The Character Problems of Rise of Skywalker (2/2)
- Glendon Frank
- Jan 31, 2020
- 31 min read
Welcome back! Today we return to the wonderfully chaotic landscape of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to talk about how it treats its characters.
Last time, we looked at the extensive supporting cast, talking about some central problems. We talked about how the movie introduced a lot of new characters, most of which felt superfluous. Some characters and character choices just kind of happen based on expectations and a sense of obligation to formula. We also saw a few examples of how experiential the movie was, that is, how it relied on a singular viewing for many of its character decisions to make sense, because on rewatch motives and arcs became very inconsistent. The story is also very insistent on expanding its scope in order to create stakes, rather than focusing on previously established drama. Similarly, it operates on a philosophy where ‘lore = development,’ rather than actually challenging its characters. Today we’ll focus on the central cast, and find many of the same problems.
In the last article, I made the claim that the creative team of this movie didn’t understand The Last Jedi and that some of their choices lead to messages that were morally opposed to the dominant themes of Star Wars. I’ll be focusing a little bit more on both of those claims in this article. The choices made by the central cast of Rise of Skywalker frequently go blatantly against the lessons they were supposed to learn through the past two movies. Entire philosophies are altered, or reversed. Chris Terrio has claimed that Rise of Skywalker doesn’t reverse anything in The Last Jedi, but that’s either a lie or just blatant ignorance. People have suggested that The Last Jedi was made in opposition to The Force Awakens, but I can’t see it. It definitely challenges some of the character beliefs in The Force Awakens, but never in ways that weren’t already anticipated in that movie. Maz Kanata tells Rey that she needs to move beyond her parents, The Last Jedi shows why. The Last Jedi never contradicts, it tests and expands. In contrast, Rise of Skywalker actually disagrees with character directions established in the previous movie. Unfortunately, it rarely offers anything of substance in replacement, rather, Rise of Skywalker frequently features character regression as opposed to growth. Characters return to old iconography and patterns, presumably in the name of obligation or familiarity. At its worst, Rise of Skywalker recontextualizes defining character choices, so as to strip our cast of the agency they once had. As a whole, Rise of Skywalker feels like a massive step back, which is a large part of why its ending is so unsatisfying.
Without further ado, here are our final four characters.
Finn and Poe Dameron
Wait why doesn’t Finn have a last na-
I’ve paired these two together here because they have a lot of similar problems. The Last Jedi kind of established them as two sides of the same coin. Realistically, that’s been their thing since day one. Poe Dameron is the cocky, charismatic face of the Resistance. Finn is the scattered, desperate turncoat from the First Order. Poe didn’t get a lot in The Force Awakens (originally, he was supposed to die in the first act, but Oscar Isaac is too charismatic to kill), but in The Last Jedi, his self-centered cockiness was directly challenged. In his mind, winning the war comes above any human cost, but Leia sternly notes that “not every problem can be solved by jumping in an X-Wing and blowing stuff up.” Vice Admiral Amelyn Holdo presses this point, but Poe gets frustrated and starts to act on his own – which inevitably makes things worse, and has grave consequences. By the movie’s end, he realizes the true virtues of leadership and starts to call competent shots and make smart decisions. Leia effectively hands control over to him, in front of everyone; Poe’s central arc is his being primed to take up the baton from the beloved General. Finn gets to a similar place, however, he takes a little longer to get there. We are introduced to him as a stormtrooper quick to flee from the First Order when he realizes how horrific war is. He spends most of the movie trying to run and only stops when his newfound friend Rey is in danger. The Last Jedi picks up from here; he’s not a Resistance fighter, he’s just trying to save his friends. But through the movie he’s paired with Rose Tico, the true believer of the Resistance, and DJ, the apathetic centrist. Through their perspectives, Finn comes to understand the purpose of taking a side. First, he becomes motivated by hatred of the First Order and their actions. But hatred leads to extremism, and to the Dark Side. It leads to the sort of uncaring nature that Poe displayed at the start of The Last Jedi. Finn tries to throw away his life in vain but is stopped. Because this fight is about more than that.
