...Meanwhile, in a galaxy far far away, a supernova of celestial bravado
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
★★★★★
Imagine a round of the parlour game Consequences in which every fold of the paper cost $200 million. That, effectively, is the new Star Wars trilogy. Its three instalments, starting with 2015’s The Force Awakens, are supposed to be intimately interconnected, yet each was written at speed, by different people, and without the foggiest plan as to where the story should, or even could, go next. Via 2017’s The Last Jedi, whose bold creative strokes, depending on your social media bubble of choice, either revitalised the franchise or eternally befouled it, we have now reached the concluding chapter, and thus The Great Unfolding.
A successful Star Wars film should be full of things the series (which launched in 1977) has technically never shown you before, but which also somehow feel like classic Star Wars. On these grounds – aside from an oddly anxious opening 10 minutes that plays as if the film is fast-forwarding to the point at which it wants to pick up – The Rise of Skywalker is a roaring success. The desert planet Pasaana, with its bustling kite festival and hell-for-leather canyon pursuit, the snowy castle town on Kijimi with its maze of alleyways, the sepulchral Sith home world of Exogol – each plays host to the kind of swashbuckling and fantasy adventures that are the series’ stock-in-trade. They are brought to life with levels of spectacle, detail and wonder unparalleled on the current blockbuster scene.
From the last of these emanates the dread croak of the Emperor Palpatine (Ian Mcdiarmid), which is once again ringing out over the galactic airwaves – a new threat to the heroic Resistance led by General Leia (the late Carrie Fisher, her appearances here constructed from deleted scenes and outtakes from the previous films). This is largely embodied by the three original Force Awakens heroes, junior Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley), repentant stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Their Last Jedi colleagues are mostly left to potter around at base camp with a new rebel officer, played by Dominic Monaghan.
A resurrected emperor also spells bad news for Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the young and impetuous supreme leader of the evil First Order. Yet his older subordinates are rather keener on the prospect of a return to the old ways, not least Allegiant General Pryde, played by Richard E Grant with his face contorted into a permanent blocked-drain sneer.
In its headlong rush towards the finish line, The Rise of Skywalker does often feel as if it’s trying to cram in as much Star Wars as possible before the film series is put on hiatus. Even so, the tension and bond between Ridley’s and Driver’s characters have been elegantly fleshed out from The Last Jedi, and gives the film a surprisingly intimate core, even when its final act gets positively Wagnerian. A lightsaber duel between the two on the halfsunken Death Star is one of the series’ purest and best: an emotionally charged battle of wills, rather than an elaborately choreographed flurry of swipes and swoops.
The Rise of Skywalker completes a saga no one sane screenwriter would have dreamt up from scratch, but does so with such pluck and showmanship that the result feels strangely precious: a busked epic whose every individual move comes straight from the heart.