of the key themes of the prequel trilogy: that the Order had grown complacent and arrogant to such an extent that its members couldn’t fathom the idea of somebody like Palpatine operating right under their noses. This is Star Wars, though, and the Jedi are an unshakable part of the franchise, so surely the name won’t be dropped!
The failure of the Jedi Order is one of the themes of the prequel trilogy – and The Last Jedi.
The Rise of Skywalker ended in such a way as to tee up future stories, just as Return of the Jedi had done four decades earlier. The question on my mind, though, is this: is it too soon? It took more than thirty years for Return of the Jedi to get a sequel, and with the disappointment of the sequels still fresh in the minds of many fans, I’m struggling to see how this new film could hope to find success.
At best, a new story featuring Rey will prove to be divisive, continuing the divisions in the Star Wars fan community that have persisted for the past few years at least. Doubling-down on a character that many fans were unimpressed with at best is admirable in some ways… but it doesn’t strike me as being a particularly smart business or storytelling decision. The simple fact is that Rey’s presence in the story is a challenge; a hurdle that the new film will have to overcome.
Rey using her Force powers.
Again, this is something that the passage of time would almost certainly damp down. Look at the reputation the prequel trilogy has today: it’s held in high regard by many fans, especially younger ones, and while there are still grumpy old holdouts like myself who remain unimpressed… the prequels on the whole have gone through somewhat of a renaissance. As fans who watched and loved those films as kids have grown up and continued to participate in the Star Wars fan community, the prequels have been – to an extent – rehabilitated.
The same is true of Return of the Jedi. Though never as controversial as the prequels, when I first encountered Star Wars in the early ’90s, Return of the Jedi was considered its weakest part by far. And it’s easy to see why: “from a certain point of view” is patent nonsense, Luke and Leia being retconned to be brother and sister was just silly, and the Ewoks were an army of teddy bears who defeated the Empire and ruined Palpatine’s carefully-laid plan! Yet you just don’t hear those criticisms any more outside of a small subset of Star Wars fans; Return of the Jedi has been rehabilitated by the passage of time.
Are you old enough to remember when everyone hated the Ewoks?
In time, many of the most divisive and heavily-criticised aspects of the sequel trilogy will be absorbed into Star Wars’ broader canon. We’ve already seen moves in shows like The Mandalorian and films like Rogue One to flesh out story points and new additions like cloning or hyperspace tracking, and as Star Wars continues to expand – both on the screen and beyond, with books, comics, games, and so on – Rey’s status as the grandchild of Palpatine and other controversial (and silly) elements of the sequels will likewise become more broadly accepted.
But this process takes time.
With the sequel trilogy still fresh in the minds of most fans, and with the general consensus being that either The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker are among the worst films in the entire franchise, building a new story atop that so soon feels like it’s asking for trouble. Return to Rey by all means – expanding her story might go some way to making up for its deficiencies in the sequel trilogy. But not yet. It’s too soon.
The “final” demise of Palpatine.
There’s also the point that I’ve made before a dozen times or more: Star Wars has only ever told one real story. Despite existing for more than 45 years, with nine mainline films, two major spin-offs, several live-action TV shows, animated series, books, games, and more… Star Wars has still only told one real story: the “Palpatine saga,” focusing on the rise, fall, rise again, and fall again of Emperor Palpatine. A new story focusing on Rey wouldn’t do the one thing that I’ve been calling on Star Wars to do for years: move on.
The Star Wars galaxy is one of the finest fictional settings ever created, in my view. It has millions of inhabited planets, thousands of alien races, space magic and sci-fi technology, dozens of named factions, and tens of thousands of years of galactic history. But every mainline Star Wars project has been denied access to the vast majority of this sandbox, being forced to return to the same time period, the same planets, the same factions, and even the same handful of characters and families time and again. Surely it’s time to knock it off now and try something genuinely new and different. Because of her involvement in the sequels, and because she’s been retconned to be a member of Palpatine’s family, Rey can’t achieve that objective on two counts.
Rey in The Force Awakens.
Can we have any confidence that Lucasfilm has learned the lessons of the sequel trilogy? Not only was the decision to split up the writing and directing of the trilogy a catastrophic mistake, but allowing someone like J.J. Abrams to essentially re-tell large parts of the original trilogy with a different coat of paint was poor. With Star Wars so intent on doubling-down on the only story it’s ever told, and a lack of boldness in the Disney boardroom seemingly refusing to consider other options, there’s a very real danger that a new sequel will repeat many of the mistakes that the franchise has made in recent years.
Several recent Star Wars projects have been little more than fan-servicey mess, with the utterly illogical or regressive inclusions of characters for no reason other than to compensate for a weak story. Some of these – like Obi-Wan Kenobi – actually ended up damaging the original films and the characters they included. So I feel more than a little concerned that a sequel featuring Rey – and thus continuing, in some form, the “Skywalker saga” – will do the same.
Rey in The Last Jedi.
So I guess that’s where I’m at when it comes to this “sequel sequel.” My main message isn’t “never do this, it’s a terrible idea,” but rather “now isn’t the right time.” As the dust settles on the sequels, and upcoming projects – both on screen and off – incorporate that story into the broader landscape of Star Wars, passions will surely settle. As younger fans who first came to Star Wars with the sequels grow up and come of age, the fan community as a whole will shift to becoming more supportive of those films. When that’s happened – say in fifteen to twenty years time – then it might finally be the right time to return to Rey. But not yet.
If I was in charge of planning the next steps for Star Wars over at Disney and Lucasfilm, I wouldn’t have given the green light to this project. My focus would be on diversifying Star Wars – stepping back in time to the days of the Old Republic, taking a look at new characters, and shining a spotlight on the denizens of the galaxy who aren’t blessed with space magic! Rey will undoubtedly have her moment to return to Star Wars… but for me, it feels incredibly premature to even be considering bringing her back now.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker) is available to stream now on Disney+. The films are also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Wars franchise – including all titles 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 the entire Star Wars franchise, from A New Hope to Obi-Wan Kenobi and beyond.
A little while ago I gave six of my “hot takes” on the Star Trek franchise, so this time it’s Star Wars’ turn to receive some controversial opinions! These are all opinions on the Star Wars franchise that, at least based on my limited engagement with the broader fan community, are either unpopular or will prove to be divisive.
This is supposed to be a bit of thought-provoking fun, so more than ever I ask you to keep in mind that all of these opinions are subjective, not objective! I’m not trying to claim that my perspectives on these broad and complex topics are in any way factual or unquestionable; I’m simply offering up my singular take on these points for the purposes of entertainment. I’ll try to explain why I feel the way I do – but I already know that many folks can and will disagree. And that’s okay! The Star Wars fan community is big enough for respectful and civil disagreement about all manner of subjects.
With all of that out of the way, this is your last chance to jump ship if you aren’t interested in some potentially controversial Star Wars opinions!
“Hot Take” #1: The sequel trilogy having problems hasn’t magically redeemed the prequel trilogy or made it any more enjoyable.
Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace.
One of the strangest arguments, in my view, that has been put forward in recent years by critics of the Star Wars sequel trilogy is that the prequels look so much better by comparison. Although I find Revenge of the Sith to be an okay film, I’ve never been wild about the first two parts of the prequel trilogy in particular, and the fact that The Rise of Skywalker and, to a lesser extent, The Force Awakens have issues doesn’t change any of that.
The prequels had a planned story from the start, and George Lucas knew which characters he wanted to include, what roles he wanted to give them, and what their arcs would look like from beginning to end. There were changes and edits along the way, but the broad strokes of the story had been planned in advance. This is something that the sequel trilogy lacked, with different writers and directors being given free rein to tell whatever stories they wanted – something widely considered to be a mistake. But just because the producers of the sequel trilogy screwed this up, that doesn’t mean that the uninspiring, overexplained backstory that comprised much of the prequels is any better as a result. It was a planned story, sure, but an unnecessary, bloated, and occasionally just plain boring one that did a lot to detract from the intimidating nature of Darth Vader in particular.