Finn and Poe both have to learn the value of life, and to realize why they are fighting. It’s not for them to destroy the enemy, and it’s definitely not to show off. It’s to protect those who can’t protect themselves. This is a theme that goes all the way back to Empire Strikes Back, and one that’s been kind of forgotten since the Original Trilogy. Yoda taught that a Jedi acts in defense, never in offense. The lightsaber isn’t supposed to be a weapon of oppression, but a symbol of hope. Luke takes this to heart; even when all of his mentors believe that Vader can’t be redeemed, he holds out hope. And like I discussed in the previous entry, it is eventually love that defeats the Emperor, not hatred. Not violence. But defense. This theme is the beating heart of Star Wars, but it’s kind of slipped into the background since Return of the Jedi. The Prequels feature bold, aggressive Jedi knights who become generals on the battlefield. Yoda has not one but two lightsaber duels, which seems strictly counter to his character. But in any case, The Last Jedi returns to that central heart. Poe learns that human sacrifice should not be considered lightly, rather, counting your losses is better than vainly charging forward in acts of showy glory. So, too, Finn’s last step to becoming a true believer of the Resistance like Rose is to learn the value of his own life, and that hatred should not be your dominant motivation. This message is demonstrated writ large by Luke’s final appearance, projecting himself across space and defeating Kylo Ren and his troops without making a single aggressive action. Luke wins the day entirely through non-violence. The whole of The Last Jedi celebrates a sort of passivism, or at least, a method of war that focuses on human life rather than on destruction. Glorious last stands are doomed to fail, it is better to try to live.
In Rise of Skywalker, however, Finn and Poe entirely forget these lessons. The movie acts like Poe is suddenly unprepared for leadership – and while I definitely think he should receive challenges as a leader, that’s not what’s happening. Rather, Leia is still very clearly in charge, and almost all of the leadership decisions that Poe does make are generally stupid and absurdly risky (I have so much to say about lightspeed-skipping, but I will restrain myself). Finn at one point scoffs about Poe being ‘no Leia,’ which is a really weird thing to say? Firstly, because Finn doesn’t really have any connection to Leia, but also because Poe should be beyond such low school-yard barbs by this point. But it’s worse than that because, in the final climax, everything gets turned on its head. After Leia’s death, Poe leads the Resistance charge… from the cockpit of an X-Wing (side-note, but I might argue the destruction of Poe’s X-Wing in The Last Jedi was just as symbolic of his arc as Kylo destroying his helmet or Rey leaving her staff behind. But all of that is ignored in this movie). He leads them in an almost guaranteed suicide run against an impossibly large fleet. They have no back-up, no real plan. Poe acts on a principle of “good people will fight if we lead them,” which is great, but this isn’t really leadership. A glorious suicide run isn’t leading anyone, it’s just attempted martyrdom. In the midst of all of this, Finn finds himself improvising in desperate circumcises, and decides that he’s going to manually destroy an important Star Destroyer – going down with it. This is all overheard by Rose, the face of The Last Jedi’s themes. It’s all probably coincidental, but it seems to me a laughable turn against everything the previous movie stood for. Finn and Poe have entirely regressed to previous versions of themselves, before their development. They’ve forgotten their lessons, and are succumbing to pointless machismo. Their pointless self-sacrificing never really pays off, but it never comes back to bite them, either.
Of course, part of this is at the fault of other elements in this movie. Like we saw in the previous article, the sudden introduction of the impossibly large Star Destroyer fleet changes the scope dramatically. Moreover, there’s the fact that the recruiting of the galaxy, the actual leading Poe is talking about, is relegated to the background. Both of these factors necessitate a finale that is draped in theatrical highs and lows than in interesting character direction. Fighting that fleet is impossible, so the movie needs there to be dramatic action in order for anything to work. But as a result, the stakes shoot out the window. Nothing is on the line, there’s no way the entire Resistance fleet is going to be destroyed. It seems unlikely that any of our named characters would even die because there’s just no room for anything like that. As a result, the entire final battle is just a sort of flashy spectacle. There’s no substance, nothing to grab onto. It just glosses over, and then it’s done.
But there’s more wrong with Poe and Finn than just their wildly out-of-character actions necessitated by the finale. Both of them suffer from that philosophy where ‘lore = development.’ See, as far as anyone was concerned, Poe Dameron grew up in the Resistance. That’s certainly what canon said; his family fought in the Rebellion; Poe even grew up on Yavin 4. But through Zorii Bliss, we learn that Poe was originally… a spice trader? The movie tries to set this up by having Poe doing stuff like hot-wiring a speeder to life, but that doesn’t really feel like foreshadowing. Poe knows ships, that seems like a thing he could do. Alternatively, that could honestly just be a fun mystery that gets kept in the background – Abrams likes mystery boxes, right? But the reveal that Poe used to be a spice trader just doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean anything. His previous connection with Zorii and the spice trade never tempts him, it never challenges him. Poe doesn’t grow as a result of this connection, and he never really changes despite the rest of his team learning about his past. Not to mention there are a lot of poor connotations you create by giving your single Latin-American acted character a new background where he was a drug trader. It’s a bad look. There are really only a handful of lines that directly mention how he used to be a spice trader, and they add nothing to the movie. There are a dozen ways Poe could have known Zorii and Babu Frik. It almost feels weirdly obligatory – making Poe a former spice trader practically screams ‘see? He’s the new Han Solo!’ But he’s always been more than that. See, the one thematic thing this new background does is cast him along with Rey and Finn as people who have grown from their past. Now that’s cool, but it seems to me like there are ways to do that which don’t contradict his character while also adding nothing of substance. Consider an alternate route where it’s Poe’s Resistance background that haunts him. After all, he grew up fighting for this cause, but now he has to lead it, surely he feels an entire life of expectation on his shoulders? Maybe that presents, I don’t know, an actual challenge for him to overcome as a leader. It also gives him a neat parallel to Kylo Ren, and possibly to Rey. It gives him something to overcome. Poe has always been a central face of the Resistance, play with that. Make that central aspect of his character something that naturally challenges him. Don’t add new lore if it’s not going to affect him.
