The above still from Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker is about as perfect if unintentional a metaphor for the state of Star Wars as you can possibly get. Not in terms of revenue, perhaps. The movie is presently tracking to make the US $1 billion mark before it finishes at the theaters. It will almost certainly clear a profit, no matter how small that might be. In dollar terms, the movie will likely not be a failure. But it will certainly not be anywhere near the kind of success the previous two trilogies were. Because severe damage has been done to the mythos due to the very incompetent storytelling and sheet-of-paper "characters" these latest films have foisted upon the audiences, including perhaps the most obvious Mary Sue that has ever been presented in a major motion picture.
But a bit more about that later. The main purpose of today's entry in this journal is to share just what the theater felt like when I and my son Liam went to this movie on Day 3 of the opening weekend. And just before I get into that experience, I have to relate how, indulging morbid curiosity, I had swung by both cineplexes in the city where I currently live to see what the lines and traffic were on the big opening night for The Rise Of Skywalker. Mixed reviews had already appeared in print and online, and spoilers for the movie which turned out to be all too true had also been posted online. And this merely added to the lingering disappointment from The Last Jedi which prematurely terminated the sequel trilogy with the way whatever "plan" had been laid out for it by J.J. Abrams was trashed by Rian Johnson, who decided to go ahead and do his own Star Wars movie instead. So it could be said that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether Episode IX would actually rise to expectations and deliver a Star Wars movie that would fix the damage to the brand and bring back the audiences that had so eagerly flocked to the previous movies and the Special Edition showings of the original trilogy.
Well, when I did my little scouting run, as you might well call it, there were no big lines outside the theaters and the car parks were half-empty. On the premier weekend for what should have been one of the biggest movies of the decade, coming out during the Christmas holidays and against weak competition and it was as if The Rise Of Skywalker was just another movie. Nothing special. By stark contrast, Liam and I had stood in a very long line for Avengers: Infinity War just the previous year, wondering if we'd even get in to the next showing or if the theater would sell out and we'd end up having to cool our heels for two-plus hours waiting for the one after. It took a bit of driving around just to find a parking place before we started for the end of the line and were lucky enough to get in and see the film on time.
I can so clearly remember the crowds I used to encounter at a Star Wars movie, the noise of all their chatter, the energy and sheer levels of excitement and anticipation. When The Return Of The Jedi came out back in 1983, I was with my local science fiction group in New Orleans who camped out in front of the Lakeside Cinema the night before along with hundreds of Star Wars fans. Robert Neagle and Ted Keller had brought a television, a VCR, and a collection of science fiction/fantasy movies on VHS for an all-night tailgate party in the covered parking garage until the doors opened. I stayed awake through the whole party, the wait in the line, and the movie, a full thirty-six hours. Like everybody who was there, we were all amped-up for Episode VI and couldn't wait to see just how the story was going to turn out after how things had been left on one of the biggest cliffhangers in movie history at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Back then, Star Wars wasn't a movie series, it was a cultural phenomenon. It was impossible not to be caught up in the mania then. And when the supreme moment of Darth Vader lifting Emperor Palpatine and throwing him down the ventilator shaft in his own Death Star throne room to save Luke finally came, the crowd in the jam-packed theater literally drowned out the movie with their cheering, pumping out more decibels than the Dolby stereo speakers could channel. It was the big payoff for the Star Wars saga, the culmination of every hope the fans had for the movie series and did it ever deliver. Even in as flawed a movie as Return Of The Jedi was, that climax was the biggest home-run shot in cinema up to that time. The enthusiasm didn't wane throughout the whole of the movie's first-run in theaters, for which millions of fans eagerly paid to see five, ten, fifteen times, and was just as energetic for the Special Edition re-releases twenty years later.
Such was definitely not the case for The Rise Of Skywalker. There was no big line outside the cineplex, no huge crowd inside the lobby. Liam and I were able to just shoot right through to find our seats, of which we had an embarrassingly large selection to choose from. The half-empty theater we saw this movie in was virtually silent. What audience there was found their seats, chatted through the ads and previews, then courteously ceased when the opening credits and title crawl began the movie... and that was the last sound to be heard from the "crowd". There was no cheering, no applause, and alternatively no catcalls, heckling or booing either. Nothing. And at the end, as the closing credits were scrolling through, the people simply filed out of the theater without any kind of reaction or comment to what they'd spent two-plus hours sitting through. Nothing. And when Liam and I exited, the theater lobby was empty. Nobody was sticking around to talk about the movie. It also turned out to be the last showing for that evening. The late 10:10 showing was evidently canceled for lack of ticket sales, as is the policy at the cineplex we went to for this film. And the car park was empty as well, save for our car and those of the remaining theater staff that were still there until they could close shop for the night. The people who came out to see The Rise Of Skywalker that night didn't love the movie, they didn't hate it, they were just... apathetic. This movie was, to them, as it was for I and my son, nothing special. It is almost an absolute certainty that there won't be a lot of repeat business for this movie. Nobody is going to be going to The Rise Of Skywalker even three times if that, much less fifteen.
