"The Rise of Skywalker" and the Folly of Attacking Spaceships with Horses

So far critics are marginally less impressed with “The Rise of Skywalker” than they were about that banana somebody taped to a wall in an art museum and billed for $150,000. I am still struggling to process the film, which had some highlights, but also some major structural issues:

GOOD:

·      Really glad Kilo Ren finally died. I never liked that character. I entirely skipped teenage angst as an emotional state and went straight to forty, so making Darth Vader Jr. a mopey manchild always rankled me. Glad they finally polished him off. Note to Star Wars: DO NOT bring him back as a force ghost.

·      Visually stunning. Really like the city on a space glacier at the beginning of the film, the rainforest world, and the Sith cathedral. The “just people” flotilla at the end also looked cool.

·      Enjoyed Rey throughout, and her relationship with Leia. Several of my friends don’t like Rey because they don’t detect a plot arch. I like the character and enjoyed her.

·      We should appreciate that Leia has a cool multi-decade arch of warrior-princess to general to elder stateswoman to ersatz Jedi master.

·      Rey is a Palpatine—master stroke! A big problem with “The Last Jedi” was an emotional bait-and-switch for all us fans. “Hey, did you think Snoke might be some cool Sith guy? Perhaps Darth Plagueis back from the dead? Hahaha—he’s just some guy! Fuck you! Oh, did you think maybe Rey was a bastard Kenobi? Or Luke’s daughter? Hahahaha her parents are nobody! Nothing matters! Nothing in life matters—we all die and life is meaningless. Hahaha! Go fuck yourself.” Making Rey a Palpatine gives her a lineage, which has always been important in the franchise. Even cooler that she is descended from the biggest, baddest baddie of them all. Which brings us to:

·      Palpatine—awesome. Always an Ian MacDiarmid fan. Love that the First Order and Snoke, which were clearly a slapdash attempt to microwave “A New Hope” with no deeper meaning, are at least now retconned into being part of a coherent master plan. Looping Palpatine back into the storyline is an awesome callback that raises the stakes.

·      Star Destroyer Death Fleet—this is, perhaps, the only possible way Star Wars could escalate from Death Star to Death Star 2 to Starbase Killer. Starbase Killer was a major problem in my view in that it cheapens the concept of planet-destroying weapons. If the Death Star is a cosmos-changing technology, it’s a big deal. If you can replicate it in some form in every single movie, then apparently WMD’s are cheap in this galaxy and every time you use them they become less shocking. Palpatine creating a dark fleet of planet-destroying ships basically multiplies the Death Star at an exponential level. Instead of one battleship armed with nuclear missiles, there is now a fleet of submarines carrying them. And, indeed, if they fan out into the galaxy, the immediate threat of planetary destruction will be more than enough to keep Palpatine in power.

GIANT GAPING HOLES AND STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS:

·      Needing a guidance transmitter for starships to fly “up.” WTF. To be clear on this, the massive fleet of apocalyptic planet-busting starships . . . can’t figure out how to . . . fly “up” without the help of a guidance transmitter? Like, none of these ships were equipped with internal instruments which tell them which direction up and down are? And even if that’s the case, couldn’t their captains just look out the window and say, “Oh, right—just fly up. Like, straight up. Then we’ll be in space.” Which even then would be unnecessary. It’s not like the ships were lobcocked at weird angles. Every single one of them could just lift into the sky and they would be absolutely fine. This is an incredibly bizarre and unnecessary plot hindrance.

·      Attacking a star destroyer with horses. WTF. Alright, at this point, in the same way that JJ Abrahams replicated “A New Hope” beat for beat in the first installment of this trilogy, we can only assume he’s trying to bring back “Return of the Jedi” the same way. Big bad weapon? Check. Palpatine in a throne room cackling that the protagonist’s friends are all about to die? Check. Emotional symbolism of low-tech warriors taking down the high-tech evil guys? Check. Although at least we could make some kind of case for the Ewoks. That was sort of like jungle savages fighting the Green Beret. Balanced? No. Possible the odd blow dart could take out a guy with a machine gun? Sure. In “The Rise of Skywalker” however, Finn attacks a star destroyer BY LANDING HORSES ON TOP OF IT. If I were the captain of a star destroyer and became aware that someone had inexplicably landed tusked Clydesdales on the hull of my SPACESHIP I would say, “Helm—please shake the ship back and forth until they all fall off to their extremely obvious deaths.” Then I would order the ship to go up, with or without a superfluous guidance transmitter, because that’s how motherfucking spaceships work. But instead, surprise surprise, the people with bow and arrows riding horses take out the star destroyer. Whoopee.

·      The overuse of “this is the point you feel emotion at” made it saccharine. Leonard Bishop wrote a book called “How to Be A Damn Good Writer,” and in it he exhorts would-be authors to limit themselves to one tear-jerking paragraph per book. Only once per novel can you have a dramatic scene where the protagonist charges over the hill only to be shot and then die slowly in the arms of his lover before expiring after an immortal one-liner. These “We are scrappy rebels and we love each other and we’re doomed but we will do the right thing anyway after one last hug BUT WAIT we won?! We won!” lines were a dime a dozen in this film. One is good. Two is stretching it. Every fifteen minutes is emotionally manipulative, and unsuccessful at that.

·      Not sure if I mentioned the bit about trying to attack a spaceship by landing horses on it, but I think that’s goddamned ridiculous. Next time just make everyone wear t-shirts that say “Lovable underdogs” instead.

CONCLUSION

I’m not ready to hate this film yet. I don’t want to hate it. But I *do* hate pretty much everything in the third act.