Finn arguably gets an even worse shake. First, the previous two movies have established potential relationships between Finn and both Rey and Rose. Rose definitely has feelings for him, and the implication seems to be that Finn feels something for Rey. Both of these are entirely abandoned. Finn gets practically no screen-time with Rose, spending most of the movie with Jannah. I feel I ought to say more about his time with Jannah here, but it really doesn’t affect him? At all? His relationship with Rey is weird, however – he spends a lot of this movie just yelling Rey’s name to no avail. Does he like her or not? The last movie showed Finn that it was important for him to fight for more than just this one friend, and very intentionally expands his circle beyond Rey, but here he just chases Rey for over two hours. There is something that Finn wants to tell Rey once in a near-death position. This ‘something’ is quickly let go when they both survive, and though it’s mentioned once later, we never find out what that ‘something’ is. Which is just poor storytelling, clearly there’s a three-beat set-up but it never is paid off. The obvious assumption is that Finn was going to express his feelings for Rey, which is why he’s embarrassed to bring it up to Poe later. But according to Abrams, that’s not the case – Finn was going to tell her that he is Force-sensitive? Which… no. Like, I’m not against Finn being Force-sensitive, but that is not what you say in a near-death scenario, and there’s no point in not talking about it afterward. It just doesn’t really make sense. But it gets worse.
See, the way Finn’s Force-sensitive nature is played through this movie is really bad. I’m not against it as a concept, in fact, if done right, it could have been a cool continuation of that ‘spark of hope’ theme from the end of The Last Jedi. Instead, it single-handedly sabotages Finn’s character. Let’s jump back to The Force Awakens. In our first few minutes knowing Finn, he makes the single most defining decision of his life: he chooses not to participate in the war engine of the First Order, and to dessert. This choice changes everything and bleeds into every action he makes after. He helps Poe escape the Finalizer, and when they’re separated, Finn decides to take up Poe’s mission. He runs into Rey and BB-8 and helps them get off Jakku, and then so on. In Rise of Skywalker, he meets Jannah, who is an ex-stormtrooper who made a similar choice to dessert the First Order. Cool! We’re seeing the stormtroopers be humanized beyond faceless mooks, they are people able to make decisions. Oh, except not really. Because in this movie Finn rationalizes all of his actions as guided by the Force. Those character-defining choices he made? Nah, it was just destiny. This is just bad writing. By attributing all of Finn’s moral decisions to the whims of fate, Finn is robbed of all agency as a character. Decisions like this are why this movie feels so fundamentally out of place with not just The Last Jedi, but The Force Awakens as well. It feels like a total betrayal of all Finn has come from. This Force-sensitive idea also reflects very poorly on the First Order – the movie emphasizes that the First Order is made up of stolen children, and the implication is sort of that all the stormtroopers are just brainwashed kids, unable to do anything moral unless the Force decides to stir in them. Finn and Jannah are perfectly fine with this. They never try to recruit stormtroopers to their side, they just return to mowing down these brainwashed kids. It’s very dark, but the movie refuses to comment on it. Beyond meeting Jannah, Finn doesn’t even really get to do anything in this movie. Nothing he does seems to have that much effect on the plot. As an ex-stormtrooper, Finn had the opportunity to be the most interesting character, but by the end of Rise of Skywalker, he has learned absolutely nothing and is rendered completely irrelevant. In the end, I don’t really know if I like Finn, or if I just enjoy John Boyega.
Kylo Ren / Ben Solo
If you don’t like anything else in this trilogy, you should at least like Kylo Ren.
Adam Driver is possibly the best actor in this entire franchise. He does so much of the heavy lifting and made Kylo Ren one of the few characters that is going to have any real life beyond this trilogy. Since day one, he fought with directors and producers to make Kylo Ren a very human character, as opposed to just a faceless monster. He succeeded. Kylo is easily the most fascinating individual in Star Wars. He gave us a central villain who was more than just Vader-lite, but who took on a life on his own. Ultimately, he’s probably the only character in this trilogy who has a coherent arc – but even then, Rise of Skywalker fumbles the ending. In all honesty, everything before this is window-dressing. It’s a shame that Finn and Poe get mishandled and that the supporting cast is such a mess. But this trilogy has been centrally about Kylo Ren and Rey. Their dynamic shapes The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, without these two, this trilogy is nothing. If everything else had gone wrong, but these two characters finished well, I think I would have been able to accept Rise of Skywalker. Like, a lot gets fumbled in Return of the Jedi, but the stuff with Luke and Vader still makes the landing, and so the rest is fine. Unfortunately, neither Kylo Ren nor Rey really finish well.