Padmé and Anakin in Attack of the Clones.
Though it’s difficult – and perhaps even a little unfair – to try to summarise the main issue with an entire trio of films in just a few words, I’d say that the sequels went wrong by trying to be too much of a copy of the original films, and then by trying to course-correct following the divisive reaction to The Last Jedi. But the prequels went wrong by telling a story that was ultimately unnecessary; we didn’t need three films chronicling the minutia of Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall to know that he was an evil villain who could be redeemed by the residual love that he had for his son.
And in many ways, the prequels undermined the story that the original trilogy had told. The inclusion of things like a nine-year-old Anakin being the builder of C-3PO was just plain dumb, and smaller things like Yoda not being the Jedi who trained Obi-Wan, as he would later claim to Luke, ended up contradicting points in the original films. Some of these are arguably nitpicks, but in a story that was weak and muddled, smaller points like these become much more noticeable and begin to pile up.
A Republic battle cruiser in Revenge of the Sith.
At the end of the day, many of the prequels’ biggest defenders are folks who grew up watching them as kids. For many people in their teens and twenties, these films were their first point of contact with the Star Wars franchise. And there’s nothing wrong with loving the prequel trilogy – there are points from all three films that I enjoyed, and I even put together a list of some of my favourites for Star Wars Day a couple of years ago.
But just because the sequel trilogy had issues with its production and its narrative, that doesn’t mean that the prequels are somehow made better in hindsight. For me, the prequels remain a disappointment, and although I was scathing in my review of The Rise of Skywalker when I saw it in 2020, for me it’s still a toss-up as to whether it’s marginally better or worse than The Phantom Menace.
“Hot Take” #2: Star Wars needs to end its overreliance on the same handful of legacy characters.
Darth Vader loomed very large indeed over the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
Since it premiered all the way back in 1977, the Star Wars franchise has focused on a tiny number of characters, only a few of whom have been explored in any detail. Prequels, sequels, spin-offs, and even supposedly-unrelated projects have all brought back into play the same handful of characters again and again, and sooner rather than later I’d like to see that stop.
The Star Wars galaxy is, in my view, one of the finest fictional settings ever created. It has both a breadth and a depth that other settings could only dream of: dozens of factions, hundreds of alien races, thousands of inhabited planets, and tens of thousands of years’ worth of galactic history – all of which could be explored in a way that would be absolutely riveting. But so far, writers and creatives have been limited to one tiny corner of this potentially vast sandbox, forced to re-use the same characters, revisit the same planets, and stay within the confines of the same relatively short sixty-year span of galactic history centred around the rise and fall of the Empire.
Boba Fett reappeared in The Mandalorian Season 2.
One of the reasons I love the video game Knights of the Old Republic so much is because it stepped away from much of what was familiar about Star Wars. There were some recognisable planets, and of course we spent time with the Republic and the Jedi, but beyond that the story took place thousands of years prior to the events of the films and introduced an entirely new cast of characters. There were definite inspirations from the original and prequel trilogies, but Knights of the Old Republic was separate from them.
That’s what I’d like to see Star Wars do more of. Instead of telling us another story about Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, tell us something else. Introduce us to a new Jedi, a new Sith, or better yet, new Light and Dark Side factions. Or abandon the Force altogether for once and show us how the 99.9% of the galaxy who aren’t blessed with space magic live! That’s what I hoped that a series like The Mandalorian might do.
Luke Skywalker in The Book of Boba Fett.
George Lucas once spoke of symmetry in Star Wars, saying that its stories should “rhyme.” But there’s a huge difference between rhyming and being a carbon copy of what came before, or between rhyming and diving ever deeper into less and less important chapters of backstory. Unfortunately, because Star Wars has never broken away from its previously-established characters, doing so now is something that must feel like a risk to the suits at Lucasfilm and Disney – and if there’s one thing that makes corporations uncomfortable, it’s risk.
However, as I’ve recently argued, Star Wars can’t just coast forever on nostalgia for its original films and the only real story it’s ever told. Sooner rather than later those characters and settings will be exhausted, spent of all storytelling potential. Then the only remaining choice will be to either try something genuinely new and different… or to bring the entire franchise to an end.
“Hot Take” #3: The Last Jedi will be highly-regarded in fifteen or twenty years’ time.
Luke Skywalker heads out to meet the forces of the First Order.
I unapologetically love The Last Jedi – it’s the highlight of the sequel trilogy for me by far. But I recognise that it was divisive in the fan community, and that some narrative decisions seem to have been made to be deliberately challenging to the expectations its audience had. For me, those points succeeded – and just like Star Wars fans eventually came to accept patent nonsense like “from a certain point of view,” or the arbitrary and unexplained decision to make Luke and Leia into brother and sister at the last moment, in time I think many of The Last Jedi’s story beats will just become accepted part of Star Wars lore.
Moreover, as fans who are kids today grow up and look back on the sequels, we’ll probably see a reappraisal of those films within the wider discourse of the fan community. Just as the prequels are supported today by fans in their teens and twenties, in fifteen or twenty years’ time I think we’ll see a similar movement in support of the sequels from fans for whom those films were their first contact with the Star Wars franchise.
Ben Solo’s turn to the Dark Side was shocking and unexpected.
In particular, the merits of The Last Jedi will come to be reappraised. The film wasn’t perfect, but it got a lot of things right, and after The Force Awakens had played it very safe by basically copying large parts of the plot of A New Hope, The Last Jedi really tried hard to take Star Wars to completely different narrative and thematic places.
Unfortunately many of its successes were overridden by The Rise of Skywalker – which itself will gradually become accepted as part of the wider lore of Star Wars, too – but that doesn’t mean that the film can’t be enjoyed on its own merits. Decisions like Rey’s parents being “no one” of consequence or Kylo Ren fully embracing his inner Dark Side to claim the mantle of Supreme Leader are – at least in my opinion – storylines that had massive appeal and huge potential. I’m sure that they’ll be looked upon much more kindly in the years ahead.
The Holdo Manoeuvre.
If the Star Wars franchise continues its current trend of doubling-down on cheap nostalgia plays and samey, almost repetitive storylines, then The Last Jedi’s attempts to shake things up will come to be seen in a new light. Star Wars is in real danger of becoming stale – if every story focuses on the same few characters, or characters who are so similar as to fill functionally the same role, then the franchise will feel like it’s lost a step and stopped innovating.
It may take a while for attitudes to shift, and there will of course be some fans for whom The Last Jedi will always remain one of the worst parts of the Star Wars franchise. But I really do believe that in a few years’ time the film will find more defenders than detractors, and will come to be an accepted and even celebrated part of Star Wars’ cinematic canon. Hopefully there’ll still be a Star Wars at that point, with new films and shows being created!
“Hot Take” #4: So-called “Jedi Robes” were originally just typical desert attire and not something ceremonial or unique to the Jedi Order.
“Old Ben” Kenobi with Luke and R2D2 in A New Hope.
One thing that’s always bugged me, even as far back as Return of the Jedi, is how so-called “Jedi Robes” are basically just the typical outfit one would expect to wear in a desert environment like Tatooine. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s outfit in the original film was never intended to be some kind of ceremonial marker of the ancient Jedi Order, but rather a costume inspired by desert cultures around the world.
