STAR WARS - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019)

I’ve always been more of a Star Trek fan.

A joke I saw recently summed up my feelings about Star Wars.

“Star Trek fans don't hate six out of nine of their movies.”

I think that says a lot about both sets of fans.

Star Wars fans are notoriously easy to anger. And for a lot of reasons... There are valid points that I think make being an angry Star Wars fan very easy. If the original 1977 film was a blast across your psyche ripping open your brainpan, showing you a world of imaginative space fantasy fiction for the first time and the second film cemented the belief that this galaxy far, far away was a glorious, deep and wonderful thing then having that belief challenged can be awful. If you felt that the universe presented in those movies was deep, smart and fun on levels that real life never could be it would have seemed like the most incredible fiction in the world was embodied in Star Wars. You could latch onto that universe of delights and adventure and have a great place to visit with a simple press of the ‘Play’ button. That things were slightly spoiled by the not quite as good but still somewhat satisfying conclusion the series achieved in ’83 didn’t negate the overwhelming cool of the first two films. For decades that's all we had and in a lot of ways it was all fans really needed. Sure, there were a lot of comic books and novels and all kinds of ephemera built around Star Wars and you could wallow in that expanded universe which allowed you to imagine more adventures with lightsabers, X-wings and the Millennium Falcon. But those three movies - as flawed as the third one was – were enough to keep the imagination alive for an entire generation.

For most fans of the original three films, 1999’s return to the big screen with EPISODE 1 was like having your childhood held up so that you could see just how rotted and cold it had become. So that you could see how many gaps your own mind filled in to make those stories complete and coherent. Indeed, Episodes 1, 2 and 3 almost seemed as if they were contrived to perfectly undermine the love built by the original trilogy, to destroy the faith of the true believers. Artificial looking, badly written, poorly conceived on almost every level to the point that they almost seemed constructed to actively snuff out the wonder filled world that those first films had built for young minds in which to wander. Suddenly the Star Wars Universe was much smaller; a much more closely contained and less inviting place for every young person who might see themselves as someone who could learn to be the next Luke Skywalker. Now you were born with it or you weren't. And if that doesn't suck the magic out of the concept set up by the original movie, I don't know what else could.

So now we have the final three films in what is now known as the Skywalker Saga. I haven't really enjoyed any of the three recent numbered films because each one seems calculated in a way that makes them as artificial as maybe all of them really were all along. THE FORCE AWAKENS feels like a sad rehash of the 1977 film built very carefully to reassure fans disappointed by the prequel trilogy. “Come back home! Trust us. We're going to give you what you want this time and not a bunch of poorly CGI'd ridiculous garbage." THE LAST JEDI seemed to have some interesting ideas about examining what a hero is and what a hero can be but spent more than half of its running time wasting entire characters on things that are obviously being done just to give them something to do. And it committed the cardinal sin of not giving the now very vocal fans what they want – more of the same. Lucas might be able to get away with that but not anyone else!

THE RISE OF SKYWALKER attempts to wrap up the entire nine film arc in a way that's satisfying, exciting and pleasing to the fanbase. That it can't do those often contradictory things shouldn't surprise anybody, but it is kind of admirable to see them in there trying as hard as they are. I'm probably the wrong age for this film being in my 50s now. I can see how poorly welded together the various elements are and it bothers me to know that almost no one in this film is in real danger and no one is going to be really taken out of the story. They just won't do that because there's no way they're going to exclude those characters from the toy line. They learned long ago to leave things open to be in future stories even if only on the printed page. Was anybody really worried that a particular character had actually been killed halfway through the movie? Certainly not. There's no way these filmmakers are going to do something that radical after the screaming fit of rage the previous film engendered when it questioned the hero’s journey myth attached to the saga.

I found myself only vaguely engaged while watching all of the things speed by me on the big screen. I have no emotional investment in any of the characters anymore. In fact, I don't think I've had any emotional investment in any of these characters since the 80s and the past 20 years of Star Wars movies has certainly not changed that. To me all the characters in these movies are just empty ciphers, often played by very good actors, but with such thin characterizations that I've never given a crap about any of them. I guess that this is probably the way adults felt about the original movie back in the 70s when they were wondering out loud to anyone who would listen ‘What do you see in this? It's just a bunch of cardboard people in a bunch of expensive special effects.’ And now I am that person looking at these movies and thinking that same thing. So, I’ve become unable to feel these story embrace me like they did in 1977 and 1980. I can see the problems, the weaknesses and the poor choices clearly. The magic is gone. I guess I was born without midichlorians. Or maybe the Force was just an illusion after all.