On Episode IX
Well, it happened. Abrams didn't even rise to his own best level. He capped off a 42-year cinematic saga with a stinker so bad that it sullies not only the new trilogy he helped to launch but his own reputation as a filmmaker.
I thought I'd avoid writing about the film, but instead of spending time on Twitter or Slack, let me just share my thoughts here.
What makes The Rise of Skywalker so bad? Well, there are multiple levels of badness involved.
[SPOILERS HEREON Y'ALL.]
First is the filmmaking itself. This was the most shocking thing about IX. I knew Abrams would go for nostalgia and servicing fandom. I figured he'd undermine VIII. I didn't know he would make such a straightforwardly bad movie, one alternately boring (the guy next to me on opening night fell asleep) and poorly told (my wife can't be the only one who found it difficult to follow).
The opening 30 minutes in particular move so fast, across so many worlds and plot points and characters old and new, with such flat-footed awkwardness, that it feels as if Abrams stepped in as director to replace another director who had already filmed all this. But that's not what happened. It's all him. Working for Disney, that trillion-dollar behemoth with all the money and time in the world to let Abrams make the best movie he possibly he could. And the result is shoddy beyond belief.
There are moments of elegance or grandeur. Rey's duel with Ren in his TIE fighter. The unexpected, graceful healing of the serpent beneath the sands. (Nice nod to The Mandalorian, that.) The ocean duel. The Sith coliseum of dead souls, the undead Emperor upheld by a black claw. Finn and Poe shooting up a Star Destroyer while running towards a low-angled tracking camera. The lightsaber "swap" from Rey to Ren (the one good and successful extension of a Rian Johnson idea). The shocking accidental death of Chewbacca at Rey's hands—
Whoops! I forgot, nobody dies in Star Wars.
And there's the rub. The problem is the script. It feels like it was written by committee in a succession of a dozen drafts. The result, at least until the final act, comes across like a series of videogame player quests. The doohickeys sought don't matter in themselves. They're just the next required token to level up and receive the next assignment.
The other problem with the script is its bottomless well of bad ideas. Hux is a spy! (Dead Hux. Dad Hux!) Leia retconned into a Jedi! Leia as Rey's true Jedi Master! A fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers, each as powerful as a Death Star—yet unable to move without being directed by a single frail antenna! (Dracula rules, as ever.)
Worst of all, Palpatine as Rey's grandfather and inexplicably alive after being thrown to his death by Vader in VI and the secret Blofeld-like master-puppeteer behind Snoke and the First Order. (Abrams: The first order? THE FINAL ORDER!) The opening words of the crawl read, "The dead speak!" A nice B-movie callback to the saga's origins. But also a foolish, self-parodying decision by a writer-director who quite literally has done nothing but make sequels and remakes for his entire career. The man does not know anything except what he watched as an adolescent. Sometimes he remixes it well. Here, he does not.
What Abrams needs is whatever happened to Lindelof while making The Leftovers. A kind of creative baptism, liberating him from his felt need to please fans by giving them what they think they want and instead steering into, rather than away from, the original and often deeply weird creative ideas that result.
What Abrams needs is an overseer—what is often known as an editor or producer—who watches his back and tells him when he's gone astray. It turns out Kathleen Kennedy is not that person. After half a decade care-taking the new, post-Lucas Disney period of Star Wars, she has given us a track record by which to judge her. It's not pretty.
For example: Instead of the now-canonical opening lines of the crawl, the obvious opening words should have been, "General Leia Organa has died." Next: "The galaxy gathers to mourn its departed royal leader. Following the Battle of Crait and the mysterious passing of the beloved princess, people flock to join the Resistance in a final push to defeat the evil First Order."
Is that so hard? Abrams thought to honor Carrie Fisher by using preexisting footage of her as Leia paired with digital work to map her face onto other actors in key moments. It doesn't work. It's clunky and forced and, wittingly or not, ends up putting more rather than less weight on her presence in the film.
What else? Poe continues to be little more than Captain Earnest. Finn almost reveals his heart to Rey—the film teases us with it—and then it's left dangling. (Was a scene of closure left on the cutting room floor? Is it meant to pop back up in the next trilogy, when Old Finn and Old Rey lose their only child to the Supremely Final Order's Supremely Supreme Leader, a clone of a clone of Palpatine's great-grandfather's uncle?) At least in part it's left dangling because Abrams decides to make Rey and Ren's final moment a kiss. I'm sure some other version of this film could have sold that, but Abrams certainly does not.
Now, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley have long been the best things about this third trilogy. And they do excellent work again in their roles. Were it not for them, the movie would be borderline unwatchable. But after Rian Johnson did not so much in The Last Jedi to move their characters along, Abrams freezes them in place until, with a snap of the fingers, their character arcs lurch into their foreordained change/resolution—and off to the climax we go.
Note well: Abrams isn't only copying Lucas (again and again), he's copying himself. The big moment for Ren to turn from evil to good is prompted by nothing so much as an imaginary memory of the last conversation he shared with his father, Han Solo. So Abrams in effect recreates his own scene from VII on the bridge when Ren kills Han—only this time, for no apparent reason, he throws away his lightsaber, having argued himself into it.
Whereas Rey, gone angry and Sith-y because bloodline, turns back to good after a handy chat with Luke in Force Ghost form. And then we're off to the races.
Even writing it out is painful. It's just so, so bad. Not to mention Lando, featuring Billy Dee Williams playing Lando as Billy Dee Williams playing Lando. Or blink-and-you-miss-them new characters like Zorii or Jannah—full of potential, but too little too late. Oh, and Rose, who for no reason at all is relegated to Leia's babysitter. She could and should have been the Lando of this trilogy: introduced mid-chapter, then a fellow front-liner in the finale. Why not include her with the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe on their (three dozen) mission quests? Just one more way to stick it to Rian Johnson, apparently.