Look at typical outfits worn in North Africa and on the Arabian peninsula as examples. The typical thobe (thawb) and bisht that are worn by men in those regions was part of the inspiration for the outfit, along with outfits worn by Bedouin and nomadic peoples. These outfits are designed to be worn in hot desert conditions, and that’s exactly what we see in “Old Ben” Kenobi’s costume when he encounters Luke Skywalker.
This mistake was first made with Anakin’s ghost in Return of the Jedi.
Luke is actually dressed very similarly to Kenobi at that point. The outfit he wears is similar to what Kenobi was wearing under his cloak – a kind of loose-fitting belted tunic. Again, this is something pretty standard in desert regions and makes sense for a planet like Tatooine. There’s nothing about either of their outfits that screams “religious order,” and it’s always struck me as odd – and more than a little arbitrary – that Kenobi’s desert cloak ended up being the basis for the ceremonial robes worn by everyone in the Jedi Order.
In-universe, it doesn’t even make sense for “Old Ben” to be cutting about Tatooine in his Jedi robes – if indeed that’s what they’re supposed to be. He’s in hiding on that world, and as we saw in the opening act of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, changing out of his robes into civilian attire would help him blend in. Putting his robes on to go exploring would draw unnecessary and unwanted attention to him at a time when he’s still one of the Empire’s most-wanted Jedi survivors.
Members of the Jedi Council in their robes in Attack of the Clones.
It would’ve been nice to see more diversity in the outfits worn by Jedi Knights and Masters, particularly during the prequel era. We could have seen a whole new range of costumes introduced, including elaborate ceremonial attire if there was a need for that. But simply copying what “Old Ben” wore on Tatooine and slapping it on every Jedi character has never made sense.
While I accept that this is now an established part of the lore of Star Wars and isn’t going to change, it’s something that’s always bugged me!
“Hot Take” #5: Star Wars doesn’t need the Jedi and the Force to tell fun stories.
Rey and Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi.
When The Mandalorian was announced a couple of years ago I felt that it had a truly exciting premise. Following “the adventures of a gunslinger far beyond the reach of the New Republic” sounded absolutely fascinating, and would have been a huge departure from anything we’d seen the franchise do before.
But within two episodes the Force came back into play, and by the end of the second season we’d been reintroduced to Luke Skywalker himself. I still find The Mandalorian to be disappointing as a result; it didn’t live up to expectations and very quickly fell back to retread the same ground as other Star Wars projects.
Finn wielding a lightsaber in The Force Awakens.
The Book of Boba Fett likewise brought the Force and Luke Skywalker into its story, and again there was a missed opportunity to show us how the 99.9% of the galaxy who aren’t Force-users live. I’m hopeful that one day a Star Wars project will be bold enough to leave the Force behind entirely – and perhaps it’ll finally happen in Andor, Rogue Squadron, or one of the upcoming films or television shows!
As I said above, the Star Wars galaxy is massive and densely-populated – and the vast, vast majority of the population doesn’t use the Force or rely on it in any way. Characters like Han Solo didn’t even believe that the Force existed at first – and that attitude could well be prevalent across much of the population. Showing us characters like that could take all manner of different forms, and I’d be really interested to see some completely different projects set in the Star Wars universe.
A New Republic pilot in The Mandalorian.
Just as a couple of examples, we could see a kind of noir-inspired crime drama set in the underworld of a planet like Coruscant. Or we could see an ER-esque medical drama that follows the exploits of doctors and nurses at a hospital. There’s more to Star Wars than just Jedi Knights, Sith Lords, and the Force, and while we all love a good lightsaber duel… Star Wars can be more than that, if there’s someone bold enough in creative control to make those decisions.
So far, every Star Wars project has included the Force or Force-wielders to a greater or lesser degree. I’d like to see a film or TV show that completely sets the Force aside. Not only would it expand our knowledge of the Star Wars galaxy away from those familiar elements, but it would be thematically and narratively different by default. And telling new and different stories is something that the Star Wars franchise needs to start doing!
“Hot Take” #6: The prequel trilogy told a story that was ultimately unnecessary.
Young Anakin in The Phantom Menace.
This isn’t saying “the prequels were bad” and commenting on things like the quality of the writing or specific narrative choices. Instead, what I’m saying is that the story of the prequel trilogy didn’t actually add anything of consequence to the Star Wars saga. Everything we knew about characters like Palpatine, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and of course Darth Vader had already been explained in the original films.
At best, the prequels were padded backstory. They showed us the Clone Wars firsthand, instead of the conflict being left as a rather ambiguous part of the saga’s lore that was referenced but unexplained. They explicitly showed us things like the original duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan that had been referenced, and confirmed that Obi-Wan had been responsible for causing Darth Vader’s life-limiting injuries. But nothing that they brought to the table was necessary or couldn’t be inferred from the original films.
Palpatine seizes power in Revenge of the Sith.
By the time it had been decided to make Darth Vader Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back, his pathway toward redemption was possible. He was an evil villain, but he had enough residual goodness and light inside him thanks to the love he had for his son that it was possible for him to betray the Emperor. We didn’t need three films charting Anakin’s rise and fall to tell us that.
Nor did we need to see Obi-Wan Kenobi training Anakin to inform their conflict. Darth Vader told us all we needed to know in a single line when they were reunited aboard the Death Star. Even Palpatine’s scheming and the way he played both sides in the Clone Wars didn’t really do much to explain his role in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi – and certainly wasn’t necessary to understand his position or role in either story.
The “birth” of Darth Vader.
There are things to celebrate about the prequels, don’t get me wrong. And there’s nothing inherently wrong or problematic about stepping back in time to look at characters in their younger days or to go into more detail about some of the events that preceded what we’d seen in the original films. But the Star Wars prequel trilogy padded out that story without really adding to it anything of substance.
The simple fact is that we knew all we needed to know at the time of the original films for those stories to be exciting and engrossing. I never felt that I was missing any crucial context to understand Luke, Leia, Han, Palpatine, or Vader, and while the prequels certainly expanded the story of Star Wars – and in many ways set the stage for its ongoing success – I feel that the reason the story never really resonated with me is because it never seemed like it was one that needed to be told.
So that’s it!
Han Solo.
I hope we’re still friends after all of that! Just remember that these are simply the opinions of one person, presented here for a bit of fun and perhaps to be thought-provoking.
Despite criticisms of some individual films and stories, I consider myself a fan of Star Wars. I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I first sat down to watch the original trilogy at the insistence of a friend in the early 1990s, and I’ve supported Star Wars at the cinema, on television, and in the gaming realm ever since. There’s a lot to love – even if I have some controversial “hot takes” on the franchise sometimes!
Just this year I’ve enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Andor and Lego Star Wars: Summer Vacation will have to offer, too. So I hope this was a bit of fun as we look ahead to some of those upcoming Star Wars projects.
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.
There’s some kind of series or miniseries focusing on R2D2 and C-3PO in development. There’s a prequel to Rogue One focusing on Cassian Andor. There’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, which will bring back the classic character to look at his life in between the prequels and the original films. There’s The Book of Boba Fett, in which Boba Fett is inexplicably back from the dead. There’s Ahsoka, a spin-off from The Mandalorian focusing on a character from the animated shows.
Boba Fett is one of several minor characters returning to Star Wars.
All of these projects indicate to me that the higher-ups at Disney and Lucasfilm don’t really know how to handle the Star Wars franchise. They’re intent on looking backwards at Star Wars’ past, seeming to think that what the franchise was is all it can ever be in the future. The result is spin-offs from spin-offs, prequels to prequels, unimportant chapters being thrown under the microscope, and characters of decreasing importance thrust into the spotlight.
Though it was purported to be a spin-off from The Mandalorian, one of the few announced projects that seemed to have any semblance of originality was Rangers of the New Republic. The series was to have looked at the New Republic – the galactic government which was created by the Rebel Alliance following the events of Return of the Jedi – in far more detail than ever before. However, Rangers of the New Republic has now been cancelled.
