STAR WARS IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

 I found STAR WARS IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, for all its faults, unexpectedly moving at the end.

*No Spoilers*

The through-line of the final STAR WARS trilogy is the wrestling match between Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren / Ben. It’s a potentially strong narrative: will they kill each other or fall in love, what is the nature of their bond? However, the heritage characters (Leia, Han, Luke, Vader, Palpatine, etc) either get in the way of this narrative or are needlessly part of it because of the series’ weird desire to have everybody of import related to somebody else. 

The repercussions of George Lucas’ idea to have Darth Vader as Luke’s father (revealed in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, 1980) and Luke and Leia as twin brother and sister (revealed in RETURN OF THE JEDI, 1983), were far-reaching and ultimately crippling for the story-telling that runs through the nine film saga.

This may be why I prefer the recent stand-alones, SOLO and ROGUE ONE, as movies. By stand-alone, I mean that, although they fit into the over-arching battle narrative, they are not having to explore the family ties that blight the regular films in the series. On its release, the excellent THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was relatively free of the curse of bloodlines and, viewed without the retrospective baggage of Luke and Leia being brother and sister, is still the strongest of all the films, in spite of it being the one to drop the f-bomb (Vader tells Luke he is his father, although Luke doesn’t believe him until it is confirmed by Yoda in JEDI.)

Culturally, STAR WARS in 1977 was an end-point, a homage to the pulp space fantasy Lucas grew up loving. It should have ended there. A one-off, simple tale depicting good triumphing over evil in a galaxy far, far away. 

However, in terms of film technology, Lucas’ strange little film that nobody understood when he started pitching it, came at the start of a revolution. Computers to track camera moves, plus the emerging digital technology meant that everything was about to change, and STAR WARS 1977 embraced and deployed that tech like no other, building on the success of the genre films that had gone before, notably Kubrick’s 2001 and Doug Trumbull’s SILENT RUNNING. It was part of what fans thrilled to and talked about. It made STAR WARS 1977 a massive hit. It made the studios hungry for more.

Cinema always did pander to the visually sensational; it’s how the artform started. There’s a moment in RETURN OF THE JEDI when a squadron of Tie Fighters - more than had ever been seen before in one shot - flies screaming directly at the camera. At the premiere of that film in London in 1983, it got the loudest cheer. We were cheering the fx. The shot was set up to celebrate itself in a “look what we can do” moment and with each new STAR WARS movie, the technical achievement became part of what was being celebrated.

My theory is that the technology was developing at such a rate (being stoked and funded by Lucas’ success) that it wanted to give the STAR WARS films the ability to fly, but the narratives were so caught up in their own limited need to explore bloodlines as to make them anywhere near satisfying.

Lucas’ original 1977 story didn’t have the complexity to sustain elaboration. As the demand for story increased with each instalment, complexity was retro-fitted into the narrative. Vader’s “Luke, I am your father” still feels like a dumb dramatic move to me. Especially as it left behind Leia (Vader was her father, too) and showed up the construction as sexist and old-fashioned. This is something the new trilogy has been bending over backwards to correct, but one still can’t shift how relentlessly hierarchical and bound by bloodlines the empire, republic and rebels are; how old-fashioned and essentially undemocratic their structures with their notions of princesses and emperors, and the relatives of the original heroes and baddies being somehow the only lives that really matter in the stories. Lucas was not wrong to set his story “a long time ago”.

The stories work best when I relate them to their source, which is the Second World War. Lucas took his idea of good vs evil from the notion of the allies vs the axis. The dogfights in the original STAR WARS were inspired by scenes of aerial combat in Second World War movies, the raid on the Death Star by raids such as those depicted in THE DAMBUSTERS and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE.

Taking the WW2 connection further, the first trilogy - PHANTOM / CLONES / SITH - was essentially Lucas working through the idea of Hitler. How does an (innocent) child grow up to become a merciless and tyrannical despot? I thought it was a noble attempt by Lucas to use the STAR WARS films to tell a story that might be considered worthwhile, something that reached beyond the pastiche nature of the original HOPE / EMPIRE / JEDI trilogy.

You can see in the Hitler trilogy the technology being deployed to render worlds evoking the other source material that so inspired Lucas: pulp sci-fi paintings from the thirties, forties and fifties.

Come the final trilogy, FORCE / LAST / SKYWALKER, and the retro pulp look has been jettisoned entirely in favour of the visual source that inspired the new film-makers when they were growing up. Nothing less than the original HOPE / EMPIRE / JEDI films. And so we have the apotheosis of the Millennium Falcon, the X-Wing and A-Wing fighters and the Y-Wing bomber; their space junk / World War Two aesthetic celebrated anew in aerial or space flight sequences that astonish; sequences that have grown out of a “wouldn’t it be cool if they did this?” conference rather than driven by character or narrative need. One of the complaints about Rey being a “Mary Sue” comes from her ability to fly the Falcon without any training through her films’ “wouldn’t it be cool? / look what we can do” sequences. The show-off Tie-Fighter shot from RETURN OF THE JEDI again proving to be the most influential part of that movie.

Where THE RISE OF SKYWALKER works is in its depiction of the struggles of Daisy Ridley’s Rey to reject the dark side of the Force, and Adam Driver’s Ren to embrace the good side of his nature, to become at one with the Jedi.

This duality of good vs evil is brought to bear on the third act climactic fight of the final film, bringing home the original impulse of Lucas to show the good guys triumphing over the nazis. I cried in the cinema. Not because the eleven-film series (more if you include the two Ewok films and the animated and live-action television series) had come to an end (I actually felt some kind of relief at this) but because SKYWALKER evokes successfully - for me at least - the coming together and the sacrifice of the men and women who died in the Second World War. It somehow was able to dig back into Lucas’ original impulse to make that first film, born of his need not to create a space saga and a merchandise powerhouse but to celebrate the good guys’ victory in that terrible but just war.