I loved most of the cast in The Force Awakens, but no one surprised me quite as Kylo Ren did. More than just the ‘new Darth Vader,’ Kylo Ren wound up being a profoundly fascinating character with a deep tension. I was immediately captivated by the idea of a villain being tempted towards the light side. Kylo quickly cements himself as someone plagued by his past, by the figures he’s grown up with. He is let down by Luke Skywalker, dismissed by his parents, and overshadowed by his grandfather. As The Last Jedi reveals, Kylo feels that in order to forge his own identity, he has to burn down these figures of his past. The solutions to his tensions almost always result in violence. Burdened by his past and this temptation towards the light, Kylo first acts out by murdering his father, Han Solo. But rather than give him newfound conviction, this action tears him apart. His mentor, Snoke, mocks him and his posturing. Kylo has dressed himself in the garb of Darth Vader as a show of intimidation, but it doesn’t work, and Snoke knows it. So, Kylo smashes his helmet and goes out to kill his mother, still destroying the past in an attempt to assert himself. But, again, he can’t fulfill the deed. He is still torn by his own morality.
See, Kylo Ren has always been set up as a reverse of Darth Vader. I got this sense from The Force Awakens, and interviews from JJ Abrams and Adam Driver around the movie’s release confirms that intent. Even Rian Johnson’s intention was to end The Last Jedi with Kylo Ren solidified as a villain. When we are introduced to Vader, he is monolithic and emotionless. But as the original trilogy progressed, we learned more about Vader, the layers give way to tortured, broken man, locked in chains of abuse, who eventually gives into the Light. Kylo, however, starts as a tortured, broken man. Extended canon material suggests that Kylo is a lot less responsible than we would think for actions like the burning of the Jedi Temple and that much of that was on the manipulation of Snoke, so we can see abuse at play as well. He opens as a man with a fragile identity and fragile confidence, but it is the fragility that makes him dangerous. Kylo asserts his identity through bold and flashy violence, making him unpredictable but prone to aggression. But the implication was that, as the films progress, Kylo would develop more surety, and become more and more the monolithic figure of Darth Vader. The Last Jedi certainly pushes him in that direction. In his pursuit to burn down anything of his past and assert his own identity, he murders his master, Snoke, and becomes Supreme Leader. He wants the Millennium Falcon shot down and tries to kill Luke Skywalker, and with him, the Jedi Order. But despite how much he advances in position, Kylo Ren continually fails and succumbs to his own violence. After he kills Snoke, Rey sees it as a spot of hope, but it’s actually Kylo descending into a darker version of himself. He is constantly consumed by his own aggressuin, falling further and further as a consequence of his reactional attitude to whatever ails him. The end of The Last Jedi has him looking entirely tormented; he is at the top of the First Order and has the Resistance on the run, but he’s horrified at what it’s costing him. Yet, the only way to go is further down. I know a lot of people wanted a redemption arc for Kylo, but I think the first two movies makes it pretty clear that Kylo Ren is steering towards self-annihilation.
I think a major reason behind this desire to redeem Kylo is his ever-complicated relationship with Rey, which is by far the most humanizing factor of him. You can say what you want about whether or not the two should be read in a romantic context, but you can’t deny that the movies set up a high degree of emotional intimacy between the two of them. Throughout The Force Awakens, Kylo finds himself fixated on her, eventually choosing to kidnap and extract information from her rather than just grabbing BB-8. Surprisingly, this scene features him unmasking in front of her; this is the first time we see his face in the movie, and thus should be read as a sign of intimacy. Something draws him to her, but he tries to get at it by force and aggression, the only tools he knows. In The Last Jedi, they are drawn together ever further via the sudden bond through the Force. This bond forces them to communicate, and more than that forces them to understand each other. They realize that they are both broken, hollow people, abandoned by all that they looked up to. The scene where they touch each other across the Force is almost sensual. It’s framed like a love scene. And their ensuing partnership, fighting side-by-side, revels in these two people acting as one. But ideological differences force them apart. Kylo is still bound by his self-destruction, and Rey has found it within herself to assert her own identity apart from other people. They have this complicated intimacy – view it as a relationship, deep friendship, whatever – there is mutual understanding between them. Kylo wanted her by his side, and she was the only one who ever tried to understand him and see him as more than a monster. Yet, they are fundamentally opposed in this conflict, leading two sides towards a climactic ending. That’s good drama. But I think their connection lead some audiences to want him to be redeemed just as much as Rey did. It helps that Adam Driver went out of his way to present Kylo as inexplicably human, even if it meant resisting the vision of directors and writers. But by the movie’s end, Rey literally closes the door on him. Kylo has chosen his own destiny, and he will have to pay for his crimes.