Logo for Rangers of the New Republic.
The New Republic hasn’t been explored in much detail in Star Wars’ main canon, instead being relegated to a background role in both The Mandalorian and the sequel trilogy. In The Force Awakens, we see Starkiller Base deployed against the New Republic’s capital system, destroying its government institutions and much of its military. By the time of The Last Jedi, the First Order is said to be in control of much of the galaxy, and the New Republic isn’t mentioned thereafter.
The Mandalorian showed us a glimpse of the New Republic, including how it tries to police outlying star systems and enforce its laws – and how it’s relatively ineffective at doing so. There was potential to expand on this depiction, showing both the governmental side of the New Republic, hampered by legislative inefficiencies, as well as the actual Rangers themselves.
A New Republic pilot seen in The Mandalorian.
A lot of Star Wars projects currently in production look at morally ambiguous characters. The Mandalorian focuses on a bounty hunter – someone who primarily operates outside of the law, albeit that he has a heart of gold underneath his armour. The Book of Boba Fett will focus on another Mandalorian bounty hunter, and if it stays true to its premise will show us Star Wars’ seedy underworld in more detail.
Andor will follow Cassian Andor – a character whose moral ambiguity was on full display in Rogue One, and who will do anything to advance the Rebels’ cause. Ahsoka is going to follow the titular Ahsoka Tano, an ex-Jedi who appears to be off doing her own thing rather than helping Luke Skywalker and the Rebels. The only series following an out-and-out hero – or one of the unambiguously “good guys” – is Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Cassian Andor will be the focus of a new Disney+ series.
Rangers of the New Republic had the potential to show us a different side of Star Wars – arguably one closer thematically to the original films, yet still distinct and independent of them. While other shows would look at the underworld of the galaxy, at criminals, or at spies who’ll do anything for their cause, Rangers of the New Republic could’ve been a breath of fresh air. The series could’ve presented an optimistic cast of characters who were genuinely trying to help the new government succeed.
Characters who are too pure and excessively virtuous can be boring, and that would’ve been a pitfall that Rangers of the New Republic would’ve needed to avoid. But had the show managed to walk that line, we might’ve seen something a bit different from Star Wars’ other current and upcoming offerings: a show that would’ve happily looked at the “good guys” as they tried to shore up the New Republic and tackled everything from criminals to ex-Imperial officers.
Emblem of the New Republic.
In part, the decision to cancel Rangers of the New Republic is probably tied to the situation with Cara Dune actress Gina Carano. Though it was never officially stated that the show would star Carano, many fans and commentators assumed that she would have a significant role to play, so following her dismissal from Lucasfilm in the aftermath of some very stupid social media posts, perhaps the show was always living on borrowed time.
We won’t get into the Gina Carano situation here. Suffice to say that anyone with any kind of profile needs to be incredibly careful what they say on social media, and she wasn’t. She upset a lot of people, doubled down on some of her controversial remarks, and that ended up costing her a potential recurring gig with Lucasfilm. She only has herself to blame.
Gina Carano as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian Season 1.
I would argue, though, that Rangers of the New Republic didn’t need to be all about Cara Dune. We met a couple of New Republic characters in The Mandalorian, and they could’ve served as a gateway into the show, keeping it connected to The Mandalorian and potentially building up to a crossover event with one or more of the other shows that were in production at the same time.
There was potential in Rangers of the New Republic. Not only was it a series that could’ve been something different from the likes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett by looking at the post-Return of the Jedi government, but it was also a series that could’ve left familiar characters behind to strike out on its own. All of the other Star Wars projects currently in production have this kind of backwards-looking, nostalgia-heavy focus, and Rangers of the New Republic was one of the few offerings that had the potential to be something a little different. As Star Wars continues to double down on nostalgic throwbacks, I fear we’ll come to regret the cancellation of Rangers of the New Republic.
The Star Wars franchise – including all films and series mentioned 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 the Star Wars franchise – including recent projects such as The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian. There are also minor spoilers for the Star Trek franchise too.
Let’s step through the looking-glass, across the divide between universes, into a strange new world. This world is very much like our own, but with one major difference: Star Trek behaved like Star Wars. The Original Series ran from 1966 to 1969, just as it did in our reality, but then… things started to change.
Join me on a weird and wonderful journey through what Star Trek might have been… if it had acted like Star Wars. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll make it home safe and sound.
Are you ready to go through the looking-glass?
We begin our journey in the 1970s. Star Trek is being rebroadcast in syndication, and its fanbase is growing. Some of these fans begin to organise and ask for more Star Trek on their screens, and the company that owns Star Trek in this alternate reality – let’s call them CiacomVBS – thinks long and hard about what to do. They have a popular series on their hands… what should they do with it?
Eventually the people in charge of Star Trek hit upon a brilliant idea: a Star Trek prequel, looking at Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and other familiar characters in their Starfleet Academy days and before their five-year mission. The main roles were re-cast, and the first new Star Trek project in almost twenty years was finally greenlit in 1988. Called the “Kelvin films” for the involvement of a starship called the USS Kelvin, this prequel trilogy was popular with some Trekkies, but wildly disliked by others. When the third film finished its theatrical run, CiacomVBS decided to shelve Star Trek and proclaimed that the franchise was complete.
Fans were split on Star Trek by this point. Some proclaimed that The Original Series was the only good part, whereas other (primarily younger) fans were thrilled with the Kelvin films. As time passed, Star Trek appeared to be complete. Its stars moved on to other projects, or faded into obscurity. But the fanbase remained, and with the passage of time those younger fans grew up, leading to a minor resurgence in the popularity of the Kelvin films.
In the 1990s, a massive media empire called the Dalt Wisney Company approached CiacomVBS about a buyout. When the multi-billion dollar deal went through, Wisney announced a plan to bring Star Trek back – this time for a sequel. Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered a few years later, and starred a younger cast of characters – alongside the return of The Original Series’ crew. Their first adventure was to find Captain Kirk, who had gone missing.
Kirk eventually agreed to train the new crew of Starfleet officers, along with help from Spock, Dr McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu. The returning characters took up a lot of the new show’s screen time, leaving many Trekkies to say that the new crew were undeveloped and underused. To make matters worse, a lack of overall direction by the Dalt Wisney Company meant that each of the three seasons of The Next Generation was helmed by a totally different team of writers. The consequence of this was a jarring change in tone between each of the three seasons.
The Next Generation’s third and final season was its worst by far, with a confused mess of a story that seemed to be trying to overwrite much of what happened in Season 2 – including the backstory of Captain Picard, the major character introduced in Season 1. By far its most egregious fault, though, was bringing back Khan as a villain – Khan had been killed off decades earlier, and his return was called “the worst kind of deus ex machina” by critics.
There were also two “standalone” projects produced during this time. The first saw a team of renegade Starfleet officers go on a secret mission to steal the plans to the Klingon D7 battle cruiser, and ended with them transmitting the plans to Kirk aboard the Enterprise. The second was titled Chekov: A Star Trek Story, and it told the tale of the young Pavel Chekov before he joined Starfleet.
Despite the lacklustre response to The Next Generation and Chekov, Wisney had invested a lot of money into Star Trek, and putting their expensive acquisition on hiatus was not possible. They announced another spin-off: Deep Space Nine. This promised to finally take a look at the Star Trek galaxy away from Captain Kirk and Starfleet for the first time, being set on a space station in a new region that had never been seen before.
