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***Spoiler-free review, but if you want to remain pure of mind entirely, you should perhaps stay off the Internet for the next few days***
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is objectively a good Star Wars film. If you’re a Star Wars fan who’s not Extremely Online, that’s pretty much all that you need to know. If, however, you are part of social media and fandom and the general Discourse Experience—hang on, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
The foremost thing I felt emerging from The Rise of Skywalker was a need to catch my breath. The movie moves at breakneck speed, which is impressive considering its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. This film never sits still: our heroes—and villains—are always moving, always on the edge of a catastrophe, always talking fast enough to render finer plot-points incomprehensible, always saved at the last second by some twist or another. There’s nary a pause or a dull moment, and the first half is dizzying, motion and exposition-filled, as you struggle to remember what the mission was before everyone is fleeing the scene again.
This can become tiresome—it’s difficult to feel that the stakes are ever real when we can almost certainly expect someone to save the day and someone else to provide a hard-to-find object or discover an impossible solution at an improbable moment. This is an effective way to keep you on the edge of your seat, but it did make me wish that the audience and the characters got a bit more room to breathe. Even so, the sense of being on constantly uneven ground is exciting.
Such a quick pace is necessary to fit in so much activity, and there is a lot of activity. There are giant set pieces, far-flung planets and hidden worlds, markets and cantinas and the inside of many a rustbucket ship. There are a lot of colorful alien races rendered through top-notch effects and makeup. There are a lot of haphazardly drawn plans and fuzzy goals. At heart, I feel as though the movie also owes a debt to another famed Harrison Ford series—it tips its hat to Indiana Jones, even if a central quest to uncover an object that leads to other objects is just so much filler to move our players around on the board.
Ultimately, the plotting or plausibility of the set-ups don’t matter much because we’re not here for seamless linear progression or logical thinking in our space opera, we’re here for the characters we’ve long loved and those we’ve come to know in the new trilogy. And on character moments, this movie delivers, for both good and ill.
There’s a lot of fan service for longterm and long-invested Star Wars fans (significant swathes of what happens would be head-scratching to the uninitiated). Fans of new heroes Rey, Finn, and Poe (played by a stalwart Daisy Ridley, an earnest John Boyega, and a charismatic Oscar Isaac) will be thrilled to know the golden trio finally spends a lot of time together. They were all split up in The Last Jedi, and they’re much stronger as a unit; it’s a lovely, tight-knit team, not without its internal frictions.
There’s also a lot to do here for Adam Driver’s very tall and very broody bad guy Kylo Ren; the movie is divided more between hero/villain perspectives than we’re used to seeing in Star Wars. And of course, there’s precious moments to pass with the late Carrie Fisher’s General Leia Organa. Fisher’s death, and the subsequent need to use previously shot footage and sleight-of-hand to include Leia, no doubt shaped the direction of this story. She’s given a rightful and respectful place of honor.
While being as vague as possible about specifics, Rey, Finn, Poe, and their droid pals are looking for something important, while Kylo Ren is seeking to stop them, greater machinations lurk in the shadows, and friends old and new join the fight. I’m not sure what else I can say about what propels everyone forward without spoiling a good deal, so I’m not going to try.
My biggest problems with The Last Jedi were the dragging side-plots that didn’t seem to add much to the narrative, and a sense that some characters were “out of character.” My biggest problem with The Force Awakens was that it felt as though someone was going through a “How to make a Star Wars movie” checklist and crossing out each scenario one by one. The Rise of Skywalker feels more assured and inspired, and now the characters have earned enough screentime to make us care about them.
I’m an ardent Star Wars fan, but I never felt the emotional connection to the new guard that has so resonated with some of my friends. That being said, this is probably my favorite movie of the trilogy. It has a lot of fun while also pulling relentlessly at heartstrings and turning on the waterworks. I cried in the second half and meant it. It’s hard not to feel like this movie is a poignant goodbye to a milieu so many different generations of us grew up immersed in, even if everything is staged to the max to evoke said poignancy.
