Just as Disney’s The Mandalorian plays upon our emotional piggy bank of memories by bringing back (spoiler!) Yoda, J.J. Abrams has been most successful at bridging the old and new Star Wars chapters by never ignoring its past. After all, we know that characters never really die in Star Wars; they just become ectoplasmic.
This is why it was no longer unusual to see Yoda pop up in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a shimmering robed ghost still giving life lessons to a wizened Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). So it is in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, where we are constantly reminded that — whether through The Force, or through Industrial Light and Magic — the past is never dead; it’s not even past.
As we pick up on the opening crawl (“THE DEAD SPEAK!”), General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher, in footage shot before her death) is trying to stop a threat from the past — someone whose cloaked visage and distinct cackle has appeared in the movie trailers — even as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) seeks to either destroy Rey (Daisy Ridley) or bring her over to the dark side.
Rey, meanwhile, has been busy training as a Jedi under Leia, and the old team of Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac) are doing their best to marshal the troops for the never-ending battle thing.
Kylo Ren is clearly very upset at being punk’d by Luke’s hologram in the last outing. He’s on the warpath, growing more and more Vaderish with each passing day (he has an amusing variation on the flinging-around-subordinates move Darth Vader pioneered in Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back). He’s even stitched together a new helmet with demented red cracks (this guy’s clearly a millennial creative trapped in his own hate narratives; maybe keeping Vader’s crushed old helmet around in a cooler doesn’t help).
When history looks back on the J.J. Abrams-steered trilogy, what will probably please fans most is the return of iconic heroes. It was a gas to see Harrison Ford back in the fold in The Force Awakens, even if he met a fan-shocking fate; on the other hand, Carrie Fisher’s return to the screen was short-lived, as she passed away after filming 2017’s The Last Jedi. After much soul-searching — with Abrams claiming he received an uncanny “message” from Fisher’s last book, The Princess Diarist — her existing Leia footage was used for the conclusion. And it adds to the poignancy of this finale, which wraps up not only the current trilogy, but also a 40-year Star Wars journey.
Some would argue against honoring the past. “Let the past die,” mutters Kylo Ren at one point. “Kill it if you have to.” Spoken like a true angst-driven millennial. In other words: Okay, boomer. You had your moment. Step aside.
Give credit to Abrams, though: he’s had to steer an X-Wing fighter down a narrow Death Star canal lined with original fan expectations, new demands for greater expansion of the story, and a distinctly sour memory of the Lucas prequels. He mostly succeeded, by faithfully (some would say slavishly) mimicking the tone of the original movies. It helps that he recreates key set pieces (Kylo Ren’s storming around his Imperial Cruiser, echoing Darth Vader’s earlier moves), wisecracking dialogue (not just “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” but other iconic lines that resurface in The Rise of Skywalker), and even, er, complete plotlines when necessary (The Force Awakens, borrowing its “blow up the Death Star” finale from A New Hope). While Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi injected a new energy into the franchise, this final chapter adheres to the old beats of the canon; let the next franchise explore the other myriad worlds and adventures that Lucas’s initial vision has spawned.
As for the movie itself, The Rise of Skywalker might be the most complicated story yet, so locked into its tinker-toy unfolding of plot details that we may miss them the first time around (things like that green pyramid thingy, which my wife had to explain was a device that led to the Sith planet). Yet there are a handful of awesome scenes, even if they do echo other scenes from past movies. There is that desert encounter between Rey, her powers now growing beyond even her own comprehension, and Kylo Ren, bearing down on her in a TIE Silencer, that echoes not just Star Wars showdowns, but Westerns (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) and even Mad Max road battles.
Also powerful was the reunion of Rey and Ren in the Palace of the Siths (or whatever the hell it’s called), set up by a cackling villain whom we’re all too familiar with. The scenes are not so much replicas of the past; here, they’re done up on a grander scale. This is the final chapter, after all. Big things must fall.
Looking back on the Abrams trilogy — because that’s what we are asked to do here; The Force practically demands it, what with all the important details from the previous two movies still in play — we will notice that there was scant attention paid to romance. While the original George Lucas trilogy was a swashbuckling adventure, and this meant a certain tug of war between Han Solo and young Luke over Leia’s affections, there is barely a whiff of anything vaguely resembling a hookup in the Abrams trilogy. Yes, Finn was firmly put in the friend zone by Rey early on, and Poe has led us to think he could be more than a buddy, and though he seems enough of a player to hook up with any available port in a storm, this Disney-owned franchise never goes there. Perhaps times have changed, and the bad-boy qualities of a Han Solo simply no longer play in our #MeToo times.
Too bad, I guess. A certain element of Star Wars’ original charm is sacrificed by denying that, in crises, people do tend to bare themselves, emotionally, and in other ways. In other words, they hook up. Not these characters. A warm, three-way embrace is all you get. (Adding a certain amount of unsolicited sleazery is Richard E. Grant as an Imperial commander who, lacking the gravitas of Peter Cushing, simply substitutes leering and eye-popping.)
What fans may notice, as the final credits roll on this trilogy, is that it was the small moments between human (and non-human) characters, both new and old, that moved us more than the state-of-the-art ILM, fighter battles and explosions. It was the embrace of Leia and Rey, or the encounters between Han Solo and Kylo Ren, or even the longtime companions C-3P0 and R2-D2, that made fans weep. Because this, folks, is the end.
But of course, it’s not — not really. We’ve already established that ectoplasm rules in this galaxy far, far away. And popular characters always have a way of resurrecting — not, as one wag put it, merely as “Disney meme generators,” but because fans do demand it. Legacy wins out (as shown in the final scene). And, as Luke Skywalker put it, no one’s ever really gone.