Fans seemed to respond well to Deep Space Nine at first, but its short runtime, bland main character, and overreliance on the aesthetic of The Original Series were all points of criticism of the show. By Season 2 it seemed to be doing better and was beginning to stand on its own two feet – but for some inexplicable reason Season 2 of Deep Space Nine brought back the character of Sulu – who had been killed off in The Next Generation. Fans were confused as to how he had survived being eaten by an alien monster, but this was never addressed.
The Season 2 finale was perhaps the most egregious example of Wisney forcing fan-service into Deep Space Nine, though. As Sisko and his crew were cornered, staring down a seemingly-unstoppable villain, the shuttlecraft Galileo was spotted approaching DS9. The shuttle door opened, and there, in all his glory, stood Captain Kirk. Kirk dispatched the villain’s henchmen with ease, and gave Sisko – and the show’s stunned audience – a nod and a wink.
In the aftermath of Deep Space Nine Season 2, the Dalt Wisney Company put together a presentation where they announced what’s coming next for Star Trek – and to no one’s surprise, it was more of the same. Nostalgia, throwbacks, and not much else.
The actor who played Scotty in the Kelvin series was given his own spin-off. Next was Star Trek: Nurse Chapel, which promised a look at the franchise’s second-most famous medical officer. Then there was The Harry Mudd Show, looking at lovable rogue Harry Mudd, and Star Trek: Balok, which promised a deep dive into the backstory of the character fans first met in The Corbomite Maneuver. There was a miniseries looking at Kor, the Klingon captain, and finally there was Star Trek: That Guy Who Flew The Shuttle In That One Episode – which was immediately given a three-season order. Some fans were thrilled with these offerings… but a lone voice spoke out.
On a website called Dennising with Trek, an independent critic wrote that it was time for Star Trek to move on. The Original Series had become a weight around the neck of the franchise, holding it back and stopping it from properly moving on to new adventures. The Star Trek galaxy offered such an interesting and exciting setting, they wrote, that it was positively criminal to only look at such a tiny sliver of it over and over and over again. Star Trek can be better than this.
Apparently this website is incredibly popular in the alternate reality.
So that, my friends, is where we end our journey through this strange mirror universe. We step back across the divide, and find ourselves firmly back in our own reality. I promised I’d get you home safe and sound!
What was the point of our little interdimensional sojurn? As I’ve said many times already, Star Wars is stuck. It has never been able to move beyond its original trilogy, and it’s gotten to a point where those films are now holding it back from making any meaningful progress.
You might look at some of the Star Trek projects that exist in the alternate reality we visited and say that they sound like fun – but they represent an incredibly narrow vision of what Star Trek could be. If Star Trek had behaved like Star Wars, with a total and unshakable reliance on The Original Series and its characters, we’d never have got to see some absolutely incredible characters and stories. We’d have missed out on Picard’s transformation into Locutus of Borg in The Best of Both Worlds, or on Sisko’s painful decision in In The Pale Moonlight. We’d never have met Captain Janeway and her crew at all, nor Captain Archer and his.
Avery Brooks put in one of his best performances as Sisko in the Season 6 episode In The Pale Moonlight.
There is a place for prequels, for looking back, and for nostalgia. The very reason franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars were revived is because the companies behind them see nostalgia as a way to attract audiences. But in my opinion – my subjective opinion – Star Wars goes too far and overplays the nostalgia card. The Star Wars galaxy is a sandbox of almost infinite proportions, with not only trillions of inhabitants, countless alien races, and millions of planets to explore, but also tens of thousands of years of history. We could look at events and characters that are entirely disconnected from Luke, Han, and Leia – but Star Wars has never even tried to do that.
The Mandalorian brought back Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker in what was pure fan-service. Fans lapped it up, and I’m happy for the people who enjoyed the way that story went. But for my money I think Star Wars can do better. I think it can be broader and deeper, and can step away from relying on those old characters. Star Wars is a fantastic franchise, and its setting is so vast and interesting that it doesn’t need the crutch of those old characters… but for some reason Disney can’t see it.
Luke Skywalker returned in The Mandalorian.
Star Trek moved away from its original incarnation decades ago, and in the years since we’ve had a heck of a lot of exciting, memorable shows and films that have become iconic parts of the franchise in their own right. And that innovation and willingness to try new things continues today, with Star Trek recently branching out into animated comedy and with a kids’ show on the horizon. Star Wars could do that too.
Star Trek realised a long time ago that the galaxy Gene Roddenberry and others had created was crying out to be explored. New characters and new ships came along and have had some incredible adventures. Star Wars hasn’t been brave enough to try anything genuinely different yet. I hope one day that will change.
Some names, titles, and properties above have been used in a satirical manner for the sake of parody and criticism. The Star Wars franchise and all related properties are the copyright of the Walt Disney Company and LucasFilm. The Star Trek franchise and all related properties are the copyright of ViacomCBS. Stock photos courtesy of Unsplash. 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 the Star Wars franchise, including casting information for The Mandalorian Season 2,The Rise of Skywalker, and other recent projects.
One of my favourite parts of the Star Wars franchise isn’t a film, it’s the two Knights of the Old Republic games from 2003-04. While I generally found the Expanded Universe – now re-branded as Star Wars Legends and no longer in production – to be unenjoyable, Knights of the Old Republic was an exception. It took a setting and a story that was thousands of years distant from the Original Trilogy, and while it’s certainly true that some elements were derivative, especially in the first game, as a whole it was something different that took Star Wars fans to different places and a different era. It expanded on the overall lore of Star Wars without overwriting anything, and it was a great look at the Star Wars galaxy away from Luke, Anakin, and Palpatine.
When it was announced in 2012 that Disney would be acquiring Lucasfilm I was excited. Ever since 1999, when Star Wars expanded to be more than just a trilogy of films, the vague prospect of a sequel to Return of the Jedi had been appealing to me. Learning what came next for Luke, Han, Leia, and others was something I was interested in, as I also was interested to learn what came next for the galaxy as a whole following the Emperor’s death. It’s easy to forget, but Return of the Jedi didn’t end with a full-scale victory for the Rebel Alliance. The Death Star was gone and the Emperor was dead, but practically the whole galaxy was still under Imperial control. I was fascinated to see how the Rebels turned victory in a battle into victory in the overall war.
The destruction of the Second Death Star. The sequel trilogy was supposed to tell us what became of the galaxy after this moment.
The Expanded Universe attempted to tell this story, but it was a convoluted, poor-quality tale hampered by having different writers with different ideas – seemingly Lucasfilm’s policy when it came to the Expanded Universe was that anyone could write anything. Many of these stories came across as fan-fiction, pitting a seemingly invincible Luke, Han, and Leia against all manner of obstacles. Over the years, the Expanded Universe grew to such an extent that it was convoluted and incredibly offputting for newcomers – several hundred books, several hundred more comics and graphic novels, over a hundred video and board games, two kids’ television shows, and myriad others, all of which required roadmaps, suggested reading lists, and of course a number of encyclopaedias and reference works to keep up with it all. All of this meant that the Expanded Universe was impossible to get to grips with without making it a full-time commitment. I was pleased when it was announced that Disney would be overwriting it.
By wiping the slate clean, not only would Disney not be constrained by some of the Expanded Universe’s poor storytelling, but the canon of Star Wars post-Return of the Jedi could be restarted, hopefully in a more concise way that would be easier to follow. That seemed to succeed at first, but now – a mere six years on from the cancellation of the old Expanded Universe – Star Wars is once again pretty convoluted with books, games, comics, and even a theme park attraction all officially canon. While I don’t want to spend too much time making a comparison with Star Trek, in that case the issue of canon has always been incredibly simple: television episodes and films are canon, everything else is not.
With so many books, comics, games, and other media, the old Expanded Universe was convoluted and offputting.
