Star Wars Episode IX is… Not a Complete Disappointment?

“Take it or leave it.”

Happy late Easter! Or, for a more secular approach, happy Animal Crossing Bunny Day. I like Animal Crossing a lot, and I like the fact that the game takes a “play at your own pace” approach to things. Hell, the game even encourages you to take breaks and not binge it, with the most obvious tactic being that time in the game-world follows the same time in the real world, meaning that if Tom Nook says “check back tomorrow,” he means the real tomorrow. Unless you time travel, anyway. Then nothing matters and you can go anywhen you want.

I like this flow of time, personally, and don’t mind waiting for things to happen and the seasons to change in the game just like they do in real life. And it makes holidays in the game extra special, too, in the same way that holidays in real life are special; they only happy once a year. Bunny Day, the vaguely Easter-themed Animal Crossing holiday, is one of these, and this year is happened just this last Sunday, the same day as real Easter. And that was cool, and I liked it. What I did not like was how many fucking wood eggs I had collected over the week prior. And what I also did not like is the horseshit prize at the end of the digital “egg hunt.” That zipper guy can fuck right off.

But no matter. Both holidays, real and fake, tactile and virtual, religious and EGG, are now over, and it’s back to business-as-usual. Doing everything from home until the virus decides we can go outside again. And for me, that means making maps, reading papers about Shakespeare, working out and half-listening to a zoom discussion, and of course, writing these goofy-ass blog posts. I happened to do almost all of those things this weekend, including writing a blog post. Wow! How would anyone have ever guessed that I wrote a blog post about writing a blog post that they’re reading right now? It’s this kind of circular logic that gets me the big bucks.

I’ve been meaning on doing this blog for a while. Since about February, actually. But I kept getting distracted by horoscopes, or I ran out of time, or I went to New Orleans, or something else came up that became more pressing issue than a blog post about why I think the new Star Wars movie is mostly dumb. But hey, at least now that it’s taken me so long and it’s been almost five months since the movie released, I can talk about the plot without worrying about spoiling it for anyone, huh? Oh, yeah, I guess that’s a thing I forgot last time: Spoiler Warning.

For some reference, way back in December of 2019, I wrote a little post about why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a dumb movie that did absolutely nothing for the series as a whole, with the exception of introducing Rose. The point of that entire article boiled down to “none of the interesting stuff went anywhere and everything was predictable and I hope the next movie isn’t the same tripe but it probably will be.” And you know what? Now that I’ve seen episode 9, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, I know that my predictions were pretty accurate. It was predictable, it was oversimplified, and it was the same tripe; almost. But it wasn’t a complete disappointment.

I’ll start with the good things before I begin my dismantling of J.J. Abrams’s entire career. As I said before, I knew I’d go see the movie, and I knew I’d like it. And I did; I did enjoy the movie as a blockbuster action flick, which it is. The scenes were great, the visuals were impressive, the acting was top-notch across the board (the disappearance of the love isn’t your fault, Daisy Ridley), the sounds were everything I wanted out of a John Williams score, and most importantly, it kept me entertained for its two-plus-hour runtime. It’s a fun movie, and I enjoyed it markedly more than The Last Jedi primarily because it didn’t feel so waterlogged with underutilized trash. I still postulate that you could have condensed the entire new trilogy down into a single movie, but that’s beside the point.

Some other things I liked about it: there were a ton of callbacks to other Star Wars movies. That kind of fan service, as ultimately detrimental as it can be, still makes me excited when I can pick it out in a movie. For example, during that scene where Rey hears all the voices of the previous Jedi, I’m pretty damn sure you can hear Mace Windu among all those voices. And sure, it makes sense, Mace Windu was a Jedi that appeared in the prequels, but it still made me smile to think of Samuel L. Jackson’s ghost calling Rey a motherfucker. Hearing Yoda and Qui-Gon was pretty cool too, though.

And there’s that callback to the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise in the beginning of the movie. I actually thought that was a pretty neat thing to include, since it’s both fan service and a convenient way to explain Palpatine’s resurrection. Near the start of the film, Palpatine says something about how the force can grant powers “that many would consider unnatural,” which is almost word for word a line from the prequels where Palpatine talks about his old master, a Sith who could reverse death. I think that inclusion points pretty clearly to Palpatine also being able to influence life the way Darth Plagueis did, which is how he comes back to life at all. And honestly, I think that throwaway line is actually a pretty clever way of “fixing” the glaring deus ex machina that is Palpatine’s presence in the movie.

