Note: The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of SPOILERS …
It is something of an odd, even perverse, choice to begin the trademark opening crawl of the latest STAR WARS film with the words ‘The dead speak!’ when the top-billed star tragically passed away before production even began, yet remains present on-screen through the use of archival footage and digital manipulation.
This kind of haphazard thoughtlessness is emblematic of the film’s approach to both its place in the wider franchise and constructing its own individual story. [1] It also marks it as a somewhat stranger – indeed, uncanny – movie than it has generally been deemed by both critics and apologists. Not just in terms of the ‘uncanny valley’ effect evidenced in scenes between live actors and Carrie Fisher’s digital ghost, but in the way the film unfolds its whole narrative – the sense of something that is familiar, but not quite right.
No doubt in part due to the untimely death of Fisher, the main linkage between past and present in this film, as it connects and conflicts with its predecessors, is not (as of the beginning of this episode of the saga) still-surviving member of the original trio Princess Leia. Nor is it the finally returning addition of Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian.
Rather it is Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), arch-villain of both the original trilogy and the prequels, who defines the thematic relationship between this film and all its forebears, precisely because of the awkwardness around his appearance. Palpatine’s intrusion into the sequel trilogy seems almost violent in its discontinuity with the previous two entries, THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015) and THE LAST JEDI (2017).[2]
This re-animated figure, suspended for most of the movie by a mechanical arm looming from the dark above, suggests not the peaceful afterlife of the ethereal Jedi, but something far uncannier and more unnatural.[3] He is not, like the Jedi force ghosts, a spectral apparition. He is instead decrepit, corpselike, inexplicably corporeal following his explosive fate in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). His appearance causes disruptions and dislocations in the narrative of the film, and the saga overall, dredging up the past and fracturing a sense of the present.
It would, perhaps, be entirely too cute to suggest that Palpatine’s abrupt return is itself the reason for the film’s choppy editing and awkward narrative flow. But it is fair to propose that these issues are linked, stemming from the underlying production challenges and creative choices of a movie built partly around archival footage of a deceased star, completed on an abbreviated production schedule, while taking on the challenge of serving as a sequel and conclusion not just to this trilogy, but the entire saga.
Certainly, as a consequence of his reappearance, Palpatine suborns the stories of this trilogy’s central figures, Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), twisting their character arcs further into distorted versions of past events.[4] Rey’s journey through the trilogy becomes not just a reimagining of the story of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), but essentially a repetition of it – just as Kylo goes from recalling the tragic path of Anakin Skywalker to re-enacting it.
Rey is no longer the daughter of no-one, as was established in THE LAST JEDI, but instead becomes a scion of imperial lineage, just as Luke was revealed to be the son of Darth Vader. And, indeed, Kylo’s final redemption and self-sacrifice for the sake of love has him following more assiduously in his grandfather’s footsteps than ever before.
The dead weigh heavily on the film’s characters and its narrative. Indeed, two of the film’s most emotionally resonant scenes – the redeemed Kylo Ren (now Ben Solo once more) imagining a reunion with the father he murdered, and the lament of Resistance leader Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to Leia after her death – convey a sense of genuine loss and the challenges of moving on.
When it comes, the final struggle between Rey and Palpatine is explicitly framed as a battle between the power of all the dead Sith embodied in Palpatine, and the spirits of all the dead Jedi who are channelled through Rey. The ultimate confrontation in this film, and the whole saga, is a war between necromancers.
The true symbolic opposition to Palpatine in this film therefore is not Rey, who becomes altogether too entrammelled in his byzantine machinations. Even at the end, her identity is defined in relation to his – as Jedi rather than Sith, as a Skywalker rather than a Palpatine. Instead, the character who most represents the ability to grow and change and form new connections, and wins his freedom from the resurrected past that Palpatine represents, is Finn (John Boyega).