But we’re drifting off-topic. The Expanded Universe being dumped was a good thing, because I hoped what would replace it would be superior. And for the most part that’s been the case, though The Rise of Skywalker certainly dragged the overall story of the sequels down a long way.
Star Wars has a truly interesting setting: there’s a whole galaxy with countless worlds, trillions of inhabitants, and thousands of different species. But for the most part, the franchise has spent decades focusing on an absolutely minuscule fraction of this vast, potentially interesting setting it’s created.
The Expanded Universe spent a lot of time with Luke, Han, and Leia, as well as later with characters like Anakin, and by far the majority of its stories are set between The Phantom Menace and the couple of decades after Return of the Jedi. Where Knights of the Old Republic succeeded was in taking its audience away from that overtrodden ground and showing us a glimpse of the Star Wars galaxy without those familiar characters.
Knights of the Old Republic II was a great game that told a story far removed from Star Wars’ original trilogy.
The prequels dedicated three films to overexplaining the background of Darth Vader – a story I’d absolutely argue was unnecessary and didn’t really do anything to improve or inform the Original Trilogy in any substantial way. That was part of why I found those films so disappointing. While the third entry, Revenge of the Sith, was better than the first two, all three films didn’t really bring anything new or interesting to the table. As I sat down to watch The Force Awakens a decade later, I hoped that we’d start to see something different.
The five films made since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 have been a disappointment in that regard. We’ve had The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker, which essentially remade A New Hope and Return of the Jedi only worse, Solo: A Star Wars Story which made the same mistake of unnecessarily overexplaining Han Solo that the prequels did with Darth Vader, and Rogue One, which was a great standalone story but was a prequel feeding straight into the plot of A New Hope. The Last Jedi tried to take things in a different direction, but was still a story primarily about Luke – and is now effectively non-canon after being overwritten by its sequel.
The Last Jedi was the most recent Star Wars film to even try to do something differently – but was still constrained by being a sequel using familiar characters.
I know I said I wouldn’t make too many comparisons with Star Trek, but there’s one that’s too important not to mention. In 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. And aside from a cameo appearance, that show basically did its own thing and didn’t worry about The Original Series. The Star Trek franchise thus established that it could be so much more than its original incarnation. Star Wars has never done that – in its cinematic canon it hasn’t even tried, despite existing for over forty years. Where Star Trek consists of three time periods, an alternate reality, and nine distinct sets of main characters, Star Wars has been unable to move beyond the story of its original trilogy. The prequels lent backstory to the originals. The sequels and spin-offs expanded that same story. Even The Mandalorian brought in themes, concepts, and characters that weren’t as far-removed from the original films as they should’ve been – a decision compounded by the silly decision to bring in Boba Fett in Season 2.
Star Was could be so much more than it is. But at every opportunity, decisions have been taken to narrow its focus and dive deeper into unimportant parts of its only actual story; after more than forty years, the Star Wars franchise has still only told one real story. The decision to shoehorn Palpatine into The Rise of Skywalker makes this infinitely worse, as apparently he’s been manipulating everything and everyone from behind the scenes for the entire saga of films. As I wrote once, this transforms the Skywalker Saga into what is really the “Palpatine Saga”, as he’s the only character who seems to act of his own volition. But this isn’t supposed to be (another) critique of that incredibly poor narrative decision!
The deus ex machina of Palpatine ruined The Rise of Skywalker… and really the entire sequel trilogy.
The decision to bring Palpatine back is indicative of a franchise that has no new ideas. It was categorically not “always the plan” to bring him back in the sequels, or this would have been established in The Force Awakens. Instead, Palpatine became a deus ex machina because Star Wars as a whole has been unable to move out of the shadow of its first three films. Those films could have laid the groundwork for an expanded franchise – as The Original Series did for Star Trek – but instead they’ve almost become a ball and chain; a weight around the neck of the franchise, keeping it locked in place and unable to move on.
It shouldn’t be because of a lack of ideas. The Star Wars galaxy is a massive sandbox for any writer or director to play in, with almost unlimited potential to tell genuinely new and interesting stories. Instead it’s a lack of vision and a lack of boldness on the part of a large corporation; Disney wants to play the nostalgia card over and over again, and because Star Wars had never previously tried to escape its Original Trilogy, doing so now seems – from a corporate point of view – too big of a risk. How else does one explain the decision to allow The Rise of Skywalker to overwrite The Last Jedi? Corporate-mandated cowardice, retreating to nostalgia and safe, comfortable ground. Trying something even slightly different requires a boldness that simply isn’t present in most boardrooms.
Star Wars is being run by a corporate boardroom unwilling to take risks or do things differently.
Two-thirds of the sequel trilogy re-told the original trilogy. The prequels were glorified backstory, and the two spin-off films were also prequels to the originals. Star Wars has only ever made three original films – everything else either overexplained that story or tried to re-tell it. The Star Wars “saga” is thus nothing more than one story. One main character – Palpatine – controls and manipulates it, and only a handful of characters get any significant screen time and development.
I wrote recently that the overall story of Star Wars has been dragged full-circle, with the questions fans had about the state of the galaxy and the Jedi Order after Return of the Jedi simply not being answered in any meaningful way. The galaxy is once again in a position where Palpatine is dead, there’s one remaining young Jedi, an autocratic state controls much of the galaxy but has suffered a major defeat, and the survivors will have to finish the war and try to rebuild. That’s where both Return of the Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker left things. Far from answering the questions posed by the original films, the sequels just asked the same questions again with a different coat of paint.
By re-telling the same story – albeit in a worse way – the sequel trilogy as a whole has entirely failed to accomplish anything.
The end of the sequel trilogy left the Star Wars galaxy in exactly the same state it was in almost forty years ago.
The announcement of The Mandalorian came with what I thought was an exciting premise: the adventures of a gunslinger far beyond the reach of the New Republic. Wow! Finally, something genuinely different in Star Wars. It didn’t last, of course, as the second episode of the show brought the Force back into things. While in some respects The Mandalorian tried to be different, in too many ways it was samey. The aesthetic, the reuse of elements from the original trilogy like Boba Fett’s armour, the Jawas and their Sandcrawler, and of course the return of the Force made what was already a boring show with episodes that were too short even less interesting. I found the whole experience a disappointment.
The two upcoming Disney+ shows – based around Obi-Wan Kenobi and Rogue One’s Cassian Andor – look set to repeat the same mistakes. Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Kenobi was definitely one of the prequels’ better elements, but do we need yet another prequel? In-universe, Kenobi went into exile on Tatooine after the rise of the Empire. Anything he does in the show would either be constrained by taking place within a few miles of his desert hut or else feel awfully tacked-on. And the Cassian Andor show is a prequel to a prequel. Rogue One was a great film, but does it need its own prequel show?
Cassian Andor was a great character in his sole appearance. Not sure he needs a prequel series of his own, though.
Can’t the investment being made in these properties be reallocated to something genuinely different? There’s so much potential in the Star Wars galaxy, yet Disney and Lucasfilm seem intent on showing us the same tiny sliver over and over and over again. When people talk of franchise fatigue and the feeling that Disney is milking Star Wars dry it’s because of this! When every Star Wars project feels samey and repetitive, it’s much easier to get burnt out on the franchise.
There are some exceptions – I recently played through Jedi: Fallen Order, and despite that game using a familiar time period, it was a mostly-original story with only one returning character from the films playing a role. It was different enough to feel like a half-step away from what had come before.
Jedi: Fallen Order told a decent standalone Star Wars story.
For the franchise to survive long-term and remain viable, it needs to step away from the original trilogy for the first time. New films and shows, whenever they may come, should look at wholly new characters in a setting and even time period that’s distinct from what came before. There also needs to be a plan – the rudderless sequel trilogy can’t be repeated. Any new project needs to have someone at the helm to guide its story. Questions need to be asked at the beginning about where the characters are going and what the endgame of the story is, so that the franchise doesn’t just keep making the same mistakes.