And that's going to be the legacy of this film. Abrams' fundamental failure to understand what The Last Jedi accomplished, and what it made possible. Either Kathleen Kennedy agrees with Abrams in his estimation of that film, or she capitulated to fandom's purported desires (and thus lacks the insight or leadership to steer the ship). Either way, it's quite a thing to behold a billion-dollar franchise lack any semblance of vision across three films made in only a few years' time.
In sum, Episode IX had the opportunity to be something special. Even granting the hand Johnson was dealt (not least the foolish decision to destroy the New Republic, thus reducing the trilogy to a rehash of the original, at least at the formal level), he set up the finale to tell a new story: no Supreme Leader, no Emperor, no Death Star, no consolidated Rebels ready for a Final Mission Once And For All. In Johnson's hands—or Brad Bird's, or Christopher Nolan's, or Tony Gilroy's, or Sam Mendes's, or James Mangold's, or Kathryn Bigelow's, or whomever—it could have been great. It could have been different, new, bold, and unexpected. It could have taken us by surprise, not by resurrecting the ancient dead of the Original Trilogy, but by telling a new story in a new way about these new characters we'd come to care for.
But in Abrams' hands, no one's ever really gone, and there's only ever one story to tell, and re-tell, over and over until the end of time. A pity.
Random Further Comments (Dec 20)
–Is IX worse than the prequels? Not II, which is the worst movie ever made. But it might be worse than I and III. At the very least, it's a discussion. Moments here surpass moments there; but the filmmaking is less shoddy there than it is here. It's all a matter of taste, really. What sort of bad do you prefer your bad movie to be?
–I have long said that J.J. Abrams is the best caster in film. That's his destiny: a producer of blockbuster films who has veto power on all casting decisions. He may also be allowed to touch up dialogue. Otherwise he is not allowed anywhere near a script. He is not allowed to produce or direct films based on preexisting intellectual property. And he is only allowed to direct movies written by someone other than himself.
–After a promising start, Finn's character never got his due across the trilogy. A missed opportunity, in two respects: to explore the psychology of a turncoat stormtrooper, and to consider the moral ambiguity of fighting and killing an opposing military force largely made up of child soldiers (i.e., children kidnapped and brainwashed into service).
–Rey's self-made yellow lightsaber at the end was a nice touch. But as a friend pointed out, it should have been modeled on her long staff: either lengthier in form or double-bladed like Darth Maul's. UPDATE: Turns out I didn't look closely enough. The new lightsaber is made from her long staff, only reduced to a normal size blade handle, rather than fitted into a double-bladed one. Should have spotted it, and that's a solid choice from Abrams et al.
Further Comments Post-Second Viewing (Dec 21)
–I took my oldest to see the movie today, and I have to say, upon second viewing, it was a less frustrating experience. Note well: Not one of the movie's flaws turned out to be something other than a flaw. Everything above stands. But during my first viewing, I thought I would hate to return to the film, even that I might find it unwatchable. It's plenty watchable. And knowing all the terrible script decisions in advance means not audibly groaning at the revelation of each one. That's not nothing, I suppose.
–The second viewing also allowed me to see more of the artistry in the direction, which during the first viewing I found hard to distinguish from the problems in the script (not least since the latter affects the former in numerous ways, especially length of scenes and speed of cutting from one to another). Abrams really is a skilled director of action, emotion, and dialogue. That's what makes the failure of the film painful rather than ho-hum.
–The film was doomed before a single shot was filmed. And it's not micro-elements, it's the macro-frame, the narrative context created from the outset. The three principal mistakes are: Palpatine's return; Rey's lineage; and Leia's central role. All the other flaws (with the possible exception of demoting Rose to a glorified cameo) pale in comparison to those, and could have been incorporated into a quality film. No movie's perfect, after all. This one didn't have to be. It's the deep infrastructure of the story, not particular scenes, that ensure its downfall.
–I was more impressed by John Boyega's performance this time around (and Oscar Isaac's to an extent). Watch him when he's not talking, or just before and after he has dialogue. The reaction shots are priceless. He's never not in character. It only makes the stalling-out of his character arc that much more galling.
–The number of loose threads combined with the amount of yada-yada-ing of plot was glaring on the second viewing. Abrams literally has a character say, "Dark arts. Cloning. Sith jabberwocky..." or some such thing as a comprehensive response to Palpatine being alive. Did they not finish the script? Is there a scene lying on the cutting room floor that resolves Finn's unspoken declaration of love for Rey? Will we ever know?
–Abrams really has issues with killing characters off (also for blowing up entire planets: seven across three films, with two more nearly goners); you can tell by his affinity for fake-killing them and letting them live. M:I:3 opens with the apparent murder of Ethan Hunt's wife—nope. Star Trek Into Darkness ends with Kirk's fake death, brought back to life a few minutes later via Khan 2.0's blood (and also tribbles? It's all so hard to recall the finer points of his scripts). Poe fake-dies in VII, with no real explanation. And in this one both Chewie and Rey "die," only to be not-dead (having never died, in the one case, or been brought back to life, in the other) mere seconds later.
–Must Rey and Ren have kissed at the end? Really? Still not buying it, y'all. (Though that scene at the climax with his face filling the frame, staring "at" Rey, communicating silently, ready to receive the lightsaber: that's a killer. Again, there are solid moments, scenes, and ideas; but in the end it's not just parts that don't add up: the film, finally, is less than the sum of its parts.)
–Having said all that, in the same way that I can enjoy Episodes I or III with my kids, who love Darth Maul and pod-racing and clones and Mace Windu and CGI Yoda and the rest, I was able fully to enjoy IX with my son (his first Star Wars movie in the theater!), who gasped at Rey's family name and laughed at the droid humor and was delighted Ren turned good and found the Emperor truly frightening. (He even leaned over the moment after Rey and Ren kiss, and said, "That's the first time he's ever smiled!") So I'm glad there's that. I wrote above that IX might be worse than I or III. I realize now that's mostly not true. The Phantom Menace is more of an original story, and has genuinely interesting ideas—however poorly executed—and in that respect Lucas has the better of Abrams: the former creates, the latter remixes. But in most other ways IX is superior, also to III. It helps to have sterling actors in gripping roles directed skillfully in gorgeous locales amid haunting atmosphere. If only there were a story to fill it out.