The way I see it, there are two interesting directions Rise of Skywalker could have taken. You could play into that tension between Rey and Kylo and have that be the driving conflict of the movie: two people with a deep connection, moving on radically different paths, forced towards a confrontation that will decide both their fates. We would have a Kylo Ren torn between his desire to purge his past and to connect with this woman. Or, despite his path to self-annihilation, Rise of Skywalker could spin it the opposite direction, and have Kylo redeemed by Rey and his connection with her, and spend his life in penance for all that he’s done. While I don’t prefer the idea of redeemed Ben, it has legs. One of the central problems in Rise of Skywalker, however, is that it tried to split it down the middle. He ends the movie redeemed, but begins it more violent than ever. It feels like the production of the first half of the movie took place without any knowledge of where he would end up. If you were to work with a redeemed Ben, you could play up the torment that Kylo felt at the end of The Last Jedi – but they don’t. Kylo seems full of purpose and conviction, with clear central goals. He is going to convert Rey, kill the Emperor, and take his fleet. Gone is the self-destructive obsession with eliminating his past, rather, he re-adopts old iconography that symbolizes his certainty of identity. He rebuilds his helmet. He goes hunting with the Knights of Ren. It all kind of feels like a step backward, back to his position at the start of The Force Awakens. With the regression returns his senseless violence, lashing out at officers and venting his rage on the battlefield. These are all weird places to start a path towards a redeemed Ben. Maybe it would work as contrast, but his redemption happens so fast anyway that it seems like a misstep. He evolves into the cracks of his persona that he was trying to hide previously, looking like a petulant child. He doesn’t feel like someone who has grown.
I think the presence of the Emperor enables this – if the plot had required Kylo to actually exist and lead as the Supreme Leader, I think we’d see a much more measured character. What’s more, the movie tells us that the Emperor has orchestrated everything; he was the voices tempting Kylo, but he also was the force pushing Kylo to murder Snoke. Snoke is imagined as a sort of test for Kylo. This is bad. Like I talked about with Finn, pulling away agency from central character choices is always a bad move. Kylo killing Snoke is a huge deal and this movie tells us that it was all according to plan. Kylo doesn’t get to make his own choices, he’s manipulated as always. So, the movie starts not with a grown, developed Kylo, but a regressed one, aggression personified. Yet still, we are meant to believe he is still redeemable. I mean, even his connection with Rey becomes newly antagonistic; they fight each other through their Force Bond (which was established specifically as a way that they’d be forced to talk, not fight) and Kylo almost only speaks to Rey with his helmet on. The intimacy of their relationship is gone, somehow vanished between the two movies. Yet, Rise of Skywalker will end with the two sharing a kiss. The two halves of the movie are in conflict with each other.
To make matters worse, Ben Solo’s redemption takes place entirely over the course of one scene. I talked in the previous article about how this scene is very unclear. What exactly is Leia doing; does she project a vision of Han Solo? Does she distract Kylo? One gets the sense that when Kylo sees Han it was supposed to be Leia, and that Carrie Fisher’s death forced something else – but, she had passed away long before Abrams and Terrio were even brought in. I always feel like it ought to be Luke, after all, the last movie ended with him saying that he would ‘see [Kylo] around,’ an idea that’s never paid off. Instead, Kylo is met with a ‘memory’ of his father, rather than the Force-users of his family. It gives the sense that Kylo’s family just doesn’t care about him, so he has to scour his own memories. Luke and Leia never interact with Kylo or Ben, and he doesn’t appear as a Force ghost with them in the end. Rather, they are entirely focused on their new darling protegee, Rey. It just gives a lot of poor connotations. It feels like his former family has simply forgotten about him, validating all of the isolation that he’s felt. Yet, despite the bizarre context, this scene between Kylo/Ben and Han is easily my favourite in the movie. It’s the only time the blazingly fast pacing actually slows down, and it’s very welcome. So, I want to love this scene… it just doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit with the aggressive villainy we’ve seen from Kylo before now. There’s no build-up. It works as a last step to redemption, but in this movie, it is the entire crux of his turn. Then, the redeemed Ben Solo proceeds to say nothing for the rest of the movie. He has no dialogue with Rey, who has understood his so deeply; nothing against the Emperor, who has apparently manipulated everything in his life. Props go to Adam Driver for somehow still selling this redemption through his physicality, but Ben is a sort of non-factor in the finale. He never personally fights the Emperor, he’s just pushed out of the way. And then he dies, having done almost nothing.
