The Rise of Skywalker Review

Don't read this article if you're going to go and see The Rise of Skywalker and you expect to get some enjoyment from it.

I was disappointed. I had been hoping that this film was going to be so bad that we could all laugh about the whole Disney trilogy. Frankly I wanted it to be so bad that Kathleen Kennedy and Jar Jar Abrams would have got laughed out of the room if they'd offered to help with the school play. I wanted The Room in a galaxy far far away  - oh hi Mark. I wanted The Rise of Skywalker to make The Fantom Menace look like Citizen fucking Kane. Instead, the film, I'm sad to say is solidly mediocre.

It looks great, the music is fine, the acting's fine - the emperor is wonderful, the plot is tedious and hectic at the same time and the characterisation is wafer thin. The main story, as best I can remember is: Go to location 1, get McGuffin 1 and escape from the minor baddie. Go to location 2, use McGuffin 1 to get McGuffin 2&3 and escape from the minor baddie. Remember that you can't trust a ginger. Use McGuffin 3 to get to location 3, get McGuffin 4 and escape from the minor baddie. Lose McGuffin 4, find McGuffin 4 and use it to get to the final location and the final boss.

There's very little threat or tension. Just about everybody has impenetrable plot-armour, or a fairy-god-deus-ex-machina-mother. Chewbacca is captured and we see the spaceship he's on destroyed, but then he turns out to be alive on another one. The final McGuffin is destroyed, but we had another one in the glove box all along. Mary-Sue is beaten in a lightsabre fight, but at the critical moment her opponent is force-distracted. Everyone is captured and then easily rescued, the rebel's are hopelessly outnumbered and them massively reinforced. The minor antagonist is thrown down a cliff and then climbs back up. The protagonist is killed and then restored.

My favourite thing about the film, unless I've misunderstood the ending, is that the dark side wins and the memory of Luke Skywalker is ground into humiliated dust. The resurrected Palpatine wants Mary-Sue (his own granddaughter) to kill him so that he and his ghost buddies can share her body. She's tricked into doing it in self defence in the final fight and by the end of the film she's taken the Skywalker lightsabres (yes there's two of them - don't ask), the Skywalker moisture farm and the Skywalker name for the Palpatines.

I for one welcome our new Sith Skywalker overlords.

Richard "dew. it!" B