Further Reflections One Week Out (Dec 26)
–Most of my reading, conversations, and encounters in the past week have been with folks who were similarly disappointed with IX, though not always for similar reasons. Even those who have enjoyed it have admitted the shortcomings, vices, or script problems. Less than half a dozen have been unqualified lovers of the film (though I've only found such persons online, not in person—and at least a few appear to have been contrarians who went in knowing the buzz was bad).
But three defenses of the film keep popping up, and they're worth addressing. First: that Palpatine's return was fitting. Second: that superior alternative plots are not forthcoming. Third: that IX is a proper conclusion to the Skywalker–Palpatine trilogy of trilogies as a whole.
Let me take these up together, since they're related to one another, before moving on to some other reflections.
To the second point first: I do think there are superior alternative plots, though the burden of proof need not fall on lowly critics like myself to supply them. Stories are contingent; a thousand things can happen. Fittingness is an art: one says of the fitting conclusion, "Yes, I see now, it could have ended no other way." Abrams wants us to believe that. He's wrong.
But, in any case, sometime in the next week my final(!) update to this ever-expanding post will be an alternative opening crawl and a basic plot line for the film, Palpatine- and lineage-free. (Spoiler: It opens with a royal funeral, and it involves sabotage efforts from without and from within the First Order, including spies.)
But back to the first point: What the defenders miss about the inconveniens of Palpatine's return is not his return full-stop. It is his return out of nowhere, with not a hint or foreshadowing in VII or VIII. It is unfitting because it is a villain deux ex machina—a diabolus ex machina?—wherein the Big Bad, for lack of a better option, is parachuted in to give the story false gravitas it has not otherwise earned and was not naturally heading toward. The truth is that Rian Johnson killed J. J. Abrams' New Big Bad, himself little more than Palpatine Redux, so Abrams did the next best thing: bring back the original. Again, we know this extra-textually, because Abrams made this particular decision upon returning to Star Wars to take over from Colin Treverrow, and neither Treverrow nor Johnson had any inkling of Palpatine's impending resurrection.
This brings us to the third point, that IX works as a sequel capping off the three cycles of Star Wars films. I think some clarity can be shed here by reframing the question one asks. To wit: The following are distinct questions that admit of different answers:
1. Is IX a fitting sequel to VIII?
2. Is IX a fitting conclusion to VII?
3. Is IX a fitting conclusion to IV–VI?
4. Is IX a fitting conclusion to I–III?
Defenders of IX are, so far as I can see, interpreting IX in the light of either The Force Awakens or the prequel trilogy (and thus question #2 or #4). Understood in that way, I can see why they might answer in the affirmative. If the nine-film saga is finally about both the Skywalker and the Palpatine bloodlines, or "houses," then in a way IX works, especially the final act. Moreover, IX works quite well as a kind of direct sequel to VII: the style, the humor, the storytelling, the recycling of tropes, characters, even lines of dialogue: if VII is your jam, you're bound to love IX.
Where IX does not work—at all—is as a sequel to The Last Jedi or as a conclusion to the original trilogy. Regarding the latter, it disentangles and disintegrates the beautiful commingling of the personal and the political, encapsulated perfectly in the final act of Return of the Jedi when the throne room scene functions as both an intra-family drama and a microcosmic battle upon which the fate of the entire galaxy hangs. And this is itself the culmination of a three-film discovery of this very entanglement: Luke is an orphan whose father was murdered long ago, only to learn the would-be murderer is his father, only to realize the princess he sought to help is his own sister. And to save his father he must be saved by him, thus destroying the Emperor, thus destroying the Empire: this is not merely to restore balance to the Force and to bring peace to the galaxy but to restore order and bring peace to his own family.
But IX undoes this: the New Republic is annihilated at the drop of a hat by a Death Star 3.0; the Empire is resurrected as the First Order; the Emperor is resurrected as ... himself. (All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.) But IX gives us no reason to think, with Rey's supposed victory, that days or weeks or months later later it's not all going to play out again, exactly as before. When Luke throws away his lightsaber and Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft, the elation and catharsis we originally felt and are meant still to feel at the simultaneous personal and political victory just accomplished has been reduced to the personal alone.
And as for VIII: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a failure of a sequel to The Last Jedi—at every level—it is a sort of anti-sequel. It actively, intentionally, and painfully seeks at every turn to undo the plot, themes, and character arcs of the previous film. And even if your judgment of VIII is that it is something less than superlative (a misguided judgment, but one I'll permit for now), surely you must admit that a direct sequel that so clearly hates its predecessor, laboring with all its might to unburden itself of its inheritance, is a recipe for narrative confusion, incoherence, and sloppiness. Fittingness is about beauty, harmony, and order. The only honest feeling one can have going from TLJ to TROS is whiplash. Whomever is to blame for that (Kathleen Kennedy above all, also Abrams, but not at all Johnson, who was given free reign and no heads up for what was to come), the result is a fracture within this final trilogy that weighs heavily on the ability of IX to perform its duty as triple finale: sequel/conclusion at once to Rey, to Luke and Leia, and to Anakin. It buckles and breaks under the weight—one chosen by the writer-director, not forced upon him.
–Another word about Abrams: the man loves his narrative cheats and work-arounds. His worst vice is impatience. Kirk must be promoted immediately. Rey must already be a brilliant pilot and swordsman. Finn can be a general just like that. Need a master code-breaker? Poe knows a gal. Need to get to Exogol to stop the super-duper-master-fleet-each-as-powerful-as-a-death-star within 16 hours, plus round up the entire galaxy to come help? Sure, why not.