But that kind of goes along with my biggest problem in the film, besides its predictability; it threw away so many good possibilities just so that the ending could mirror the end of episode 6. It’s basically the same movie after Rey and Kylo get to Exegol, the planet where Palpatine inexplicably has thousands of ships and countless followers that no one knew about before.

Think about this: Rose Tico, a strong character with a dynamic, interesting personality who is also played by an Asian-American actress, who had such an important role in episode 8, gets sidelined in this movie and shows up for about eight seconds, total. She could have easily filled in for Finn or Poe, or could have joined the team outright and fought with them across the galaxy. And Snoke, who was built up for a movie-and-a-half to be the “new” Palpatine, is trashed as some GMO puppet that the Emperor grew on his body farm back in Sith-world. I still stand by the fact that I want a Snoke backstory movie about how he lived in the outerworlds through all six of the previous Star Wars movies and then took over the fallen empire through sheer force of will and force powers that he taught himself. At least, that was the official backstory until it was revealed that he was just a clone.

Just like episode 8, The Rise of Skywalker is full of stuff like this, just less embarrassingly so. A few other examples: the Jedi hunter that killed Rey’s parents. How Rey’s parents, the children of fucking Palpatine, hid for so long. That weird platonic kiss between Rey and Kylo. The Knights of Ren. Those engineer-scrapper-people that live in the shadow of the crashed Death Star. Lando Calrissian. And probably some other stuff that I can’t remember. Because maybe the most damning comment I can make about the movie is this; it’s forgettable.

It does nothing original whatsoever. The entire sequel trilogy exists because it can ride off the coattails of the original movies from the 70’s and 80’s. And to be fair, those movies weren’t exactly original, either. Everything in them, from space wizards to planet-killing spaceships, had been done before in other space operas and sci-fi novels. What makes the originals special is the cultural touchstone they became, the fact that they brought the campy space story to the popular eye, and the genuine humanity that they seem to have. People care about the originals because you know that the people who made them cared, and it shows. These new ones, not so much.

I genuinely believe that if the sequel trilogy existed in a world without any previous Star Wars media, they’d probably be as successful as the original trilogy. But they don’t exist in that world. You can’t just keep putting out the same thing over and over again and expect people to have the same affection for it. At some point you have to try something new, take the story in a new direction. Instead of having Rey and Kylo fight each other, then fight Palpatine, then have Kylo sacrifice himself for Rey, as actually happens, spice it up. Cut Palpatine entirely. Have Rey join Kylo. Develop Kylo into the interesting villain he is. Have a massive Jedi force ghost battle. Make Rey go back in time. Something, anything would probably be more interesting than what we actually got. Or at least more memorable.

And there were chances of that; it’s no surprise that The Rise of Skywalker went through a ton of edits before we finally came to what we have now, but what makes this different is that we know what those edits entailed, because one of the original scripts was leaked. We know that one of the the original versions had no Palpatine, more Rose, more force ghosts, more interesting battles, and the reveal that Kylo Ren killed Rey’s parents. Alright, that last part isn’t that great, but it’s something! It’s better than what we got!

I don’t know. I still watched the movie. I don’t regret watching it. Disney still has all the money in the world. So maybe I’m part of the problem, continuing to consume this media that leaves me feeling hollow and unfulfilled. Because here’s the bottom line; ultimately, I enjoyed it as a movie, yes, but not as a story. It’s flashy and loud but lacks the character that the original trilogy had, and simultaneously lacks any sort of originality to make up for it. It isn’t daring. It isn’t particularly interesting. It just kind of… is. And considering that Disney has a whole fucking expanded universe to play with, that’s a damn shame.

It doesn’t really matter anyway. This post is late and everyone else has already done it. No one seemed too thrilled with episode 9, so I’m definitely not alone in that. At least in the last post I made about Star Wars, I tried to offer some hope, but here I don’t have much of anything. Just a kind of gassy fart of words to serve as a followup that I felt compelled to write, just to say that I did. Maybe it’s closure for me, to put these mostly disappointing movies away where I don’t have to think about them too hard anymore. I don’t know. It could have been better. It should have been different. Hopefully, since it didn’t do very well at the box office, Disney will take the hint. Try something new.

At the very least, we did get the first explicitly LGBT+ interaction in Star Wars history, so it wasn’t a complete loss. But then again, it wasn’t Finn and Poe either, so nothing really matters. Happy Bunny Day!