Tony uses the Force one
last time.
Here’s the thing
about the three ‘new’ Star Wars movies. You know how everybody’s
creeped out by the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ in Cats? The
combination of people in CGI cat-skins, but some of them wearing
additional fur coats? The weirdly varying size and scale of the cats
to the objects in their environment?
The new Star Wars
movies have the storytelling equivalent of that uncanny valley. Rey
the nobody from nowhere (much like the original Luke, the nobody from
nowhere) is supposed to be a new generation in a galaxy that’s
post-Palpatine, post-Vader, post-initial Rebel Alliance, facing a new
generation of threat, the First Order, who absolutely aren’t the
Empire, nosiree Bob, ruled over by a creature called Snoke, who
absolutely isn’t just Palpatine on growth hormones, of course not,
that would be ludicrous. And yet from the very beginning, the new
movies have swaddled Rey, Finn, Poe et al in the lore and the
characters of the original movies. Chewie, Han, Leia, Luke, R2 and
Threepio, they’re all in these movies, not so much handing over the
reins to a new generation as being trotted out for a pre-extinction
shindig without in any case facing up to the question of how the
Rebel Alliance, having defeated the Evil Empire went
remarkably quickly from being winners to being hunted rebels again.
The obvious answer seems to be that the characters of the Rebel
Alliance only work when they’re struggling to overthrow an
oppressive force, but still – it feels like a poor statement on the
power of democracy and rebellion that all the characters from the
original trilogy are seen to be still alive in time to have had the
tables turned on them and be rebels again. The result is that
the new Rebel Alliance feels like an exercise in nostalgia, and in
the absence of the power couple that was Vader and Palpatine, or
anyone who comes even remotely close to their chemistry and on-screen
scares, the whole thing feels a bit ludicrous.
It feels especially
ludicrous as the movies have a lot of bare wiring showing. There’s
the son of Han and Leia being a desperate emo Wannabe-Sith, and as
such, being personally responsible for taking out most of the
surviving members of his family without in any way ever being
actually scary, as though a stern ‘Go to your room, young
man’ would sort him out. There’s the seemingly contractual
slaughter of at least one of the original cast per movie – although
of course, with the whole ‘Force Ghost’ thing, this tends not to
mean a whole hell of a lot. But most of all, the dynamics of the
screenwriting are up there on screen for all to see: Kylo Ren, born
too late, desperate to be the equal of the former Dark Side glories
of his house, Rey from Nowhere, beloved of the new Rebel Alliance
(which is actually most of the old Rebel Alliance with altogether
gloriously fewer knobs on). If Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is Darth Emo,
then Domhnall Gleeson has been stomping around the place for a couple
of movies giving it his best Grand Moff Wannabe, even to the extent
of having a souped-up would-be Death Star and being foot-stampingly
determined to use it. Everything in these three movies has been a
battle between the kernel of a new iteration of the Force personified
(Rey, and to some extent, Finn too), and a Star Destroyer full of
nostalgic baggage crying ‘Look, look! Things were better in the old
days!’
The third movie might
be called The Rise Of Skywalker (though that in itself
is a massive cop-out. For…reasons), but really, it’s the movie in
which the fight against the overwhelming tide of fan-serving
nostalgia is lost. It’s not an enormous spoiler for anyone who’s
seen the trailer, and they also put the news right in the opening
crawl – Palpatine’s back! No particular explanation of how or why
that’s possible is given (though fans of course have a ready-made
solution to that through other media). But he’s back, he’s been
hiding in the darkness, building, of all things, a fleet of Star
Destroyers, each of which is equipped with planet-killing
capabilities. They’re like a fleet of Death Stars… only…y’know,
much less cool. Impressive and imposing, certainly, just less cool.
Much of the movie is
taken up with finding a compass that will allow the good guys and
gals to even get to the region of the Sith where all these
Star Destroyers have been secretly built (You have to wonder – does
this mean most engineers are Sith, because that would explain a hell
of a lot), interspersed with dialogue battles and occasionally
somewhat under-inspired lightsaber battles between Ren and Rey,
despite them being in different physical locations at the time. So
that’s new.