Worse than this abbreviated storytelling tic, Abrams as often as not refuses put in the time or the effort to earn our affection or trust for his characters or plot beats. Rather, he works with borrowed emotional capital. He knows how we already feel about Han or Leia or Chewie or Luke, and he uses that to his advantage. He brings in a stray "memory" to turn the lead villain into a hero. He has the good guys and bad guys keep flying the same ships, in the same planet locales, wearing the same suits, with the same droids along for the ride: and this time, no one can die, not for good. Does he need to create a new character to rally the troops for a final battle? Nope. Billy Dee Williams will do the job nicely. Should Benedict Cumberbatch play a heretofore unknown adversary for Kirk, Spock, & co.? Nah: Khan 2.0 is what the people want. And you've got to give the people what they want.
–I continue to lament the unintelligible and finally uninteresting character arc for poor FN-2187. If VII, following his desertion, was about Finn's struggle with a kind of cowardice—running away from evil and danger—and VIII about wrestling with recklessness—now running straight into danger and certain death—then IX should have concerned the mean of those two extremes: what it means for this child-soldier turncoat to be courageous, to embody the virtue of bravery.
Instead, we get a replay of both VII and VIII with Finn being funny but Rey-obsessed while also attempting, again, a suicide mission (only this time not kept from following through with it by Rose). And though Abrams has said in interviews that the film was meant to reveal that Finn, too, is Force-sensitive, and that this is what he wanted to tell Rey, this is far from evident in the film, and the half-hearted attempt to address his affection for Rey is clumsy at best (not to mention, for the thousandth time, acting as if Rose, i.e. Abrams' stand-in for VIII/Johnson, doesn't exist). What a missed opportunity.
–If Finn stands for the virtue of courage, it seems to me that Poe stands for prudence: a virtue he learned in the previous film, but which he must re-learn for Abrams here, since what happens in TLJ stays in TLJ. But what if Poe were less earnest in this film, less impulsive and soul-searching and navel-gazing, and more of a straightforward, prudent, wise leader?
As for Rey: I want to say her virtue is justice, paired with religio. Rendering what is due to those to whom it is due in proper proportion, while honoring, with an appropriate piety, those to whom one is indebted—including, in her case, Rey's literal parents, but also and especially her adoptive family: the Resistance, on the one hand, and the Jedi, on the other. (Though I don't love "Rey Skywalker" at the end, I will allow it on this reading.)
–About Kylo Ren's turn. It was not necessary, much less inevitable, narratively, that he break good like his grandfather. Johnson posed this question in VIII: what if Ben Solo were offered the opportunity, considered it, but turned away (whether in weakness or in malice)? That is a story that could have been told well.
A story that involves his repentance from evil also could have been told well. That didn't happen here, not least because the turn is a cheat: saved from death, his own memory converts him. What's more, the film has him simply become Good at that point. But the brilliance of Vader's turn in VI isn't that he goes from Evil to Good at the drop of a hat. Rather, he lets his paternal love for his son overthrow his willingness to cooperate with evil—and only thus does he turn on Palpatine.
Adam Driver's performance overcomes Abrams' deficiencies as a writer here, but the intriguing possibility here was for a transformation that is only partial: so that Ren's conflicted badness—"Millennial Darth" playing dress-up but unable fully to embrace evil's true depths—becomes a conflicted goodness: love and devotion to Rey, perhaps, but not necessarily to her cause or her friends or the ends and virtues she stands and fights for. That is more dramatically interesting, truer to the character, and would have made for a fascinating open-ended "ending": Ben Solo, reconciled to Rey but not to himself or to what she loves. What does the future hold for such a pair? An unstable settlement, for sure, and one less happy-clappy kumbaya in the way that IX wants to repeat VI.
–Speaking of Ren and Rey, I'm increasingly dissatisfied by that kiss. I like the continued theme of attachment overcoming detachment, even as attachment presents the greater temptation for disordered loves and thus for fall into evil. Thus is Anakin lured to the Dark Side by Palpatine via his dysfunctional love for Padme; but thus also is Anakin redeemed by Luke's well-ordered detachment (willingness to die, lightsaber thrown away) rooted in proper attachment (love for his father and sister, unwillingness to kill in anger). This very balance of detachment within attachment is undone in Luke's fear (in the flashback of The Last Jedi) of what the young Ben Solo is capable of: and this unbalance tips Ben over to the Dark Side. What brings him back to the Light is Rey, who she is and what she does, and his, Ben's, overpowering love for her.
But is that love eros? It certainly isn't familial. It seems to me that, even at the level of the text of the films (VII and IX on their own, but also VIII), it isn't eros, either, but rather philia. The love of Rey for Ren and of Ren for Rey is one of friendship. That is itself one of the under-discussed themes of Star Wars, whereby the personal is wedded to the political not through family alone but through the power of friends to band together in the face of unimaginable power and terrible odds. (Perhaps the great failure of the prequel trilogy is its inability to depict friendship well, chiefly between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Not for lack of trying...)
But perhaps I'm not giving Abrams his due. On his terms, the eros of the new trilogy echoes and recapitulates the tragic eros of the prequel trilogy, with filial love anchoring the original trilogy and friendship uniting all three. I prefer my alternative, however, since it is isn't so much a failure of eros as one of philia that prompts Anakin's fall in Revenge of the Sith: his inability to be a friend to Obi-Wan, in truth and in justice. In which case, the redemption of Anakin's grandson by (ugh) Palpatine's granddaughter comes about by that very love whose lack doomed Anakin in the first place. Going forward, in fact, I think I will choose to read IX in this way, regardless of Abrams' intentions, since Ben and Rey's kiss can be interpreted as a kind of exuberant exclamation point in the Hamlet-esque final moments of their ostensible shared deathbed.
A silver lining, that, in an otherwise diverting but finally disappointing denouement to the Skywalker saga. If nothing else, Abrams always delivers by forcing his audience repeatedly to ask a single, lingering question of all of his films. That is, what might have been.