I’m not strictly against a redeemed Ben, but I think it’s less interesting than letting him live with his consequences. And I think skimming over his redemption is less interesting than drawing it out over the movie. The least interesting choice is to then kill Ben afterward, essentially giving him a free pass rather than having him live with what he’s done, and try to make amends. Vader’s death works because it’s imperative in defeating the Emperor, love is the entire point. It works because his fall was tragic, and it works because Vader is an old man at his death. No one has really offered him redemption before, and he dies saving his son, a young soul. That is his penance. But Ben Solo doesn’t have any of that. He’s young, and while canon has some contention as to just how responsible Ben is for his fall, the previous two movies have shown him insistently denying redemption. I feel like I’m doing a poor job articulating it, but it just does not work to kill him at the end of this movie. He has lived his life falling into violence, and he deserves to spend the rest of his life climbing out of it. To redeem the world he has helped create. One gets the sense that he dies halfway through his arc. Ben feels incomplete. This sense of incompleteness is deepened by the aftermath of his death. He gives his life for Rey, a woman this movie would have you believe he loves or at least cares about. They share a kiss, initiated by Rey. There’s some sort of connection. But Rey never speaks of Ben ever again, after his death. She doesn’t seem to mourn this man who understood her on such a unique level, and he doesn’t appear as a Force Ghost to her afterward. Even Vader got that closure. Ben’s death is so incredibly jarring because the movie acts as if it never happened. It doesn’t have any consequences. Vader’s death had gravity – he had a full conversation with Luke, and then Luke has a somber scene at Vader’s funeral pyre. But Ben is whisked away, never to be mentioned again. It all just feels very wrong. Redeemed Ben dying is the least interesting choice for his character, but the fact that his death is brushed under the rug is borderline offensive.
Kylo Ren is one of the best characters in this franchise, and his end is tragically shortsighted. It doesn’t feel like a fulfillment of what’s been established, and it doesn’t even feel like a natural conclusion to what’s established in this movie. His death feels cheap and unearned. Sure, it’s a loving self-sacrifice, but given the weird aggression and violence around fighting the Emperor, it doesn’t really feel like it means anything. His death is not a surprising but logical resolution to an impossible conflict, a la Return of the Jedi, it’s a cheap gotcha for the audience. It’s more experiential storytelling, instead of logical character direction. Anything good with Kylo/Ben in this movie isn’t from the script, it’s from Adam Driver. The fact that his character is salvageable at all in this movie is practically a miracle. The more that comes out behind-the-scenes from this movie, the more evident that is; the other day we learned that Adam Driver recorded some final ADR in his closet, suggesting that some of his masked dialogue – including a few pointed reveals about Rey – were inserted last-minute. Speaking of Rey…
Rey. Just Rey.
The Rey in this movie might as well be a different character from the Rey we got to know through The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. I know there are people out there who insist that they love all three movies, but I actually don’t understand how, because the protagonists are so radically different.
Rey was introduced as a character with a great deal of longing. Just like Kylo Ren, she struggled with identity, but in an entirely different way. While Kylo bore the burden of his lineage and his destiny, Rey’s burden was the lack of all of that. The lack of anything, really. The Force Awakens introduces her as a character longing for some sort of family dynamic. She believes her parents are going to come back to her on Jakku, but it becomes increasingly clear that she’s been abandoned. Maz tells her to look forward, not back. Rey is looking for a sense of belonging in this crazy world, but she is confronted with the humanity of everyone around her. She looks for belonging in Han Solo, but then he is murdered in front of her. Next, she looks for it in Luke Skywalker, but she finds a hollow, broken failure of a man. She tries again to find it in her parents, looking for answers in the cave on Ach-To but mysteriously sees only herself. She tries to find belonging in her new connection with Kylo, but he chooses his own darkness over her. He also forces her to accept what she’s always known – that her parents never cared about her, and abandoned her for drinking money. This reveal is what proves to me that Terrio, if not Abrams, simply did not understand The Last Jedi; in recounting it, Terrio suggested that the reveal was that Rey’s parents were junk traders and not heroes. But that’s only part of it. Yes, Rey has to confront that she isn’t connected to any lineage, that she is all along in the universe. But she also has to confront the deep sense of isolation and abandonment that she feels after being abandoned by her parents. Her parents did not care about her, and that is central to her character.
