Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

"Somehow, Palpatine returned." Three words uttered in a trailer, laughed off as a tease, and then delivered with a completely straight face as the actual premise of the final chapter in a nine-film saga. That line, right there, tells you everything you need to know about The Rise of Skywalker. Not just that it's bad, but that it's bad in a way that's almost impressive. A one-star film takes effort to make this wrong.

I'll be upfront: I thought The Last Jedi (2017) was a hot mess. A bold, fascinating, frustrating, frequently maddening hot mess. But whatever you make of Rian Johnson's choices, they were at least choices. Ideas with some weight behind them. What J.J. Abrams has done here is take that mess, panic, and somehow produce something worse. Not a correction. Not a reinvention. Just a frantic, breathless scramble that piles nonsense on top of nonsense until the whole thing collapses under its own incoherence.

Where do you even start? Palpatine, I suppose, since the film certainly doesn't bother to. He's back. He has a fleet. The fleet has been sitting on the Sith homeworld of Exegol for thirty-odd years, apparently just waiting. For what, exactly? The film has no interest in telling you. No backstory, no logic, no explanation beyond a throwaway line that dissolves the moment you think about it for more than four seconds. This is a zombie villain propped up by plot necessity rather than any storytelling intention, and the film expects you to just go with it because Star Wars.

And then there's the dagger. The ancient dagger that just so happens to align perfectly with the wreckage of the second Death Star, pointing Rey towards the next MacGuffin on her scavenger hunt. I sat in the cinema watching this unfold with genuine disbelief. It's the kind of contrivance that makes you feel slightly embarrassed on the film's behalf. The plotting throughout has this quality, a relentless, joyless sprint from one plot point to the next, each one conveniently solving the problem of the last, none of it remotely earned.

But nothing quite matches the Rey-is-a-Palpatine reveal for sheer, brazen audacity. One of the genuinely interesting threads from the previous film was the idea that Rey came from nothing, that ordinary people could matter, that heroism wasn't a bloodline. It was a direct, meaningful answer to everything Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) had left tantalisingly open. And The Rise of Skywalker throws it straight in the bin. Making Rey the granddaughter of Palpatine isn't just a lazy retcon, it's an ideological betrayal of what these films are supposed to be about. Luke Skywalker was a kid from a dusty nowhere planet. That mattered. This undoes it.

Then, as if to round things off with one final indignity, we get the kiss between Rey and Kylo Ren. A moment meant to feel like a culmination. A romantic resolution to one of the saga's central relationships. It lands with a thud so profound you could feel the air leave the room. None of the emotional groundwork is there. It's fan service for a fan base that, by and large, didn't actually want it. It's embarrassing in a way that lingers.

What makes this all so genuinely painful is the weight of what's behind it. I grew up with these films. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is one of the greatest sequels ever made. Return of the Jedi (1983), for all its Ewok-shaped flaws, has an emotional climax that still works. This saga, at its best, has real power. The Rise of Skywalker doesn't just squander that inheritance, it actively degrades it. Every hollow revelation, every cheap shortcut, every breathless plot device chips away at something that used to mean something.

One star. The characters deserved better. The saga deserved better. We deserved better. And frankly, so did anyone who sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) thinking things couldn't possibly get worse. Somehow, they did.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2019-12-04

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu · Disney Plus
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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