Soooooo, about "The Rise of Skywalker"....

[yvannairie]

Taking a day away from people being angry and disappointed about TROS and I feel like I can finally put my own thoughts about it down. It's been really stressful thinking about this movie, because I went into it sort of... dreading, as a lot of people whose opinions I respect had found it miserably disappointing, and there seemed to not even be any statements to the effect of "well it was Good For A Star Wars Movie".

So, to avoid sounding like a corparete ass-kisser -- let's be clear that the script of TROS? Actually a mess on multiple levels. The two major plot threads (Finn&Poe and Rey&Kylo) do not intersect at any point except during the denouement, and both bear the scars of being hacked apart and put together -- the Resistance plot more than the Jedi plot. Overall the A plot with Finn&Poe starts out weak and gets stronger as it goes along, while the Rey&Kylo plot starts out strong, peaks at the midpoint of the film and gets weaker from there, but it manages to build up enough momentum that you'll forgive that if you're not put off by the plot twists.

There's also a lot of messy obvious rewrite stuff in there like Poe's retconned backstory, Zorii and Jannah... existing, as very obvious Innocuous Different-Gender But Conveniently Same Ethnicity Potential Love Interest (if it turns out that romance plots for the two of them and Poe and Finn were edited out, I will not be even a bit surprised) as well as Maz and Rose having massively reduced roles, many of the important revelations happening on top of fancy flashback footage.

It is really obvious that this movie went not only through multiple rewrites, but probably at least a few dramatic editing passes. It is a mess. It is entirely a mess.

And yet, it is exactly the kind of mess that I expected out of a Star Wars film. TROS was never gonna be as good as TLJ, and once I'd set my expectations to "lots of stuff getting Jossed, with vigour, or at least retooled b/c the backlash was so dramatic" I liked what I got a lot. Overall, the most angry I got was waiting on the characters I liked so much emerging from all the stuff that was put on top of them from the previous movie. All the stuff that annoyed me, could have just been cut. It was written in to appeal to who knows who, not me, and overall distracted from what the movie actually was going for.

Which was visiting consequences on Kylo Ren for his choice to take over the First Order.

I really enjoyed the first half of the Rey&Kylo plot, with him trying to assert himself as above and beyond the environment that created him -- one of being above the fear that made him turn to the Dark Side, to the point of taking one look at Palpatine and seeing an opportunity to prove to Rey they both were above the influences that shaped them into being -- and how that dovetailed with Rey trying to find connection, trying to learn from Luke's mistake of isolating himself by reaching out, while constantly still slipping into isolating herself and trying to be The Whole Solution(tm) as the last Jedi.

Pivoting from Rey From Nowhere to Rey The Lonely worked really well for me. The energy she took away from TLJ, of shaping her own destiny, was so obviously eating at her that she was becoming short-tempered, obsessive and reckless, which then dovetailed nicely with her general fear of her power because her only reference point to power like hers was Kylo Ren, her "match". Them being revealed to be powerful because of that duality also went a nice way into explaining why their relationship was shaping both of them so powerfully. I could absolutely buy that her fear of becoming Kylo Ren was driving much of her obsession behind her being validated by the Jedi before her by finding her connection to them rather than just. Indiscriminately reaching out, and grabbing onto anything that met her halfway.

She was shown having standards, including the ones she held Ben to, during the film. She was reaching out in the Force to form positive bonds as a way to check her own raw destructive potential -- and it wasn't quite working out for her, because being so connected to Ren, having that bad relationship still in her life, was making her more aware of her own flaws. Did she feel such kinship with Kylo Ren because she, too, was capable of that?

Well, no -- but she did feel kinship with Ben, and acknowledging that just as she had seen potential in him to turn good, she had to keep believing in the potential in herself to be good. She wasn't Palpatine's child, what she knew of her power came from the Skywalkers.

I think, overall, Rey's story and Finn's Force-sensitivity paired well with the idea that the Force was "opening up" to a new generation across the galaxy -- especially the ones who had been abused, isolated or otherwise mistreated by their environment. That is also how I took the end of TLJ, really, the young generation who had these powers but was hard-pressed than ever to just... survive, were much more likely to start showing exceptional potential. The idea that pain and trauma makes you stronger in the Force is perhaps not the most wholesome message, but this trilogy has been spending a lot of time on the social aspect of the Force, of Force as extension of your relationship, both toxic ones and healthy ones, and, well. To say that negative relationships can make our responses to all relationships more dramatic and uncontrollable hopefully isn't a controversial statement.