I thought I'd avoid writing about the film, but instead of spending time on Twitter or Slack, let me just share my thoughts here.
What makes The Rise of Skywalker so bad? Well, there are multiple levels of badness involved.
[SPOILERS HEREON Y'ALL.]
First is the filmmaking itself. This was the most shocking thing about IX. I knew Abrams would go for nostalgia and servicing fandom. I figured he'd undermine VIII. I didn't know he would make such a straightforwardly bad movie, one alternately boring (the guy next to me on opening night fell asleep) and poorly told (my wife can't be the only one who found it difficult to follow).
The opening 30 minutes in particular move so fast, across so many worlds and plot points and characters old and new, with such flat-footed awkwardness, that it feels as if Abrams stepped in as director to replace another director who had already filmed all this. But that's not what happened. It's all him. Working for Disney, that trillion-dollar behemoth with all the money and time in the world to let Abrams make the best movie he possibly he could. And the result is shoddy beyond belief.
There are moments of elegance or grandeur. Rey's duel with Ren in his TIE fighter. The unexpected, graceful healing of the serpent beneath the sands. (Nice nod to The Mandalorian, that.) The ocean duel. The Sith coliseum of dead souls, the undead Emperor upheld by a black claw. Finn and Poe shooting up a Star Destroyer while running towards a low-angled tracking camera. The lightsaber "swap" from Rey to Ren (the one good and successful extension of a Rian Johnson idea). The shocking accidental death of Chewbacca at Rey's hands—
Whoops! I forgot, nobody dies in Star Wars.
And there's the rub. The problem is the script. It feels like it was written by committee in a succession of a dozen drafts. The result, at least until the final act, comes across like a series of videogame player quests. The doohickeys sought don't matter in themselves. They're just the next required token to level up and receive the next assignment.
The other problem with the script is its bottomless well of bad ideas. Hux is a spy! (Dead Hux. Dad Hux!) Leia retconned into a Jedi! Leia as Rey's true Jedi Master! A fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers, each as powerful as a Death Star—yet unable to move without being directed by a single frail antenna! (Dracula rules, as ever.)
Worst of all, Palpatine as Rey's grandfather and inexplicably alive after being thrown to his death by Vader in VI and the secret Blofeld-like master-puppeteer behind Snoke and the First Order. (Abrams: The first order? THE FINAL ORDER!) The opening words of the crawl read, "The dead speak!" A nice B-movie callback to the saga's origins. But also a foolish, self-parodying decision by a writer-director who quite literally has done nothing but make sequels and remakes for his entire career. The man does not know anything except what he watched as an adolescent. Sometimes he remixes it well. Here, he does not.
What Abrams needs is whatever happened to Lindelof while making The Leftovers. A kind of creative baptism, liberating him from his felt need to please fans by giving them what they think they want and instead steering into, rather than away from, the original and often deeply weird creative ideas that result.
What Abrams needs is an overseer—what is often known as an editor or producer—who watches his back and tells him when he's gone astray. It turns out Kathleen Kennedy is not that person. After half a decade care-taking the new, post-Lucas Disney period of Star Wars, she has given us a track record by which to judge her. It's not pretty.
For example: Instead of the now-canonical opening lines of the crawl, the obvious opening words should have been, "General Leia Organa has died." Next: "The galaxy gathers to mourn its departed royal leader. Following the Battle of Crait and the mysterious passing of the beloved princess, people flock to join the Resistance in a final push to defeat the evil First Order."
Is that so hard? Abrams thought to honor Carrie Fisher by using preexisting footage of her as Leia paired with digital work to map her face onto other actors in key moments. It doesn't work. It's clunky and forced and, wittingly or not, ends up putting more rather than less weight on her presence in the film.
What else? Poe continues to be little more than Captain Earnest. Finn almost reveals his heart to Rey—the film teases us with it—and then it's left dangling. (Was a scene of closure left on the cutting room floor? Is it meant to pop back up in the next trilogy, when Old Finn and Old Rey lose their only child to the Supremely Final Order's Supremely Supreme Leader, a clone of a clone of Palpatine's great-grandfather's uncle?) At least in part it's left dangling because Abrams decides to make Rey and Ren's final moment a kiss. I'm sure some other version of this film could have sold that, but Abrams certainly does not.
Now, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley have long been the best things about this third trilogy. And they do excellent work again in their roles. Were it not for them, the movie would be borderline unwatchable. But after Rian Johnson did not so much in The Last Jedi to move their characters along, Abrams freezes them in place until, with a snap of the fingers, their character arcs lurch into their foreordained change/resolution—and off to the climax we go.
Note well: Abrams isn't only copying Lucas (again and again), he's copying himself. The big moment for Ren to turn from evil to good is prompted by nothing so much as an imaginary memory of the last conversation he shared with his father, Han Solo. So Abrams in effect recreates his own scene from VII on the bridge when Ren kills Han—only this time, for no apparent reason, he throws away his lightsaber, having argued himself into it.
Whereas Rey, gone angry and Sith-y because bloodline, turns back to good after a handy chat with Luke in Force Ghost form. And then we're off to the races.
Even writing it out is painful. It's just so, so bad. Not to mention Lando, featuring Billy Dee Williams playing Lando as Billy Dee Williams playing Lando. Or blink-and-you-miss-them new characters like Zorii or Jannah—full of potential, but too little too late. Oh, and Rose, who for no reason at all is relegated to Leia's babysitter. She could and should have been the Lando of this trilogy: introduced mid-chapter, then a fellow front-liner in the finale. Why not include her with the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe on their (three dozen) mission quests? Just one more way to stick it to Rian Johnson, apparently.