Not every recent Star Trek project has been to everyone’s taste. But since the 2005 cancellation of Enterprise – and in some respects even before then – Star Trek hasn’t been afraid to try completely new things. Action films, a serialised drama show, and now an animated comedy have all joined the lineup. Some of these have brought in new fans, and at the very least, no one in 2020 can accuse Star Trek of being stale. Star Wars, in contrast, has absolutely become stale. The one story it’s been telling for forty years has finally ended, so now is the moment for Star Wars to properly move on.
The Star Wars franchise – including all films and other media mentioned above – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. Stock photos courtesy of Unsplash, Knights of the Old Republic II screenshot courtesy of the press kit on IGDB. 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 are spoilers for all three films in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, including The Rise of Skywalker.
As I’ve covered already here on the website, reviews for the final part of the Star Wars sequel trilogy – The Rise of Skywalker – are mixed. What this unfortunately means, at least in the short-term, is that the divisiveness in the fanbase and in online fan communities, as well as a lot of vile anti-Disney hate, will continue. The best opportunity to bring fans back together was wasted with The Rise of Skywalker, which inexplicably brings back Emperor Palpatine, throwing up issues not just for this trilogy, but for the original films too.
I don’t want to get into all of that right now, as I’ll save my opinions on The Rise of Skywalker itself for when I get around to a full review. This article intends to address the production side of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and the clear issues that have been present.
Poster for The Force Awakens (2015)
Despite what George Lucas subsequently claimed, 1977’s Star Wars was a one-off film. It wasn’t “Episode IV” when it was released, it was a standalone story – albeit one that was careful to leave the door cracked slightly open to allow for the possibility of a sequel. The fact that the original trilogy wasn’t a planned story is noticeable – not least in the haphazard approach to the family ties between Vader, Luke, and Leia. A New Hope (as we’ll have to call it to avoid confusion) is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end. If there had only ever been one Star Wars film, it would still be a complete story. The two sequels follow on from A New Hope, but are a second self-contained story; a duology, if you will.
In 1977 that made perfect sense – there was no guarantee that A New Hope would be a success, so dedicating extra time and money to writing sequels before the original was even a proven earner would have been wasteful. Not to mention that if the story had been written as part one of three, ending without wrapping up its story, and then for production reasons parts two and three were never made, A New Hope would be even more of a failure that if it were a standalone film that flopped. In short, in 1977 it wasn’t anyone’s intention to make a trilogy of films, and the fact that The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were able to be made at all was purely on the back of the success of A New Hope and the story it told.
Fast-forward to 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm – and with it, the rights to the Star Wars franchise. The intention, as stated by Disney at the time and many, many times subsequently, was to make a new trilogy of films. Not one new film with the possibility to make others, but a trilogy of three films to serve as a sequel to the originals.
It’s apparent from the ending of The Force Awakens that it wasn’t ever intended to be a one-shot story. As Rey finally travels to Ahch-To and meets Luke, she extends her hand and offers him his father’s lightsaber. And then the film ends with the two of them standing on the cliffside – as close to a “cliffhanger” as it’s possible to get without one of them literally hanging from that cliff! This moment set up a sequel, the second part of the planned trilogy.
Disney and Lucasfilm went about writing this trilogy in the worst possible way. They brought in three different writers and directors – later reduced to two when Colin Trevorrow left the project that ultimately became The Rise of Skywalker – and each was essentially given free rein to tell whatever story they wanted, regardless of how well it worked as one part of a larger overall story. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson simply didn’t work together on their stories – that’s “stories” in the plural, where it should have been two parts of one single story.
The use of different directors for each film is not, in itself, an issue. Even the original trilogy had three different directors. Television series do this all the time, and as long as the story is good there can even be a benefit to having different directors, as each brings their own style and insight. In Game of Thrones, for example, some directors became renowned for their battles, and others for quieter, character-driven stories. Splitting up the directing duties worked well in countless other franchises, so why not in Star Wars too?
Promo poster for 2017’s The Last Jedi
The fundamental problem is that there was no story for the directors to work from – or if there was, they were allowed to ignore it entirely.
Between 2012, when the Lucasfilm deal was announced, and the release of the film that ultimately became The Force Awakens, there needed to be one writer – or a team of writers – planning out in excruciating detail what the story of the trilogy would be. They needed to consider which characters were coming back – obviously Han, Luke, and Leia were, but who else? Then they needed to consider what was happening in the galaxy – we all assumed the Empire had died with Palpatine, but what happened next?
A lot of Disney sequels (the direct-to-video kind) have the same basic problem: how do you tell an interesting and engaging story after “happily ever after” – without completely undoing the happy ending? This is the problem Star Wars was facing: the Emperor was dead, the Death Stars destroyed, and as of the end of Return of the Jedi it looked like we were on course for a Rebel victory. So, if the Rebels did win and managed to restore democratic government to the galaxy, and both of the Sith Lords (Vader and Palpatine) had died, where was the threat, drama, and tension going to come from in order to drive the new trilogy of films?
This was the fundamental question. What came after the happy ending? And then how could that be spun out into a three-film story arc that would be as dramatic, as tense, and as exciting as the originals?
The answer came from JJ Abrams as he set to work on The Force Awakens – after the Empire fell, the First Order rose from its ashes, and was trying to overthrow the New Republic. They had legions of Stormtroopers, they had a planet-killing superweapon, and they had a mysterious Dark Side user as their Supreme Leader, who had a helmet-wearing Dark Side apprentice. A little derivative, perhaps, but not bad. After the disappointment of the prequels a decade prior (see my last article for my thoughts on that series) a return to what made Star Wars great seemed like a solid idea. It was, at the very least, a plausible and perfectly reasonable way to approach the new trilogy.
Except this was how JJ Abrams approached The Force Awakens; it wasn’t how Disney and Lucasfilm were approaching the whole trilogy. Rian Johnson came along and decided that Star Wars needed to go in a bold new direction. Instead of Rey being related to Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi, she was nobody, related to no one. Instead of Kylo Ren being on a path to redemption like his grandfather, he chose to commit to the Dark Side and claim for himself total power. And instead of Snoke being as manipulative and cunning as Emperor Palpatine, he was cut down by his apprentice before he could achieve his goals. Bold. New. Different. And a great way for the franchise to go to stay relevant and exciting.
BB-8 on a promo poster for The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Both concepts – JJ Abrams’ idea of retelling the “greatest hits” of Star Wars, and Rian Johnson’s idea to shake up the franchise and take it to wholly new thematic places – have merit. But they’re about as far apart as it’s possible to be.
What that means is that Disney and Lucasfilm needed to pick one style or the other. Before The Force Awakens was fully in production, Rian Johnson had been approached to make The Last Jedi and will have, at the very least, submitted some kind of story outline or discussed the basic premise and concept he had in mind. There was still time, even in mid-2014, to change direction and go down the Rian Johnson route if Disney and Lucasfilm wanted to do so. But if they were happy with the JJ Abrams approach, and wanted the sequels to essentially re-tell the original trilogy, then they needed to commit to that approach instead.
Trying to do both has resulted in the sequel trilogy being a mess. It hasn’t had any direction to its story, and at a fundamental level it hasn’t even known what kind of story it was supposed to be telling. That is a significant problem that has hampered it, and one that was entirely avoidable if basic film production and storytelling rules had been followed.
