Review: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker
Henri Robbins | Online Editor
Rating: 6/10
I’ve always loved the Star Wars movies, ever since my dad showed them to me in the first grade. They were intriguing, enthralling, captivating, a window to a new world that I’d never seen before. They were unexpected, groundbreaking — they were like nothing I’d ever seen. The movies, comics, books, and games captured me for a large part of my youth. With that, the newest trilogy has felt like something of a betrayal of all of that. What started as a new, innovative series from an unknown director has become one of the largest corporate properties to ever exist, and with that, any chance of something groundbreaking or challenging has gone out the window, much more after the failed attempt of The Last Jedi to do so. I won’t get into that, but to put it simply, Episode 8 took good risks in a bad way, and made the new directors too scared to take their own risks. That’s where Rise of Skywalker failed. For the most part, it felt like a complete rehash of Return of the Jedi, simply with new characters and a bunch more unnecessary plot points. It takes the same plot of “Palpatine is trying to take over the galaxy, [protagonist] needs to stop him without succumbing to the Dark Side,” and just adds in a bit more plot complexity which does nothing but muddy the waters and add some visual spectacle. The characters, while well-written and likeable, feel poorly used. Many of them are thrown away or just feel like meaningless plot-pushers. The way that the plot progresses has countless holes, and while it tries to recreate the twists of the original trilogy, they all feel fairly expected and contrived. All in all, the plot was exactly what you would expect, in the most disappointing way. If you want to know how the story ends, I would recommend seeing it, but if you aren’t that invested then I don’t feel that it’s worth the time or money. Just watch the original trilogy instead.