And that's going to be the legacy of this film. Abrams' fundamental failure to understand what The Last Jedi accomplished, and what it made possible. Either Kathleen Kennedy agrees with Abrams in his estimation of that film, or she capitulated to fandom's purported desires (and thus lacks the insight or leadership to steer the ship). Either way, it's quite a thing to behold a billion-dollar franchise lack any semblance of vision across three films made in only a few years' time.
In sum, Episode IX had the opportunity to be something special. Even granting the hand Johnson was dealt (not least the foolish decision to destroy the New Republic, thus reducing the trilogy to a rehash of the original, at least at the formal level), he set up the finale to tell a new story: no Supreme Leader, no Emperor, no Death Star, no consolidated Rebels ready for a Final Mission Once And For All. In Johnson's hands—or Brad Bird's, or Christopher Nolan's, or Tony Gilroy's, or Sam Mendes's, or James Mangold's, or Kathryn Bigelow's, or whomever—it could have been great. It could have been different, new, bold, and unexpected. It could have taken us by surprise, not by resurrecting the ancient dead of the Original Trilogy, but by telling a new story in a new way about these new characters we'd come to care for.
But in Abrams' hands, no one's ever really gone, and there's only ever one story to tell, and re-tell, over and over until the end of time. A pity.
Random Further Comments (Dec 20)
–Is IX worse than the prequels? Not II, which is the worst movie ever made. But it might be worse than I and III. At the very least, it's a discussion. Moments here surpass moments there; but the filmmaking is less shoddy there than it is here. It's all a matter of taste, really. What sort of bad do you prefer your bad movie to be?
–I have long said that J.J. Abrams is the best caster in film. That's his destiny: a producer of blockbuster films who has veto power on all casting decisions. He may also be allowed to touch up dialogue. Otherwise he is not allowed anywhere near a script. He is not allowed to produce or direct films based on preexisting intellectual property. And he is only allowed to direct movies written by someone other than himself.
–After a promising start, Finn's character never got his due across the trilogy. A missed opportunity, in two respects: to explore the psychology of a turncoat stormtrooper, and to consider the moral ambiguity of fighting and killing an opposing military force largely made up of child soldiers (i.e., children kidnapped and brainwashed into service).
–Rey's self-made yellow lightsaber at the end was a nice touch. But as a friend pointed out, it should have been modeled on her long staff: either lengthier in form or double-bladed like Darth Maul's. UPDATE: Turns out I didn't look closely enough. The new lightsaber is made from her long staff, only reduced to a normal size blade handle, rather than fitted into a double-bladed one. Should have spotted it, and that's a solid choice from Abrams et al.
Further Comments Post-Second Viewing (Dec 21)
–I took my oldest to see the movie today, and I have to say, upon second viewing, it was a less frustrating experience. Note well: Not one of the movie's flaws turned out to be something other than a flaw. Everything above stands. But during my first viewing, I thought I would hate to return to the film, even that I might find it unwatchable. It's plenty watchable. And knowing all the terrible script decisions in advance means not audibly groaning at the revelation of each one. That's not nothing, I suppose.
–The second viewing also allowed me to see more of the artistry in the direction, which during the first viewing I found hard to distinguish from the problems in the script (not least since the latter affects the former in numerous ways, especially length of scenes and speed of cutting from one to another). Abrams really is a skilled director of action, emotion, and dialogue. That's what makes the failure of the film painful rather than ho-hum.
–The film was doomed before a single shot was filmed. And it's not micro-elements, it's the macro-frame, the narrative context created from the outset. The three principal mistakes are: Palpatine's return; Rey's lineage; and Leia's central role. All the other flaws (with the possible exception of demoting Rose to a glorified cameo) pale in comparison to those, and could have been incorporated into a quality film. No movie's perfect, after all. This one didn't have to be. It's the deep infrastructure of the story, not particular scenes, that ensure its downfall.
–I was more impressed by John Boyega's performance this time around (and Oscar Isaac's to an extent). Watch him when he's not talking, or just before and after he has dialogue. The reaction shots are priceless. He's never not in character. It only makes the stalling-out of his character arc that much more galling.
–The number of loose threads combined with the amount of yada-yada-ing of plot was glaring on the second viewing. Abrams literally has a character say, "Dark arts. Cloning. Sith jabberwocky..." or some such thing as a comprehensive response to Palpatine being alive. Did they not finish the script? Is there a scene lying on the cutting room floor that resolves Finn's unspoken declaration of love for Rey? Will we ever know?
–Abrams really has issues with killing characters off (also for blowing up entire planets: seven across three films, with two more nearly goners); you can tell by his affinity for fake-killing them and letting them live. M:I:3 opens with the apparent murder of Ethan Hunt's wife—nope. Star Trek Into Darkness ends with Kirk's fake death, brought back to life a few minutes later via Khan 2.0's blood (and also tribbles? It's all so hard to recall the finer points of his scripts). Poe fake-dies in VII, with no real explanation. And in this one both Chewie and Rey "die," only to be not-dead (having never died, in the one case, or been brought back to life, in the other) mere seconds later.
–Must Rey and Ren have kissed at the end? Really? Still not buying it, y'all. (Though that scene at the climax with his face filling the frame, staring "at" Rey, communicating silently, ready to receive the lightsaber: that's a killer. Again, there are solid moments, scenes, and ideas; but in the end it's not just parts that don't add up: the film, finally, is less than the sum of its parts.)
–Having said all that, in the same way that I can enjoy Episodes I or III with my kids, who love Darth Maul and pod-racing and clones and Mace Windu and CGI Yoda and the rest, I was able fully to enjoy IX with my son (his first Star Wars movie in the theater!), who gasped at Rey's family name and laughed at the droid humor and was delighted Ren turned good and found the Emperor truly frightening. (He even leaned over the moment after Rey and Ren kiss, and said, "That's the first time he's ever smiled!") So I'm glad there's that. I wrote above that IX might be worse than I or III. I realize now that's mostly not true. The Phantom Menace is more of an original story, and has genuinely interesting ideas—however poorly executed—and in that respect Lucas has the better of Abrams: the former creates, the latter remixes. But in most other ways IX is superior, also to III. It helps to have sterling actors in gripping roles directed skillfully in gorgeous locales amid haunting atmosphere. If only there were a story to fill it out.