Why? Because Rey’s lesson is not just ‘whoops, your family isn’t important.’ It’s that the belonging, the sense of identity that she’s longing for, needs to come from within her. While Kylo tries to forge an identity through his forceful posturing and aggressive outburst, Rey has to find her identity in her own strength and own belovedness. That’s why the cave only shows Rey herself. She can’t rely on Kylo, or Luke, or anyone else, she has to believe in herself. That’s a big part of why she closes the door on Kylo at the end of The Last Jedi because she finally has her self-assertion and she doesn’t need him anymore. She has found her family in the Resistance, and she has found a strength within herself. There are powerful feminist messages within this, about inner feminine power and the ability to have that without being tied to any patriarchal structures, but I genuinely believe there are powerful universal messages as well. Because it takes Star Wars back to what it was on Day 1 – a story about this little farm boy who realized he could save the world. Other movies have made it about lineages, and midichlorians, but A New Hope was pure escapism. The message was that ‘heroism can come from anywhere.’ And The Last Jedi takes us back to that. Rian Johnson has described as the path of adolescence, of finding your place in the world. Rey, by being a woman all on her own and having to find her own strength and identity, shows us once again that we all can be a hero, and also shows the journey to adulthood. These are lessons that have meant a lot to me, because I relate to Rey’s sense of loss and isolation, and I relate to the need to self-assert rather than to find that identity in others. I think she embodies the Millennial hero, someone who has to find that strength of self amidst a world begging for your attention. I love Rey’s character in these movies, I think it’s deeply profound.
Rise of Skywalker spits on all of that. That sounds aggressive, and it is. Maybe it’s because I feel so close to this character, but whenever I think of what Rise of Skywalker does to Rey, it looks like such a blatant betrayal of what was done to her character. Because Rise of Skywalker throws all of those themes out the window. No longer is Rey a character unto herself, someone who must find her inner strength. Now, she’s the granddaughter of Palpatine! She’s not powerful because the Force chose her, she’s powerful because she’s a Palpatine! She doesn’t have darkness within her because she is a broken woman dealing with deep abandonment issues, she has darkness because she’s a Palpatine! Every element of her character is swept under this rug of lineage, and it disgusts me. Even her parents are recontextualized. Kylo tells her that her parents were on the run from Palpatine, and says “they sold you because they loved you,” selling her into slavery to hide her from their father. There is so much wrong with this. It entirely invalidates her sense of abandonment – her parents loved her the entire time! The idea of selling someone into slavery out of love is also an entirely abhorrent idea, and I hope I don’t have to explain that. But I think what strikes me the most is how none of these changes are needed. Rey being a Palpatine doesn’t change anything, really. It kind of explains away why she’s so aggressive in the second act (which, I don’t love. I really dislike when characters suddenly become ‘evil’ because of ‘fate’ or whatever. I think it’s bad writing. Probably related to that idea of taking away agency), but again, her tension with Kylo or her coping with her sense of abandonment could have explained that. And, as demonstrated in the last article, her being a Palpatine never really affects the Emperor’s plans, as they are constantly changing anyway. It’s just added lore trying to mask itself as character development. The movie wants to have this theme of ‘you can choose your own lineage, and your past doesn’t define you’ – which is fine! That’s a fine theme… that was Return of the Jedi. Or, if you really want to discuss it in this movie, discuss it with Kylo Ren, a character who is already tied around concepts of past and lineage. Rey has spent the past two movies learning to grow from her past, and from the past of the Jedi, but this movie rolls back both of those threads.
Speaking of which, we need to talk about the Jedi in this movie. The Last Jedi volleys a lot of balls that Rise of Skywalker drops (is that how analogies work?) but possibly none fall harder than the idea of the Jedi. After all, The Last Jedi sets up a big problem in this world: the Jedi need to be redefined. The Jedi do not contain the sum of goodness, and in fact, they have done an awful lot of bad. Luke thought the Jedi Order needed to be buried, but Rey, and the movie as a whole, suggests more that they need to grow. Rey leaves the movie with the old Jedi texts, not to repeat their mistakes, but to learn from then. Luke ends the movie stating that he is not the last Jedi. Besides Rey, the end of the movie shows us that the Force is awakening in people all around the galaxy. The implication is that we will have to find a new way to understand the Jedi. They will have to be more than just base light and dark, but something more complex. A lot of people considered a sort of ‘grey Jedi’ idea. Rey and Kylo are suggested as an image of the ‘balance’ in the Force, and Rise of Skywalker leans into that by calling them a ‘dyad.’ Especially if you’re going to end with a redeemed Ben, it just makes sense to end with the two of them as a newfound balance. But Rise of Skywalker does practically nothing to redefine the Jedi, or with the idea that the Force is awakening. Rather, it leans back into the old Jedi order. Rey is powerless until all the old Jedi speak to her. Rey finishes the task of old Jedi, of Anakin, of Leia. Rey even, bafflingly, considers herself ‘unworthy’ of Luke’s lightsaber, despite the saber calling to her in The Force Awakens. I talked previously about the idea of this movie feeling obligated towards it, and Rey here seems very obligated to what has come before.