If we’re cutting to
the chase, then Rey is not what she’s been painted as being – a
new nobody with a particular affinity with the Force, to kick the
saga down a new path. She’s very much a relic of the old mythos,
which more or less swallows her up in this instalment. She has an
intense source of personal power which can only be explained one way
– and is, fairly on in the film, meaning we’re then waiting for
her and the characters around her to play catch-up with information
we already know. There are battles, feelings, the will-she-won’t-she
turn to the Dark Side question, as faced by Luke throughout the
original trilogy of movies, and there’s a more explicit duality
expressed between Rey and Ren as the film trundles on, with a
familiar outcome, inasmuch as a turning can happen in either
direction, and we’ve seen what happens here once already, though on
that occasion there was a little less snogging involved. The Rise of
the Sith (sorry, I’m having that one, although it should absolutely
have been what this movie was called) looks imminent as the
planet-killing Star Destroyers start to roll out, a pan-galactic
fleet of ‘just people’ is assembled to fight the forces of the
Dark Side (I’m as woolly-headed a liberal as you’ll find
anywhere, but even I cringed slightly when the fleet assembled
against the rising emperor was described as ‘just people, and
there’s more of us than there are of them’ because the Real World
politics of it was sledgehammer-subtle), but as in the original
trilogy, the fate of the galaxy ultimately hinges on a battle for the
souls of two Force-sensitives, a would-be Jedi and a Sith, while the
emperor watches. Even the beats feel the same, treading the same old
path with new faces – and a couple of old ones, as Billy Dee
Williams pops in to save the galaxy again as Lando Calrissian just in
the nick of inevitability – but the whole thing feels saturated
with sameness and admittedly not-undeserved self-congratulation.
That said, if it’s
nothing especially new, retreads old flight paths, and yanks Rey back
into the realms of ‘old’ Star Wars, rather than letting her be
the start of ‘new’ Star Wars, it’s by no means an especially
bad way to spend two and a half hours. There’s fun with
robots, Chewie nearly gets killed in a spectacular fashion, Richard E
Grant arrives and easily, almost instantly, outclasses Domhnall
Gleeson as the Moff To Watch, giving of his best Space-Nazi acting.
Lupita Nyong’o and Shirley Henderson both make anything they’re
in almost instantly better, though recognising them in The Rise Of
Skywalker is more of a challenge than usual, and the list of
pleasing cameos is long to the point of glorious film nerd absurdity,
with Denis Lawson, Billie Lourd, Vinette Robinson, Jodie Comer,
Warwick Davis (Yes, apologies for the spoiler, but even a particular
variety of forest-dweller is in this movie), Dominic ‘One Star
Destroyer To Rule Them All’ Monaghan and even, in voice at least,
JJ Abrams himself being just a handful of highlights. There’s the
discovery by Finn of a group of other Stormtroopers who
rebelled against the darkness of the First Order, led and more or
less personified by Naomi Ackie as Jannah – think Valkyrie from the
MCU and put her in a galaxy far, far away. And in a vague nod to
George R R Martin, there’s the notion of a Throne of the Sith,
whoever sits on it being the embodiment of thousands of generations
of evil gittery. There’s Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, following
fully on from Han Solo, getting to say the impossible sugary nonsense
at which Harrison Ford occasionally baulked, and coming to the
conclusion that it takes a village to do the work of one General
Princess Leia Badass Organa. And of course, if you’re watching The
Rise Of Skywalker for fairy tale fun in the stars, or for
full-throttle space opera with the clashing of good and evil
archetypes, you’re in the right place, because this movie has all
that by the bucketload, and is determined to leave nothing in the
tank. You’ll absolutely be entertained by what we’re told is the
final instalment in the Skywalker saga. You just probably won’t be
able to resist scratching the itch of knowing that you’ve seen most
of this before, and that most of it, by virtue of not being a
knowing, self-referencing re-run, felt better that first time.
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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