Further Reflections One Week Out (Dec 26)
–Most of my reading, conversations, and encounters in the past week have been with folks who were similarly disappointed with IX, though not always for similar reasons. Even those who have enjoyed it have admitted the shortcomings, vices, or script problems. Less than half a dozen have been unqualified lovers of the film (though I've only found such persons online, not in person—and at least a few appear to have been contrarians who went in knowing the buzz was bad).
But three defenses of the film keep popping up, and they're worth addressing. First: that Palpatine's return was fitting. Second: that superior alternative plots are not forthcoming. Third: that IX is a proper conclusion to the Skywalker–Palpatine trilogy of trilogies as a whole.
Let me take these up together, since they're related to one another, before moving on to some other reflections.
To the second point first: I do think there are superior alternative plots, though the burden of proof need not fall on lowly critics like myself to supply them. Stories are contingent; a thousand things can happen. Fittingness is an art: one says of the fitting conclusion, "Yes, I see now, it could have ended no other way." Abrams wants us to believe that. He's wrong.
But, in any case, sometime in the next week my final(!) update to this ever-expanding post will be an alternative opening crawl and a basic plot line for the film, Palpatine- and lineage-free. (Spoiler: It opens with a royal funeral, and it involves sabotage efforts from without and from within the First Order, including spies.)
But back to the first point: What the defenders miss about the inconveniens of Palpatine's return is not his return full-stop. It is his return out of nowhere, with not a hint or foreshadowing in VII or VIII. It is unfitting because it is a villain deux ex machina—a diabolus ex machina?—wherein the Big Bad, for lack of a better option, is parachuted in to give the story false gravitas it has not otherwise earned and was not naturally heading toward. The truth is that Rian Johnson killed J. J. Abrams' New Big Bad, himself little more than Palpatine Redux, so Abrams did the next best thing: bring back the original. Again, we know this extra-textually, because Abrams made this particular decision upon returning to Star Wars to take over from Colin Treverrow, and neither Treverrow nor Johnson had any inkling of Palpatine's impending resurrection.
This brings us to the third point, that IX works as a sequel capping off the three cycles of Star Wars films. I think some clarity can be shed here by reframing the question one asks. To wit: The following are distinct questions that admit of different answers:
1. Is IX a fitting sequel to VIII?
2. Is IX a fitting conclusion to VII?
3. Is IX a fitting conclusion to IV–VI?
4. Is IX a fitting conclusion to I–III?
Defenders of IX are, so far as I can see, interpreting IX in the light of either The Force Awakens or the prequel trilogy (and thus question #2 or #4). Understood in that way, I can see why they might answer in the affirmative. If the nine-film saga is finally about both the Skywalker and the Palpatine bloodlines, or "houses," then in a way IX works, especially the final act. Moreover, IX works quite well as a kind of direct sequel to VII: the style, the humor, the storytelling, the recycling of tropes, characters, even lines of dialogue: if VII is your jam, you're bound to love IX.
Where IX does not work—at all—is as a sequel to The Last Jedi or as a conclusion to the original trilogy. Regarding the latter, it disentangles and disintegrates the beautiful commingling of the personal and the political, encapsulated perfectly in the final act of Return of the Jedi when the throne room scene functions as both an intra-family drama and a microcosmic battle upon which the fate of the entire galaxy hangs. And this is itself the culmination of a three-film discovery of this very entanglement: Luke is an orphan whose father was murdered long ago, only to learn the would-be murderer is his father, only to realize the princess he sought to help is his own sister. And to save his father he must be saved by him, thus destroying the Emperor, thus destroying the Empire: this is not merely to restore balance to the Force and to bring peace to the galaxy but to restore order and bring peace to his own family.
But IX undoes this: the New Republic is annihilated at the drop of a hat by a Death Star 3.0; the Empire is resurrected as the First Order; the Emperor is resurrected as ... himself. (All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.) But IX gives us no reason to think, with Rey's supposed victory, that days or weeks or months later later it's not all going to play out again, exactly as before. When Luke throws away his lightsaber and Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft, the elation and catharsis we originally felt and are meant still to feel at the simultaneous personal and political victory just accomplished has been reduced to the personal alone.
And as for VIII: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a failure of a sequel to The Last Jedi—at every level—it is a sort of anti-sequel. It actively, intentionally, and painfully seeks at every turn to undo the plot, themes, and character arcs of the previous film. And even if your judgment of VIII is that it is something less than superlative (a misguided judgment, but one I'll permit for now), surely you must admit that a direct sequel that so clearly hates its predecessor, laboring with all its might to unburden itself of its inheritance, is a recipe for narrative confusion, incoherence, and sloppiness. Fittingness is about beauty, harmony, and order. The only honest feeling one can have going from TLJ to TROS is whiplash. Whomever is to blame for that (Kathleen Kennedy above all, also Abrams, but not at all Johnson, who was given free reign and no heads up for what was to come), the result is a fracture within this final trilogy that weighs heavily on the ability of IX to perform its duty as triple finale: sequel/conclusion at once to Rey, to Luke and Leia, and to Anakin. It buckles and breaks under the weight—one chosen by the writer-director, not forced upon him.
–Another word about Abrams: the man loves his narrative cheats and work-arounds. His worst vice is impatience. Kirk must be promoted immediately. Rey must already be a brilliant pilot and swordsman. Finn can be a general just like that. Need a master code-breaker? Poe knows a gal. Need to get to Exogol to stop the super-duper-master-fleet-each-as-powerful-as-a-death-star within 16 hours, plus round up the entire galaxy to come help? Sure, why not.
