I staggered out of Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker (2019) with the dismal sense that my brain had been sucked free of any interesting ideas and, somehow, my I. Q. (not too impressive to begin with) had been badly compromised. The movie is a vast soul-destroying engine and it diminishes you.
The film is the last installment in a series of pictures running on a yearly basis, it seems, since about 1977 -- if I remember correctly there was a hiatus of about twenty years between the first three installments and later iterations. Apparently, the story fits together in some arcane way, generally it seems on the basis of genetics - all the main characters seem to be related to one another somehow, although this is as obscure as the family tree in a big Russian novel: you've got lots of outlandish names, hidden relationships, etc. Furthermore, chronologies get confused because no one ever really dies -- people seem to die but get brought back to life and, then, hang around as holograms or intrusive memories for generations. The main characters are hard-wired into the Force, an all-powerful source of miracles of all kinds -- this strips all confrontations of any meaning: if the characters mostly have omnipotence, know everything across parsecs of light-years, and can exercise mind-over-matter at will while resurrecting the dead, nothing has any stake at all. All of the action seems to be a vain soap-bubble of fantasy in which omnipotent immortals indulge themselves in picturesque landscapes. There is never any suspense, because we know no one can be permanently killed. Now and then, a planet and all of its fauna and flora get blown to pieces -- but this is of no more consequence than swatting a mosquito.
Star Wars: The Rise of Starwalker begins with a long title full of impenetrable information but beginning with the characteristic expression: The Dead Speak! As I have said, in the Star Wars universe no one really gets to die -- in fact, they can't die because they are just manifestations of undying pantheistic or pan-diabolic forces. This is evident even in the actors. One of the characters is played by a prominent actress who died of a drug overdose about a year before this film was made. The actress is still hard-at-work in this film, somehow revivified to play an important role in the movie. (As a lawyer, I would like to see the contract with the corpse or its family as to how this apparition gets paid -- presumably, the same way dead Alec Guinness got paid for his many post-mortem cameos in this series.) As usual the Universe is at risk. An emperor named Palpatine, thought to have died in an earlier episode, has now apparently been resurrected and he is causing all sorts of mischief through the agency of the guy who started off as Lena Dunham's boyfriend in Girls. Adam Driver has to play the bad guy, Kyle Ren, I think, presumably because he has somewhat saturnine features and long black hair. He is massing his dark forces on some planet with a name like Ezekal (at least this is how it sounds.). None of the good guys know how to find Ezekal. This triggers a noisy chase and hunt for a MacGuffin -- the magic navigator that will lead the good guys to the evil force's lair. (The magic navigator is rather prosaically called a "Way Finder crystal.") For the first two-thirds of the film, the good guys chase around trying to locate the "Way Finder". Finally, Rey, a spunky young woman, locates the navigator only to have Kyle Ren demonstrate the utter unimportance of this plot point by crushing the crystal in his fist. No matter, the good guys ultimately find the mystery planet and launch an all-out assault that is supposed to combine elements of the Battle of Midway and the miracle of Dunkirk. There's vast slaughter of bad guys, hecatombs of white and black clad Storm Troopers are massacred at no cost to the good guys -- not one of them dies except the poor superannuated Princess who has to die because the actress who impersonates her perished from a drug overdose on a Transatlantic flight. As far as I can remember no one else dies except for Kyle Ren, the Byronic bad guy, and I'm not whether he was brought to life in the end -- I don't think so, but I can't remember for certain.