In terms of the various Discourse debates that will seize the Internet, there are likely going to be a lot, especially in TROS’s choices regarding romance, people of color, families, good and bad guys, and sexuality (after teasing that we have to wait and see for representation, there is indeed a minor blink-and-you-miss-it queer moment, which seems to be what we’re supposed to settle for these days and be glad of the scraps).
If this weren’t a plot-spoiler-free review, there are a thousand points and decisions I’d like to nitpick, take issue with, and argue about, but this isn’t the space for it. So stepping back to look at the movie as a whole, I can say that it’s a satisfying experience—sometimes surprising, but all the more interesting when it isn’t trying too hard to surprise and just lets the characters be themselves and discover new facets of who they can be.
J.J. Abrams directed both TFA and TROS, so it tracks that those movies feel more alike than Rian Johnson’s middle-child TLJ, but it seems as though Abrams has gone out of his way to undo many of Johnson’s decisive plot decisions and characterizations. Where Johnson lay stitches, Abrams has ripped them out. The Rise of Skywalker essentially starts with a blank slate, which is sure to thrill Last Jedi haters, except for how much of the action hinges on Rey, who is a girl, so there may still be some people taking issue with that. I love the idea of a new generation growing up with a woman as their foremost Force-wielding hero, and another woman as the Resistance’s capable and adored leader.
Some of the bigger twists in the film will have long been predicted if you pay attention to these sorts of predictions, and I have problems with several of them that I will no doubt be unpacking in future pieces. In short, though I do not agree with quite a few of Abrams’ choices, I can also see why they were made.
But I’m not deep in the current Star Wars fandom, and without a real horse in this race, I had an excellent time watching The Rise of Skywalker. (Those with horses in the race for a particular character or ship may be considerably less enthusiastic.) It ticks all the boxes for Star Wars, and it wraps most things up that it needs to, even if the paths it takes there will feel rocky and questionable to some viewers. It’s also hard to believe that we’ve reached the end of the line, and with the advent of Disney+, who knows if we really have?
I think it will take a few more days and maybe even a few more viewings to fully process how I feel about this concluding chapter. There’s still room for many further stories to be told in this particular galaxy; if Rise of Skywalker has a message beyond “we’re stronger together,” it’s that nothing lost must remain that way for long.
(image: Disney/Lucasfilm)
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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
***Spoiler-free review, but if you want to remain pure of mind entirely, you should perhaps stay off the Internet for the next few days***
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is objectively a good Star Wars film. If you’re a Star Wars fan who’s not Extremely Online, that’s pretty much all that you need to know. If, however, you are part of social media and fandom and the general Discourse Experience—hang on, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
The foremost thing I felt emerging from The Rise of Skywalker was a need to catch my breath. The movie moves at breakneck speed, which is impressive considering its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. This film never sits still: our heroes—and villains—are always moving, always on the edge of a catastrophe, always talking fast enough to render finer plot-points incomprehensible, always saved at the last second by some twist or another. There’s nary a pause or a dull moment, and the first half is dizzying, motion and exposition-filled, as you struggle to remember what the mission was before everyone is fleeing the scene again.
This can become tiresome—it’s difficult to feel that the stakes are ever real when we can almost certainly expect someone to save the day and someone else to provide a hard-to-find object or discover an impossible solution at an improbable moment. This is an effective way to keep you on the edge of your seat, but it did make me wish that the audience and the characters got a bit more room to breathe. Even so, the sense of being on constantly uneven ground is exciting.
Such a quick pace is necessary to fit in so much activity, and there is a lot of activity. There are giant set pieces, far-flung planets and hidden worlds, markets and cantinas and the inside of many a rustbucket ship. There are a lot of colorful alien races rendered through top-notch effects and makeup. There are a lot of haphazardly drawn plans and fuzzy goals. At heart, I feel as though the movie also owes a debt to another famed Harrison Ford series—it tips its hat to Indiana Jones, even if a central quest to uncover an object that leads to other objects is just so much filler to move our players around on the board.
Ultimately, the plotting or plausibility of the set-ups don’t matter much because we’re not here for seamless linear progression or logical thinking in our space opera, we’re here for the characters we’ve long loved and those we’ve come to know in the new trilogy. And on character moments, this movie delivers, for both good and ill.
