The surviving Resistance faces the First Order once more as Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron's journey continues. With the power and knowledge of generations behind them, the final battle commences.
Director: J.J. Abrams
Cast: Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John
Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Ian McDiarmid, Billy Dee Williams
Release Date: December 13, 2019
Genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action
Runtime: 2h 21min
Review:
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has a hefty
checklist of things it needs to accomplish while closing out the Star Wars
franchise at least the Skywalker saga.
For some reason, J.J. Abrams decides to do it in the most perfunctory
way possible. Massive reveals, which
come out of left field with regularity, occur throughout but none of it is
particularly engaging. It would have
been nice if there was some sort of mystery or intrigue but Abrams and the
screenwriters seem strangely disinterested creating any sort of tension at any
point during the proceedings. As such,
we move from set piece after set piece where we get some well choreographed
Star Wars action, rinse and repeat for 2 and half hours. Sadly, after this happens a few times you
really just don’t care anymore. The
dialogue shuffles between believable to outright corny leaving the characters
feeling more artificial than organic.
The cast does what it can with the characters delivering infrequent
moments of life. Daisy Ridley who seems
continuously sweaty leads the film as best she can. Her character has always been a bit of cipher
mainly because she never feels like anything more than rehash of Luke’s story line, something compounded by story choices here. Ultimately she’s nothing more than a Luke
clone in Capri pants and space Uggs.
Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is even more uninteresting this go around. The insistence on having his angry emo boy be
the primary menace in this trilogy has always left me confused. There’s never been much intrigue in his
character much less any sort of palpable sense menace or real threat. John Boyega and Oscar Isaac do what they can
with their screen time but suffer from poor writing that never let them develop
memorable characters. You can sense
Isaac trying bring a spark of life to Poe in this film but it’s never
maintained for a sustained amount of time.
As such, we watch everyone go through the motions and move the plot from
one spot to another with a sense of inevitability as opposed to wonder. Sure
it’s great to see the late Carrie Fisher on screen one last time but even her
scenes aren’t nearly as moving as they should be, possibly because you can
feels Abrams building story around these bits of old footage for the sake of
inclusion. All this should have been
moving but it never hits with the emotional impact much like this final entry
overall.
C-
