Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker Spoiler Free Review
Is the force strong with this one? Or will it turn us all to the dark side?
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t hugely fond of The Rise of Skywalker‘s predecessor The Last Jedi. It was a good movie but not a good Star Wars movie. I knew I’d be reviewing this one so I put all of that out of my mind and focused solely on The Rise of Skywalker. Also, I wanted to be as fair as possible to the film and not too picky. I only say this so that you all know where I stand as a fan, it seems only fair. With that out of the way it’s time for a The Rise of Skywalker Spoiler Free Review.
This is where the fun begins…
Plot
Obviously I can’t say much. Which makes this so much trickier than it should be but I’ll do my best to give a non-spoiler rundown.
Rey and the rest of the resistance are looking for something that could eventually end the ongoing conflict. Whilst doing this they also set up several bases on different planets.
Kylo is also in search of something which can help him finally find closure. The closure he’s always wanted and needed.
Meanwhile a sinister and dark force is determined to stop all of them.
Like I said, really not much to go on but if I went any deeper than that I’d be going into spoiler territory and I don’t want to do that. I’m so sorry, you’ll have to forgive the mess of the plot outline there…
Review
Finally the review! Except… it’s a hard one to review without spoiling anything so again. This is probably going to be really vague and short but I will try my best!
I had a lot of issues with this movie. There are things that happen that make no sense and are never explained. The film seems to want to take risks but seems scared of the backlash so goes back on those risks, meaning they have pretty much no emotional weight at all. Everything in The Rise Of Skywalker just seems to happen. Not because of a choice one of the characters has made, not because of anything other than convenience and because the script says it has to.
It’s overly cringy at times and so much of it borrows from Return of the Jedi that you’d be forgiven thinking that’s what you were watching instead.
There’s nothing wrong with a call-back to an original in the series. But there’s a fine line between a respectful call-back to a classic and straight up copy pasting. The Force Awakens did it and it seems to be a trend here too.
Slow and steady does not win the race
The pacing, especially in the first half of the movie, is a joke. It feels like 6 films crammed into one. You spend the first half of a 2 and bit hour movie with nothing but exposition. It honestly feels like if that’s the story they wanted to tell, they should’ve split it up into 2 or 3 different movies in order to not rush things.
Some of the most iconic characters from the original series are both underutilised and overutilised at the same time (hard to explain without getting into spoilers again.) And some of the newer cast that have become fan favourites are so underutilised you wonder what exactly the filmmakers were thinking (I don’t think it’s spoiler-y to mention I’m talking about Kylo Ren here.)
Kylo plays a huge part at the end of the movie which should be very moving. But it’s really not and it’s because he’s underutilised as a character in the film that it’s not. It falls flat and it’s a real shame.
Final thoughts
I didn’t hate The Rise of Skywalker but I didn’t exactly like it either. It’s just a bit of a shambles. It honestly feels like you’re watching a video game with a bunch of NPCs spewing out mindless pre-programmed text than watching a movie. Much less a Star Wars movie. Like I said in my spoiler review:
Rise of Skywalker is a movie a bit like a boat on some very rough seas. It doesn’t let the characters and their progression move the plot along. The plot moves the characters along and so they end up just being a pawn in a massive game of predetermined chess. They’re given no agency, as such, the moments that are meant to be emotional really aren’t. They’re stale and, at times, eye-rollingly cringy.
I really don’t know what else I can say. I didn’t want to go too hard on it but the only moments I enjoyed were the ones that were Return of the Jedi rip offs.
That’s all for this Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoiler Free review. Check back at midnight when the full review will be available.