There is no plot just a series of chases and light-saber duels tacked together. Whenever a plot contrivance is required, the narrative simply invents something to keep things moving forward. Space ships appear out of nowhere, are sucked out of the briny deep, and there are things like magic medallions that can be used to access fortresses and flying battleships. Long dead characters appear from time to time to encourage the living. Everyone labors under a sort of blood taint -- that is, everyone has questionable genealogy and people are always waiting with baited breath for their bad side to manifest. Ultimately Kyle Ren, the bad guy, and Rey, the good heroine (who are, I think, brother and sister maybe?) have a big duel on the wreckage of the Death Star, now swamped by titanic waves on some kind of icy water-world. This planet is inhabited, on its shores, by comely Black warrior women who ride some kind of mastodon-horses. Someone gets killed in the light saber duel but is obligingly brought to life because the movie has another half-hour to go. Once again Rey and Ren end up with light swords drawn in some kind of enormous underground amphitheater full of colossal statues of villains and a vast mob of hooded figures who seem gathered for some kind of primordial Nuremberg Rally. While Rey and Ren are dueling with the Emperor Palpatine, an old gent with grey skin and cataracts in his eyes, a giant celestial battle is taking place overhead between the armadas of the good Force arrayed against the gigantic aerial battleship and its hordes of fighter jets. For reasons that make no sense at all, Rey is supposed to harness her hatred to kill Palpatine and, thus, become the new Empress of the Dark Side. (It's not clear how this is supposed to happen but the cataract-impaired Emperor harangues the heroine about killing him, demanding that she deliver the coup-de-grace.) The whole movie has progressed to this point where the heroine is supposed to kill the bad Emperor. But now she can't because, for some reason, this will make her bad. So she doesn't kill the old man and, then, there's another huge duel involving the Emperor and Rey, now assisted by her brother, Ren, who has suddenly renounced evil and become a good guy. Rey has two light sabers which are apparently twice as strong as one light saber in the wretched calculus of this film. With her two light sabers (one would have been insufficient), she defeats the evil Emperor and kills him. The audience is completely baffled. Wasn't he pleading with her to kill him just three minutes earlier? Anyway, he gets his wish and the flotilla of evil, black battleships fall flaming to the ground and, many light years away, poor Princess Leia finally gets to die once and for all. Rey and Ren kiss and it looks like there is going to be some kind of incest on display, but, then, Ren solves the narrative problem by dying of undisclosed causes. Everyone rejoices except for the bad guys who are all dead and mere molten slag. Ren goes to some desert planet where there is a decrepit igloo and there announces to the world that her last name is....(wait for it!)... "Skywalker." I've left out lots of amusing byplay with robots (they play the role of frisky and heroic German shepherds in this film), at least four or five sequences involving people on aerial jet-skis threading slot canyons or narrow fissures and innumerable battles both large and small. It's all very frantic and violent. (An entire planet that seems to have been designed by Piranesi gets blown to atoms.) A couple of scenes signify how bad this movie really is: in one scene, Ren heroically scales a vast escarpment of twisted metal and carbonized struts -- she almost falls several times and we are thrilled to see her catch herself and continue her brave ascent. But we have earlier seen that she can fly. So why doesn't she just fly up to the top of the metal wreckage and spare herself all this arduous and pointless climbing?. At one point, Poe, who is a grinning fly-boy out of World War II propaganda,, crashes his jet rocket-plane on a hillside. A woman riding a mastodon-horse appears and makes a snarky remark: "I've seen better landings," she says. "I've seen worse," Poe replies as if this is clever repartee -- of course, we've seen about three-hundred worse landings (they are called fiery crashes). It's completely idiotic and, begs this question, "Why did the supposedly competent pilot crash the rocket in the first place?" You keep expecting some plot point to arise from the crashed rocket, but if this ever happens it occurs so much later that we don't register that the rocket had to be repaired. The horrible truth is that the impressive special effect showing the crashed rocket seems to exist to support the exchange of supposedly witty, but, actually, moronic dialogue. Later, when a attack force lands on the enemy battleship to knock out some kind of guidance system (query: why don't they just bomb the system?), the warrior women riding mastodons attack with Poe at the lead. At this point, even the feckless scriptwriters of this nonsense seem to be confused. How did Poe learn to ride mastodon-horse? One of the warrior women cries out: "Not bad for only your second try!" referring to the aplomb with which the guy rides the mastodon-horse. "I had a good teacher!" Poe replies. (I maybe have Poe confused with someone else -- but you get the gist.) The screenplay is like something written in crayon by third-graders.
Toward its end, the film expresses a curious notion. Each person is the sum total of thousands of generations preceding them and, therefore, all are embodied in one. One person contains the universe. And, so, I suppose that all my heroic efforts in writing this review and over a thousand other reviews will be rewarded if I persuade just one person not to pay $8.09 cents to see this film. That one person will represent multitudes both born and unborn who will spared the mindless and noisy tedium of this picture.
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