And as for the movie itself... Oh dear.
I knew that J.J. Abrams had two equally unenviable choices available to him given how Rian Johnson had burned down the trilogy in The Last Jedi. He could either have tried to build something from the smoking ash-pile that had been left to him after that movie, or he could try to somehow, some way, revive the plan for the sequels he had originally laid out and initiated with the plot for The Force Awakens. And despite my contempt for Abrams as a film maker, I allowed a small measure of sympathy for the dilemma he found himself in that would have challenged even a Ridley Scott or a Roger Corman to try to solve. In the end, I suppose, there was no real choice. Option A simply wasn't viable because there was nothing left upon which to craft a sequel so Abrams went for Option B.
Unfortunately, J.J. Abrams is definitely no Ridley Scott or Roger Corman, and he lived down to the incompetent level of film making and storytelling he has become so infamous for in his Kelvin-timeline Star Trek movies and his two television series that ended up going nowhere in the end. The Rise Of Skywalker was simply a hyperkinetic mess of a movie that tried to essentially be two movies wrapped up in one package, in order to patch over the big smoking hole left in the middle of this benighted trilogy. The plot is utterly incoherent, loaded with ill-conceived McGuffins and a host of wholly new Force powers that were clearly made up just to patch over problems in the script. The characters, if you could call them that, have even less depth than a water dollop on a microscopic slide. Story points are simply rushed out and rushed through, the movie is inconsistent even with its own lore, never mind that of the Star Wars universe as a whole, the fact that Emperor Palpatine has returned (which was necessitated by Rian Johnson's contemptibly careless termination of Snoke in The Last Jedi) is announced in the very brief opening crawl to the movie instead of being kept as a surprise revelation, and Palpatine changes his Great Plan more often in this movie than most people change their socks. There isn't a single story element that has any kind of logical development behind it, and nothing happens in this movie that motivates the viewer to even care about what's flowing past in this cinematic theme-park ride, and that's all this "story" was. Sitting through The Rise Of Skywalker is just like riding a roller-coaster: a few thrills but in the end you wind up exactly back where you started, and the experience of the ride itself is soon forgotten. Even the title of this film makes no sense given how Rey is revealed as not a descendant of the Skywalker line and both the Skywalker and Solo families are extinct at the end of the story.
Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey... She is literally no different at the end of these three films than when we first encountered her on Jakku in The Force Awakens. Rey was Already Perfect when we met her, already able to tap into Force powers, already a better star pilot than everyone else, does not lose a fight, has maybe a few moments of angst about whether she might turn to the Dark Side or not but nothing like the struggles of Luke or his father Anakin over that dread possibility. She is the Fully Capable Hero at every turn, is practically invincible, is able to manifest new and unknown powers at the drop of a hat and at the most convenient moments for her to do so. Not only does she ably resist being turned to the Dark Side every time Kylo Ren, Snoke or Palpatine try to corrupt her, she is So Perfect that Kylo Ren was already half-turning back toward the Light before he has an imaginary conversation with the ghost of his dad, Han Solo, and is healed through the Power of Love and blah blah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah... It makes no sense and I can't even begin to try to care. Rey was and is the Ultimate Mary Sue, that worst kind of creature from truly, horribly bad fanfiction who is not only the Perfect Being who Everyone Loves, but for whom the whole universe bends to make her heroics possible. At the end of three movies, we know no more about Rey than we knew about her to begin with, and it is fittingly symbolic that she literally comes full-circle: from being the Ultimate Disney Princess who we first meet on a backwater desert planet to being the Ultimate Disney Princess who ends her journey on a backwater desert planet.
Now, it wasn't my object when I began writing this piece to get into a protracted rant about how nonsensical The Rise Of Skywalker was as a movie. My intention was to relate the experience I had at the theater when I took Liam to see the film and how we had encountered an audience for a Star Wars movie that was completely unenthusiastic for it. But that rant became an unavoidable necessity to explain the meaning of that experience, for a movie that completely lacks meaning of any kind and which nobody could care about, and didn't. I mean... how can one truly sum up what a total waste of time this movie, and this entire sequel trilogy, proved to be? Throughout the story in this movie, A did not lead to B or even to little-a. Instead, A led to Purple by way of Fallen Brown Leaf and Narwhal. Nothing in this movie made the least bit of sense, at any point. Even worse, this sequel trilogy in general, and this movie in particular, breaks the Star Wars mythos in ways that may not be repairable. It breaks every in-universe rule that was established about how anything from the technology to the Force is supposed to work. Far worse, it effectively retconned the first two trilogies to render their stories completely meaningless.
So really, as I stated at the beginning, the featured clip from the scene of the confrontation between Rey and Kylo Ren in the shattered wreckage of the Death Star is perhaps the most unintentionally perfect metaphor that could have been crafted for the current state of Star Wars.
A forty year journey from cultural icon to broken ruin.
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