Worse than this abbreviated storytelling tic, Abrams as often as not refuses put in the time or the effort to earn our affection or trust for his characters or plot beats. Rather, he works with borrowed emotional capital. He knows how we already feel about Han or Leia or Chewie or Luke, and he uses that to his advantage. He brings in a stray "memory" to turn the lead villain into a hero. He has the good guys and bad guys keep flying the same ships, in the same planet locales, wearing the same suits, with the same droids along for the ride: and this time, no one can die, not for good. Does he need to create a new character to rally the troops for a final battle? Nope. Billy Dee Williams will do the job nicely. Should Benedict Cumberbatch play a heretofore unknown adversary for Kirk, Spock, & co.? Nah: Khan 2.0 is what the people want. And you've got to give the people what they want.
–I continue to lament the unintelligible and finally uninteresting character arc for poor FN-2187. If VII, following his desertion, was about Finn's struggle with a kind of cowardice—running away from evil and danger—and VIII about wrestling with recklessness—now running straight into danger and certain death—then IX should have concerned the mean of those two extremes: what it means for this child-soldier turncoat to be courageous, to embody the virtue of bravery.
Instead, we get a replay of both VII and VIII with Finn being funny but Rey-obsessed while also attempting, again, a suicide mission (only this time not kept from following through with it by Rose). And though Abrams has said in interviews that the film was meant to reveal that Finn, too, is Force-sensitive, and that this is what he wanted to tell Rey, this is far from evident in the film, and the half-hearted attempt to address his affection for Rey is clumsy at best (not to mention, for the thousandth time, acting as if Rose, i.e. Abrams' stand-in for VIII/Johnson, doesn't exist). What a missed opportunity.
–If Finn stands for the virtue of courage, it seems to me that Poe stands for prudence: a virtue he learned in the previous film, but which he must re-learn for Abrams here, since what happens in TLJ stays in TLJ. But what if Poe were less earnest in this film, less impulsive and soul-searching and navel-gazing, and more of a straightforward, prudent, wise leader?
As for Rey: I want to say her virtue is justice, paired with religio. Rendering what is due to those to whom it is due in proper proportion, while honoring, with an appropriate piety, those to whom one is indebted—including, in her case, Rey's literal parents, but also and especially her adoptive family: the Resistance, on the one hand, and the Jedi, on the other. (Though I don't love "Rey Skywalker" at the end, I will allow it on this reading.)
–About Kylo Ren's turn. It was not necessary, much less inevitable, narratively, that he break good like his grandfather. Johnson posed this question in VIII: what if Ben Solo were offered the opportunity, considered it, but turned away (whether in weakness or in malice)? That is a story that could have been told well.
A story that involves his repentance from evil also could have been told well. That didn't happen here, not least because the turn is a cheat: saved from death, his own memory converts him. What's more, the film has him simply become Good at that point. But the brilliance of Vader's turn in VI isn't that he goes from Evil to Good at the drop of a hat. Rather, he lets his paternal love for his son overthrow his willingness to cooperate with evil—and only thus does he turn on Palpatine.
Adam Driver's performance overcomes Abrams' deficiencies as a writer here, but the intriguing possibility here was for a transformation that is only partial: so that Ren's conflicted badness—"Millennial Darth" playing dress-up but unable fully to embrace evil's true depths—becomes a conflicted goodness: love and devotion to Rey, perhaps, but not necessarily to her cause or her friends or the ends and virtues she stands and fights for. That is more dramatically interesting, truer to the character, and would have made for a fascinating open-ended "ending": Ben Solo, reconciled to Rey but not to himself or to what she loves. What does the future hold for such a pair? An unstable settlement, for sure, and one less happy-clappy kumbaya in the way that IX wants to repeat VI.
–Speaking of Ren and Rey, I'm increasingly dissatisfied by that kiss. I like the continued theme of attachment overcoming detachment, even as attachment presents the greater temptation for disordered loves and thus for fall into evil. Thus is Anakin lured to the Dark Side by Palpatine via his dysfunctional love for Padme; but thus also is Anakin redeemed by Luke's well-ordered detachment (willingness to die, lightsaber thrown away) rooted in proper attachment (love for his father and sister, unwillingness to kill in anger). This very balance of detachment within attachment is undone in Luke's fear (in the flashback of The Last Jedi) of what the young Ben Solo is capable of: and this unbalance tips Ben over to the Dark Side. What brings him back to the Light is Rey, who she is and what she does, and his, Ben's, overpowering love for her.
But is that love eros? It certainly isn't familial. It seems to me that, even at the level of the text of the films (VII and IX on their own, but also VIII), it isn't eros, either, but rather philia. The love of Rey for Ren and of Ren for Rey is one of friendship. That is itself one of the under-discussed themes of Star Wars, whereby the personal is wedded to the political not through family alone but through the power of friends to band together in the face of unimaginable power and terrible odds. (Perhaps the great failure of the prequel trilogy is its inability to depict friendship well, chiefly between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Not for lack of trying...)
But perhaps I'm not giving Abrams his due. On his terms, the eros of the new trilogy echoes and recapitulates the tragic eros of the prequel trilogy, with filial love anchoring the original trilogy and friendship uniting all three. I prefer my alternative, however, since it is isn't so much a failure of eros as one of philia that prompts Anakin's fall in Revenge of the Sith: his inability to be a friend to Obi-Wan, in truth and in justice. In which case, the redemption of Anakin's grandson by (ugh) Palpatine's granddaughter comes about by that very love whose lack doomed Anakin in the first place. Going forward, in fact, I think I will choose to read IX in this way, regardless of Abrams' intentions, since Ben and Rey's kiss can be interpreted as a kind of exuberant exclamation point in the Hamlet-esque final moments of their ostensible shared deathbed.
A silver lining, that, in an otherwise diverting but finally disappointing denouement to the Skywalker saga. If nothing else, Abrams always delivers by forcing his audience repeatedly to ask a single, lingering question of all of his films. That is, what might have been.
