The movie’s few infinitesimal touches of what might be called character-such as Rey substituting compassion for violence when she heals a deadly serpent-tick off a few ready-made socio-boxes.
Star wars the rise of skywalker movie#
Instead of drama and imagination, the movie depends on a relentless blare of music, by John Williams, which takes the place of any emotional complexity that might dare to sneak through the interstices. The closest thing to inspiration comes in the form of an occasional touch of design, in the gigantic shiny basalt blackness of Sith void spaces and the overwhelming waves separating Rey from the wreckage of the Death Star. Abrams doesn’t offer any original, significant, or memorable images, not a glimmer of action that’s staged with a sense even of mere physical connection, let alone balletic grace or athletic splendor. The bulk of “The Rise of Skywalker” involves characters in closeup expelling greeting-card-like slogans with vehemence and dour conviction, punctuated by lumpishly unchoreographed biff-bash-and-blam fight scenes. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle. The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous.
These five, led by Rey, plan to pursue the revived Palpatine on the planet of Exegol, but they can’t find it without a gizmo known as a wayfinder, and they cannot get the wayfinder without deciphering an inscription that can’t be translated except, et cetera. The drama gathers members of the Resistance who survived the catastrophe of “The Last Jedi”: primarily, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), whom Leia designates as her successor Finn (John Boyega), whom Poe names as his coequal Chewbacca and the droids BB-8 and C-3PO. Ben Solo-who has repudiated his father, Han Solo, and gone over to the dark side-gets an offer from Palpatine to take his place, together with Rey, and continue the reign of the Sith. Rey (Daisy Ridley) is being trained by Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to continue the Resistance, but she herself is pulled between her blood legacy and her allegiances-she learns that she is a granddaughter of the late Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who here makes a posthumous return as more than an illusion and less than flesh. The dyad of Disney (with its sanitized and sanctimonious simplicities) and Abrams (with his scrawnily derivative sensibility, an echo of an echo) has become a Death Star.Īs for the story of “The Rise of Skywalker,” it’s centered on its two protagonists’ struggles with their civic duties and their personal identities. Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, in 2012 now whatever’s left of his world view has been mined and refined into narrow and simplistic norms. (I’ll do my best to describe it while avoiding spoilers, but beware nonetheless.) This installment also repudiates what’s best in Star Wars, namely the idiosyncrasies and complexities of George Lucas’s last two prequels, where he flaunted the purpose and the playfulness, the intricate political intrigue and the high-style flourishes, that he had sublimated in decades of cultivating industrial-strength success. There are no such surprises, let alone audacities, in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” yet I confess that it’s nonetheless engaging to see how the movie’s ponderous banalities reveal the essence of the cycle’s four-decade slog.
It would be fascinating to see the colossally derisive wreckage that Bay could make of the rigidities and pieties of “Star Wars.”
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It’s not good, but it’s at least full of surprises and provides a baseline astonishment. See the opening chase scene of Bay’s “6 Underground,” currently on Netflix, for a sense of what can be done with an emotionally stultified and dramatically trivial script. Since the prospect of a refined stylist such as Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola-who’d likely chafe at the narrow limits imposed by such a franchise film-is too much to ask for, a boldly imaginative vulgarian such as Bay would be a welcome substitute. His earnest and righteously grandiose direction evokes, as few movies do, a craving for Michael Bay at the controls. Abrams, is mainly a distiller and a magnifier, and brings virtually no originality to it. The faults of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” are those of the franchise over all, distilled and magnified because the film’s director, J.
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