Nothing shows that more than the movie’s end. After fulfilling Leia’s prophecy and beating Luke’s enemy, Rey goes to Tatooine, to the old Skywalker homestead. Rey has no connection to Tatooine – the Skywalkers don’t even have a connection to Tatooine, they always hated it. Only the audience has any positive feelings towards the desert planet. But Rey goes there, and she goes there to bury Luke and Leia’s lightsabers. Why? This was never a practice that we’ve seen before. According to Abrams and Terrio, it was to bring Luke and Leia to rest and to bring them together again, because their separation was an ‘original sin’ or some kind. That’s an entire can of worms to itself, but what’s important is that the end of Rey’s arc is just fulfilling perceived gaps in Luke and Leia’s arc. Not only is her power not allowed to be her own, but her story isn’t even allowed to be her own. Rey even visually regresses, much like Kylo Ren. By the end of The Last Jedi, Rey had abandoned her staff, she had abandoned her three-bun hairstyle, and she traded her tan clothes for dark greys that mirrored her growing darkness and complexity. She had grown from the naïve girl in The Force Awakens. The old Legacy lightsaber is even split in half. But Rise of Skywalker reverses all that, for seemingly no reason. She gets her old hair back; she gets the staff back. The lightsaber is repaired without comment. She is clad in white clothes that evoke her initial appearance. Gone are the complex greys, now she appears as a pure Madonna figure. Her growth, her path to self-acceptance, is completely reverted. Then, at the very end of the movie, she takes on this new identity, ‘Rey Skywalker.’ This, too, is the least interesting possible route for her character. Maybe she accepts her lineage, acknowledging the sacrifice of her parents and choosing to redeem her family line, accepting herself as ‘Rey Palpatine.’ Or maybe, she rejects this notion of needing a lineage, and asserts that she really is ‘Just Rey.’ But in calling herself ‘Rey Skywalker,’ she acknowledges that lineages are important after all. How dare she end the movie by just being a character unto herself. Without a last name, she’s no one. This idea that ‘you can choose your lineage’ just seems kind of baffling? It feels like the sort of statement that only someone living in privilege could make. It isn’t half as powerful as the idea of accepting your past and growing from it, that The Last Jedi leaned into. Or even the idea of rejecting lineages and forging your own path. Rise of Skywalker states that Rey needs to choose one of these two families and that she can’t be her own hero without doing so. She never really grows, the Jedi Order never really changes. The sheer presence of a Sequel Trilogy tells us that there must be a shift in status quo if the galaxy is to have lasting peace, but Rise of Skywalker just reverts everything to the most marketable position.
There’s so much else that I could say. There’s the whole Dark Rey idea that goes absolutely nowhere and means absolutely nothing. There’s Rey’s continued need for Ben, and then the fact that she is seemingly unaffected by his death. The super weak duel between Rey and Kylo in the Death Star wreckage, that has no real stakes or narrative. The weird imagery of concluding Rey’s story on Tatooine, once again alone on a desert planet. Everything with Rey feels not only like a rejection of where she went in The Last Jedi, but also where she was poised to go from The Force Awakens. In those movies, she is a complex, burdened character trying to assert her own identity. In this one, she feels like a savior character who exists mostly to serve those who have come before her. Oh, and I haven’t even talked about her weird encounters with the Emperor. How she’s strangely tempted to go along with his plan, and then how she beats him by just ‘resisting more’ or something. She responds with aggression, and just… wins. It all feels very against the tone and messages of what has come before. If you loved all three of these movies equally, that’s great. But… I don’t know if I can. Because Rise of Skywalker simply does not understand what The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were doing, and as a result, tramples all over them. It’s simply not a satisfying conclusion to these characters, and especially not for Rey.
I think… I think I did it. I think I finally said all that I’ve wanted to say about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Despite everything, I still don’t think I hate this movie. I’ve just so very exhausted by it. This movie didn’t ruin my childhood, but it certainly squandered the arcs of characters I’ve really come to love and relate to. It doesn’t invalidate how good The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are, but it does make me wish those movies had the conclusion they deserved. Everything that Rise of Skywalker does just feels so unnecessary, so uninteresting. It makes the lowest-common-denominator choice almost every time, and when it does make bold decisions, they are almost always reverted. It’s a very sad movie, to me. Finn and Poe never really learn or grow. Kylo is redeemed, but he dies. Rey loses this person she evidently cared about and lives her life in bondage to what has come before her, unable to assert her own identity. Not to mention that the cycle of violence seems doomed to continue. We thought we killed Palpatine last time, how is this any different? No balance was achieved, we just fought evil until it died again. It feels like a hollow understanding of what Star Wars actually is. Maybe in time, I’ll come to terms with Rise of Skywalker, but for now, it just seems like a missed opportunity. We keep hearing things from behind-the-scenes, and it keeps looking like more and more of a production nightmare. This franchise deserved to go out on a higher note than this movie, than a soulless imitation of what has come before. I considered ending this two-parter with a list of things I did enjoy in this movie, but that list would be too short to feel redemptive. I know someone, somewhere, took some enjoyment out of Rise of Skywalker. But I’m done. This movie exhausted me, and I honestly look forward to not having to think about it for a while. I think that says more than any review ever could.
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