About 40 minutes into Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker there’s a little switcheroo where you think that Chewbacca has died. And I believed it. I mean, it’s the last of the sequel-trilogy, the last of this particular nine-film story arc, and important characters have died already. But Chewie? Could they really kill Chewie?
No, thank the Maker, they (by “they” we mean JJ Abrams, co-screenwriter Chris Terrio and Luscasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy) did not. In fact, it’s only one more scene (maybe two, keep in mind I was seeing white hot when I thought my Wookiee pal had bought it) until you see Chewbacca alive, and growling with such ferocity it blows the hair back on Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux.
And that, I think, is the overall message of “Episode IX”. All the toys go back where they are supposed to go at the end. The movie snaps together like a jigsaw puzzle, a series of concluding beats that seem inevitable and perfect, and designed to please all parties, so long as you don’t dwell on the logic too much. Moreover, Chewbacca finally gets that medal denied him by Princess Leia in the throne room of the Great Temple of Yavin a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (1977, when Star Wars was a risky film venture from hot shot director George Lucas after American Graffiti, not a project dripping with toy and merchandise opportunities).
In 2015, I had the good fortune to see Lucas chat with Stephen Colbert at the Tribeca film festival. Lucas is an unusual person, to say the least. Among other things, he still claims that he spends his days tinkering on “experimental films” to show his friends so they can laugh at him. But something stayed with me from that afternoon. His primary artistic vision, the words he kept using to express the engine that drives him, is “going fast”. Speed, more than narrative coherence, may just be his greatest legacy of all.
To that end, JJ Abrams is truly his Padawan. The same, I saw Colbert chat with Abrams at the Montclair film festival in New Jersey. During that talk Abrams confessed he knew that the orange foam that dissolved the metal van in Mission: Impossible III was bunk science, but only cared that it looked amazing, and it would zoom by so quickly no one would care. The two touched back on this point a few times, turning it into a punchline.
Never in Abrams’s career has he relied on this methodology more than in The Rise of Skywalker, which doesn’t just open with lightspeed but “lightspeed-skipping”. The Millennium Falcon zaps across the galaxy, baddies in tow, zipping through multiple blue tunnels of subspace, with Poe, Finn and Chewie cracking wise, TIE-fighters on their tail. A plane of sharp asteroids! A sky full of tall, narrow towers! An enormous space slug ready to gobble them up! John Williams’s score crashes along with them and, yes, this is what they mean when they say “this movie made me feel like a kid again”. Each newly glimpsed setting is gorgeous and the thrill is tangible. Later Rey chastises them. The Falcon, apparently, can’t lightspeed-skip. But it just did, because our team is the best team! Why bother complaining?
Abrams’s attempt, with this film, to tie all of Star Wars lore in a bow isn’t perfect. A visitation from a dead spirit is classic to the series, but The Rise of Skywalker has two nearly back-to-back moments that deaden the emotional impact of one another. I wish that there was a little more air in between these scenes. Also, Carrie Fisher is in the movie more than I thought she would be, and I have to say it is weird. Maybe it’s just because I know her appearances are reanimated from the discarded takes of previous films with computer tech that could land a person on Mars, but I wish it was one scene, not many. To the writers’ credit, the script, surely reverse-engineered to match whatever footage they had, basically makes sense. It’s a one-time miracle, but I hope nothing like this ever happens again.
There are plenty of winks to the original series, but we’re swimming in that at the moment thanks to the current (and terrific) TV series The Mandalorian. What The Rise of Skywalker does, which some may dislike, is whip the Emperor (AKA Senator Sheev Palpatine AKA Darth Sidious) out of nowhere and use him as a crutch to answer the question of Rey’s heritage. To this I say: sure, whatever. What worked really well, though, is how Abrams and cinematographer Dan Mindel shoot Ian McDiarmid like a Hammer horror villain, interior lighting casting shadows on his face. He’s hanging from a jib for some reason, in a pit you can only access by going under an enormous cube on a planet hidden by a cosmic storm. Star Wars!
While Palpatine’s lair looks incredible, it makes absolutely no sense that if Rey strikes the Emperor down on his command she will go to the Dark Side, but if she does so 10 minutes later she will be the hero of the galaxy. But this is what happens, and it works because the momentum of the movie makes it so. It’s all too fast and too neat looking to give you a chance to question it. So I cheered. I can’t explain it, but I cheered.
Being a Star Wars fan has, of late, become weirdly factional. A small but extremely vocal subgroup have harassed Rian Johnson, writer-director of The Last Jedi, and some of the new actors his chapter brought in, namely Kelly Marie Tran. Their actions are upsetting and ridiculous, and it has understandably inspired others to protest in favour of the middle film. But even the defensiveness has become extreme. I am glad, in a way, that this is all over now, and hope that, in time, that chatter will seem distant, and we can enjoy these extremely entertaining and marvellously designed films for what they are: rich, nerdy fun with very basic plots a child can follow. Also, Chewbacca is my favourite.
