Life Log

You know you're in a bad headspace when you find yourself wanting to have opinions on Star Wars again. Since I happen to have reached that point, I decided, on a whim, to actually watch this movie for the first time; because surprisingly enough I've never actually touched it since it came out! I watched The Rise of Skywalker once it hit theatres without having watched its prequel, if you can imagine. I also happened to watch this movie on its own without either watching the aforementioned or even The Force Awakens, so all I'm about to say is resting a bit shakily on my fuzzy memory of what happens both within the Sequel Trilogy, and the Star Wars movie canon as a whole.

My only impression of this movie going in was the memory of the fandom tearing itself apart over it, so I had the low expectations that anticipated a lot of genuinely left-field, poorly-considered, outrageous writing that would have me wondering in hindsight how anyone could direct such a movie and get away with it. Things on the same level as "Somehow, Palpatine returned. And Rey happens to be his granddaughter" you know? So I was both surprised and unsurprised to find out that the movie was... fine! Surprised because TROS left my sequel trilogy expectations in the gutter, unsurprised because I should probably be used to the fact that Star Wars fans like to bitch and whine about anything and everything.

Obviously, the movie isn't high cinema. It has the Disney/Marvel prints all over it, especially when it comes to the excess of quippy humour, and it's very much a sequel to a multi-million dollar media IP that lives on how much the fanbase is willing to pay for the next one. But it nonetheless had a lot of compelling elements strung together during its runtime, delivered some very engaging stretches of action and tension, and definitely left me with a lot to chew on after it was over.

I think this movie was consistently at its strongest when it focused on the Resistance. There's already a powerful draw, here, with the rebels' anxiety from being on the losing end of attrition warfare -- they're out of ships, their numbers are going down drastically, and the First Order has them surrounded -- which makes a lot of what's going on among the characters within feel more vivid and urgent. The emphasis from the stress of being backed into a corner made the characters' competing ideas on how to save themselves and/or find victory all the more engaging. I'd seen criticism of Poe Dameron's more reckless, trigger-happy characterization in the movie, and maybe if I gave TFA a rewatch I might feel similarly; as of now, however, I honestly feel very sympathetic to his desperation, to his response to dwindling hope being to try and take as big of a chunk out of the opposing side as he can. I also enjoyed his foils in both Leia and Holdo, who both respect his enthusiasm because of their own dedication to the cause, but who are more focused on the Resistance living to fight another day. Some decent character work going on!

Even better was how the story took the time to expand and diversify the stakes of fighting this war. I found Rose Tico to be an incredibly welcome and refreshing character: through her we get to feel that it isn't simply about survival or victory, but about lasting safety and justice within their worlds. The war is funded and persists through the oppression and exploitation of unlucky people like her, who happened to live on resource-abundant worlds that would be used to line pockets and build weapons. It's not especially radical, obviously, since this is Star Wars we're talking about, but it was still nice to see a more tangible consequence to the First Order's evil beyond their vaguely Nazi-ish imagery and impressive capacity to blow up planets: we get a lot more of the social and personal, here.

The less good parts, I have to admit, were all the moments relevant to the Force, the Jedi, the Skywalker-legacy-- which I realize is funny of me to say, seeing as that that storyline is the franchise's bread and butter! And this is definitely an incredibly subjective opinion, but I do kind of get bored of the sort of... moral spiritualism that comes around whenever the characters start talking anything Force-related. Maybe I'm too much of a sober atheist for that sort of thing. It's not even that appealing to me philosophically, either, because there's just way too much to unpack from the notion of a binary between "light" and "dark" space magic that doesn't agree with my brain.

Doesn't help that all that is also attached to Kylo Ren, who is pretty boring to me as far as villains go. He's uncharismatic, he's too whiny for me to forgive, and I am not compelled by his backstory when put in contrast to the much more pressing stakes facing the characters involved in the Resistance, and the whole intrigue of him is the same Skywalker family drama that I'm just bored of. It's sad that they ended up roping Rey into it all, too, because I really want to like her, but nothing about her really sticks.

The whole throughline of letting the past die would've been compelling if I didn't live in a world where The Rise of Skywalker exists, so every time they brought it up I couldn't help but feel both disappointed and amused because I knew they absolutely were never going to follow through with any of that, lmfao. Which is a shame, because it was by far the most interesting parts of every time I had to suffer through Force mumbo jumbo. My ear perked when Luke said that the Jedi don't have a monopoly on the Force, and I leaned closer to my screen when ghost Yoda burned the old texts, but again: nothing happening with any of that.

Oh, right, and Snoke was in this movie. I was going to mention him alongside Kylo but forgot, which goes to show how little presence he had as a villain. Dollar store Palpatine. If he had even slightly more of an interesting relationship with Kylo, it might have saved the guy ('s writing).

All-in-all, this movie was a fun distraction from the Bad Brain Stuff that's been going on with me as of late, so I enjoyed it especially for that. It also got me interested in rewatching the Original Trilogy, because I'd like to experience it again with fresh eyes, and with more of a Leia-focus: I got interested in her successive responsibilities as leader of a rebellion against a fascist empire, and would like to build a better mental profile of her character. I also finally want to watch both Rogue One and Andor, because I hear those SW properties tend to focus on the elements of this series that I'm most interested in nowadays.