In the defining moment when he first appeared in THE FORCE AWAKENS, he feels for the dead – both his fellow Stormtrooper, slain by Poe, and for the villagers being executed by the First Order. It is this experience, founded in empathy, that causes him to desert. From that beginning, he forges bonds with both Poe and Rey, and remains the link between these two other characters who are not properly introduced to one another until the end of THE LAST JEDI.[5] In Finn’s story, moving on means reaching out.
He is the heart of the new cast in the sequels and so, in a backwards way, it is almost appropriate that his arc in this film is marked by incompleteness.[6] Finn, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER repeatedly hints, is force-sensitive. The thing he wishes to tell Rey as they face death in a sand trap is not necessarily “I love you”, but perhaps the deeper and more empathetic sentiment “I feel what you feel.”
Yet this sentiment is never properly expressed, and this is part of the reason the movie’s message of togetherness triumphing over fear feels hollow. And while we may imagine that he will help Rey rebuild the Jedi Order, Finn’s destiny remains unfinished and unfixed.
Even his subplot with fellow deserting Stormtrooper, Jannah (Naomi Ackie), is cut short. Her own ending instead hints at a half-retained plot point in which she would be revealed as the daughter of Lando, stolen by the First Order in retaliation for his role in defeating the old Empire. Even the film’s own ideas seem shrouded in a kind of forgetful mist.
Not despite, but rather because of its obsession with reviving the past and raising the dead, this is a film that appears to almost have lost track of what a STAR WARS movie really is. In desperately summoning up the imagery and lore of the series to reconstruct its appeal, the film forgets how to properly relate these details to each other, and to the audience.[7]
The sense of a wider galaxy full of life that exists outside of the grand struggle between good and evil; planets and locations with environments that feels immersive and fully rendered; and most of all a sense of pioneering boldness and earnest heartfulness to go alongside the broad, archetypal storytelling of the series – together these fundamental elements encapsulate much of the deeper attraction of the original STAR WARS films.
In THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, however, they are ultimately clouded over with too-great a reverence for that same hallowed past. The result is a lurching Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, brought to life out of scavenged, reused parts, and wounded by a lack of true understanding of where it came from, or a sense of purpose of its own.
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[1] Whatever the actual series of creative decisions that, for instance, led to the minimising of Kelly Marie Tran’s role in this movie, the ultimate result is a film that, intentionally or not, appears to kowtow to criticism of the character of Rose, which included vitriolic racist abuse directed at the actress on social media.
[2] Alright, yes, Luke mentions ‘Darth Sidious’ in THE LAST JEDI during his attempt to convince Rey that the Jedi Order deserves to be left in the past. But the conversation is clearly framing him as a historical figure within the universe, not one of any current or future presence. Meanwhile, for aficionados of prequel lore, Palpatine’s re-emergence even puts into question the cosmic role played by prophesied celestial messiah Anakin Skywalker, fated to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force, which he supposedly achieved in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983).
[3] Exegol, the name of the secret world of the Sith cult that through some sinister means brought Palpatine back, seems to deliberately suggest outsideness, otherness, the alien and the abject.
[4] You know, like that Season 2 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy and villain-turner-hero-turned-villain Angelus are possessed by ghosts of a past tragedy at her high school.
[5] Poe himself is another kind of revenant, his journey originally having been intended to end in the TIE Fighter crash on Jakku, before JJ Abrams changed his mind after discussing the character with Oscar Isaac.
[6] Speaking of unresolved issues, the film shows one of the planet-killer star destroyers is already active before the final battle on Exegol when it destroys the world of Kijimi, and thus was not necessarily wiped out with the rest of the Sith fleet. So, a series which closed its first entry with the triumphant destruction of the first planet-destroying superweapon ends with yet another potentially still running around.
[7] Equally striking in its unintended significance here is perhaps the most effectively executed idea in the film, in which fussbudget droid C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels) has his memory wiped by diminutive (but enthusiastic) technician Babu Frik in order to recover a secret message from the past written in the forbidden language of the Sith.
I'll Explain Later 