This has been made worse and more noticeable by JJ Abrams returning for the final film in the series. If someone else – literally anyone else – had made their version of The Rise of Skywalker, perhaps the trilogy would have felt like a bit of a mixed bag; a collection of three distinct films. But because JJ Abrams came back and was allowed to essentially ignore the plot of The Last Jedi – even overwriting large parts of it – the resulting trilogy has a very weird feel where two films take one approach, but the middle part is completely different. And whatever one’s opinions on The Last Jedi may have been when it was released, the overall trilogy is not served by having films overwrite one another.
When there are a total of three films to tell a story, with a total runtime of seven hours, give or take, there just isn’t time for one film to retcon and overwrite its predecessor. The tonal shift is incredibly jarring too, as the trilogy goes from “remember the greatest hits of Star Wars?” to “I bet you didn’t see that coming!” – and then back again. A consistent tone is just as important as a consistent story – perhaps even more so. And as it’s clear that the two writers and directors had such contradictory visions for where to take the franchise, a decision had to be made as to which one to go with.
The first promotional poster for 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker
The fact that no such decision was made, and production on the films was allowed to proceed in this manner ultimately rests with the executives at Disney, who will have had the final say on such things. I guess I just don’t understand how people who have worked in this industry – very successfully – for decades would have failed to realise that they had a problem on their hands. Organising the trilogy along these lines should simply have never happened. I don’t think it’s fair to blame either JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson – because both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are great films as standalone pieces. In fact I think as time goes by, The Last Jedi in particular will be held up as a great example of sci-fi filmmaking and of the Star Wars franchise in general. But you can’t blame storytellers for telling the stories that they wanted, especially when they had almost unlimited resources thrown their way. The guidance and the control over their stories had to come from someone higher up, and it was unfortunately absent.
If there had been a story treatment written for the trilogy, then each director would have been constrained by that. Perhaps someone like Rian Johnson might’ve decided not to jump on board if he had to tell a JJ Abrams-style story, and vice versa.
But I’d have liked to see it go even further. The most successful film trilogy of recent years, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, was produced and shot back-to-back. One team was in control for the entire production, and the films were then released over a three-year period. There’s absolutely no reason why Star Wars couldn’t have emulated this successful formula. By appointing someone to be in overall creative control, there would have still been the option to have three different directors and different scriptwriters for each film, but the production would have been smoother.
Shooting the films back-to-back would have also meant that Carrie Fisher’s death in 2016 wouldn’t have been an issue for The Rise of Skywalker to have to get around. This is purely hindsight, because no one would have predicted that she would have passed away before the trilogy was complete, but it has nevertheless been a production issue. With the death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens and the death of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, Fisher’s Princess/General Leia was the last remaining of the original core characters. And unfortunately the scant footage that was left on the cutting room floor from the first two films was nowhere near enough to sculpt the kind of major role destined for her in The Rise of Skywalker – leading to some clumsy scenes in that film. Again though, this isn’t a reason why shooting all three films at once should have happened, it’s instead a positive consequence of doing so because of what happened out here in the real world.
This kind of production would have been more expensive initially, because the cost of producing all three films would have to be paid up-front. But it does offer advantages. Firstly, some costs would be lower – due to not having the expense of setting up production three times. Secondly, and most importantly from an audience point of view, the story and scripts could be adjusted if necessary. If something didn’t seem to be working or making sense it could be cut or reworked, to the ultimate benefit of the story of all three films.
Theatrical release poster for The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Whether that option was ever seriously considered, or whether it was always the case that the three films would be produced wholly separately isn’t known. But I think that the way the sequel trilogy turned out is a great argument for producing all films in a planned series at once. In that sense, its ultimate purpose may be to serve as a warning of how not to approach filmmaking in future.
At the end of the day, the two competing visions at the core of the Star Wars sequels – JJ Abrams’ idea to re-tell Star Wars “greatest hits”, and Rian Johnson’s approach, trying to take the franchise to new and unexpected places – have merit, and each could have been spun out into a creditable series of films. Both concepts actually produced decent standalone pieces of cinema. But they completely failed to gel together and produce a cohesive story.
When film historians look back on the sequels, they will say that they managed to avoid many of the missteps that plagued the prequels, and that they are a much more watchable and enjoyable set of films as a result. What the sequel trilogy is not, however, is a single narrative. And it lacks many of the basic points that a story should have to reach the heights that the franchise aims for.
How are Rey, Finn, and Poe significantly different by the end of The Rise of Skywalker than they were at the beginning of The Force Awakens? Rey has learned the truth of her parents – after a deliberate false start. Finn… quit the First Order. But he did that in The Force Awakens and as a character hasn’t changed any since. Poe is still Poe… he’s a good pilot and a leadership figure. But none of them learned major lessons, suffered significant defeats, or appear to have grown. And from the original characters, Han was murdered by his son, and Luke and Leia both died performing the same Force power. Han had actually wholly regressed as a character by The Force Awakens, abandoning his family and the cause he’d fought for to return to being a smuggler. Leia was fundamentally no different than the last time we’d seen her, taking a leadership role in the new rebellion. Luke is the only one of the three to have had significant character development – all of which happened off-screen. He tried to raise a new generation of Jedi, and fell into a deep depression when he failed.
I know some fans were upset by Luke’s depiction in The Last Jedi, and I’d like to address that one day in a standalone piece as there’s too much to cover here.
But back to the characters – Kylo Ren is the only one of the new characters who goes through any significant arc. And even this is blighted by the different approaches from the different writers/directors. In The Last Jedi, after killing his father in the previous film he then turns on his master, Snoke, and kills him too, claiming the mantle of Supreme Leader for himself. He had made a commitment to the Dark Side and seemed beyond redemption, only to be redeemed anyway in the next film.
The sequel trilogy hasn’t really known whose story it was telling. The prequels were Anakin’s story. The originals were Luke’s story. And the sequels can be viewed as both Rey’s story and Kylo’s, but also as Palpatine’s thanks to his inclusion in The Rise of Skywalker and the revelation that he’s been manipulating everything and everyone from the beginning. For me this deus ex machina fails completely as any kind of passable story point. But given that it’s in there, it changes the whole nature of the trilogy, and of the “Skywalker Saga” as a whole. It should have almost certainly been titled the “Palpatine Saga” given his role in the story.
The only way to have avoided these pitfalls would have been an entirely different approach beginning immediately after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. By the time they’d decided to essentially tell three independent stories and string them together, the damage was done and it’s taken till now for the extent of it to be realised. JJ Abrams, given his “mystery box” style of crafting stories was always the wrong choice to helm this series. He was the wrong choice to tell the first part of a story because he offered a barebones setup with no forward plan, and he was the wrong choice to bring in to conclude it for the same reason. Rian Johnson, for all the criticism that came his way, made a brilliant film. But The Last Jedi only really works as a standalone piece, bookended as it now is by two JJ Abrams films.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with the senior executives who chose this approach. And while it might be tempting to say that Rian Johnson derailed the trilogy by taking the middle film in such a different direction, if there had been someone in overall creative control, that either wouldn’t have happened, or it would have happened in such a way that the final film could have followed on from its conclusion and still felt natural. As things stand today, the trilogy is a mess. It’s a mess in terms of story, and in terms of tone, and unfortunately it’s in a position similar to The Hobbit from the last decade – in that it’s considered mediocre at best, and not really a worthy successor to a franchise as iconic as Star Wars.
The Mandalorian – despite how I personally felt about it – has been received far better. As was Rogue One. So there is still life in the franchise thanks to these other projects, and as we move forward there will be the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and at least one new series of films which I hope will be more successful. Unlike with the prequels I’m happy to rewatch the sequels because, as I keep saying, they do make for great standalone films. But as a series, and as one single, cohesive story, they didn’t hit the mark.
The Star Wars franchise is the copyright of Disney and Lucasfilm. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 