In this way, I also really like the ending the two new Skywalkers got. I'm very take-it-or-leave-it about the kiss, really, and I never "shipped" it romantically or really ever parsed it as romantic as much as I always had that vibe of "you know my trauma and that's why we're circling each other like this". I've had relationships like that, where you feel inexplicably tied b/c hey, who else gets it? I think, in that way, it's stronger that we got to see Force Sensitive Finn, showing us that Rey wasn't alone with her experiences even when she thought she was, because you can become myopic towards your other relationships, trying to struggle with a difficult and taxing one. I interpreted "Rey Skywalker" to be more of an acknowledgement that Ben lived on in her, that functionally she was both Rey and Ben. After struggling the whole movie feeling like she was entirely alone, an ending that confirmed that she would never have to be alone felt good.

Similarly, I felt like as much as the script was trying to sabotage the rest of the characters, the actors did a hell of a job recovering the situation. Rey's and Poe's sniping could have on paper seemed really hostile and kind of... bickering-over-Finn-esque but Oscar Isaac and Daisy Ridley had just such good chemistry and a clear understanding of how their characters felt about each other. Same could be said for John Boyega who was given absolutely nothing to work with (fun fact -- I had this same problem with TLJ, he was consistently wasted in that movie until the third act and even then... Y'all :|) but still managed to give Finn a very believable sense of affection towards both Poe and Rey. He continues to be the MVP of these films for me, always having the best performance while he's given jack shit to do.

Poe was probably given the worst lot out of the trio, but then again he was also put through the most nonsensical script revision, was pushed into having scenes with characters he had no relationships with, but even then, the bad details were all similarly take-it-or-leave-it(-but-propably-leave-it). Honestly, him scrambling to build the Resistance, doing all the risking himself and being short with everyone, suspicious and stressed made a lot of sense to me considering the last time they'd been cornered, they'd been saved by an in-universe version of an act of god. There was no second Luke Skywalker waiting in the wings to save them again, and he couldn't just passively wait for the universe to support him, because they sure as shit had not done that on Crait. Him being afraid people weren't gonna be there for him when shit went down (because, remember, he hadn't been there for them in the last movie) is palpable, and I enjoy how that dovetailed with Rey's need for context for herself outside of herself and Kylo Ren.

(It's too bad that Finn was left out of this... almost entirely, outside of the one scene where he bonded with Jannah over their similar pasts. This would have been a great opportunity to make him the rock of the team, the one with absolute faith, because hey. Rose got him where he was. He just needed the foundation. He's good at improvising.)

(A shame that Disney are fucking cowards.)

To turn this into a proper reverse compliment sandwich, I gotta mention that I absolutely couldn't stand the humour. There was literally no moment that was meant to be comical that made me even smile, and most of them made me actively cringe at the screen. But then again, the only movie out of this trilogy I thought had funny moments was TFA -- TLJ wasn't this bad, it may have been less offensively in-your-face bad and more a well-I-can-ignore-that bad -- and I've pretty much hated the humour in big blockbuster films since. IDK, probably the original Avengers. Yeah, I didn't even think Thor:Ragnarök was that funny. Sue me.

Overall, I think TROS was. Fine. Like, it wasn't great and it definitely felt fanficcy at times, but it was saved by the cast having very good grasp of their characters (I didn't mention it but Adam Driver's performance was as impressive as always -- literally the only bad part of it was his hair becoming flooffy and luscious the moment he turned good and that's on costuming, not him) and doing what people in the prequels did and forcing the bad script to sound tolerable. I was very satisfied with what I saw, and I'm excited to watch it again.

I still don't get where the fandom is coming from with their vicious disappointment, though. I understand the people who found the ending thematically unsatisfying, or were disappointed by what happened to their favourite characters, but there's just this... overriding narrative of a broken narrative promise that I just for the life of me do not get. Literally the only retcon I found it in me to be kinda frustrated about made sense and led into material that I found entirely thematically satisfying, and I find the way Rose's role was cut down an outrage against Kelly Marie Tran and her treatment, but it wasn't a debilitating plot issue, either.

IDK, man. To me, it just feels like a bunch of good ideas that people had, coming out of TLJ got Jossed, and all I can say to that is "well, yeah -- y'all didn't expect that?" We know the fandom is way more clever than the creators, we all know our theories will always speak to us more strongly and the ability for a creator to beat out their fandom in theory-crafting happens so rarely as to not be statistically significant.

I can't bring myself to hate TROS for not being the version of it that was in my head (this is the biggest reason I don't really write for series' that aren't finished, I have no interest in competing with the source material on who is more cleverer) because the version I got... was fine. I liked it.

And it kind of bothers me that I feel so defensive saying that, because me not not liking a movie is such an insignificant issue. But when even the spaces where I'd go to share in my enjoyment of a thing instead want to commisserate about how it burned their crops down... That's pretty alienating. I don't feel safe in spaces united in their hatred of a thing, anymore, and there seems to be nothing but those kinds of spaces for SW, right now.

So I'm at least glad that it's over, because now with all the unresolved potential is out of the air, we can build communities of concord over the space magic movies, and maybe start getting along, again.