There’s a lot of fan service for longterm and long-invested Star Wars fans (significant swathes of what happens would be head-scratching to the uninitiated). Fans of new heroes Rey, Finn, and Poe (played by a stalwart Daisy Ridley, an earnest John Boyega, and a charismatic Oscar Isaac) will be thrilled to know the golden trio finally spends a lot of time together. They were all split up in The Last Jedi, and they’re much stronger as a unit; it’s a lovely, tight-knit team, not without its internal frictions.
There’s also a lot to do here for Adam Driver’s very tall and very broody bad guy Kylo Ren; the movie is divided more between hero/villain perspectives than we’re used to seeing in Star Wars. And of course, there’s precious moments to pass with the late Carrie Fisher’s General Leia Organa. Fisher’s death, and the subsequent need to use previously shot footage and sleight-of-hand to include Leia, no doubt shaped the direction of this story. She’s given a rightful and respectful place of honor.
While being as vague as possible about specifics, Rey, Finn, Poe, and their droid pals are looking for something important, while Kylo Ren is seeking to stop them, greater machinations lurk in the shadows, and friends old and new join the fight. I’m not sure what else I can say about what propels everyone forward without spoiling a good deal, so I’m not going to try.
My biggest problems with The Last Jedi were the dragging side-plots that didn’t seem to add much to the narrative, and a sense that some characters were “out of character.” My biggest problem with The Force Awakens was that it felt as though someone was going through a “How to make a Star Wars movie” checklist and crossing out each scenario one by one. The Rise of Skywalker feels more assured and inspired, and now the characters have earned enough screentime to make us care about them.
I’m an ardent Star Wars fan, but I never felt the emotional connection to the new guard that has so resonated with some of my friends. That being said, this is probably my favorite movie of the trilogy. It has a lot of fun while also pulling relentlessly at heartstrings and turning on the waterworks. I cried in the second half and meant it. It’s hard not to feel like this movie is a poignant goodbye to a milieu so many different generations of us grew up immersed in, even if everything is staged to the max to evoke said poignancy.
In terms of the various Discourse debates that will seize the Internet, there are likely going to be a lot, especially in TROS’s choices regarding romance, people of color, families, good and bad guys, and sexuality (after teasing that we have to wait and see for representation, there is indeed a minor blink-and-you-miss-it queer moment, which seems to be what we’re supposed to settle for these days and be glad of the scraps).
If this weren’t a plot-spoiler-free review, there are a thousand points and decisions I’d like to nitpick, take issue with, and argue about, but this isn’t the space for it. So stepping back to look at the movie as a whole, I can say that it’s a satisfying experience—sometimes surprising, but all the more interesting when it isn’t trying too hard to surprise and just lets the characters be themselves and discover new facets of who they can be.
J.J. Abrams directed both TFA and TROS, so it tracks that those movies feel more alike than Rian Johnson’s middle-child TLJ, but it seems as though Abrams has gone out of his way to undo many of Johnson’s decisive plot decisions and characterizations. Where Johnson lay stitches, Abrams has ripped them out. The Rise of Skywalker essentially starts with a blank slate, which is sure to thrill Last Jedi haters, except for how much of the action hinges on Rey, who is a girl, so there may still be some people taking issue with that. I love the idea of a new generation growing up with a woman as their foremost Force-wielding hero, and another woman as the Resistance’s capable and adored leader.
Some of the bigger twists in the film will have long been predicted if you pay attention to these sorts of predictions, and I have problems with several of them that I will no doubt be unpacking in future pieces. In short, though I do not agree with quite a few of Abrams’ choices, I can also see why they were made.
But I’m not deep in the current Star Wars fandom, and without a real horse in this race, I had an excellent time watching The Rise of Skywalker. (Those with horses in the race for a particular character or ship may be considerably less enthusiastic.) It ticks all the boxes for Star Wars, and it wraps most things up that it needs to, even if the paths it takes there will feel rocky and questionable to some viewers. It’s also hard to believe that we’ve reached the end of the line, and with the advent of Disney+, who knows if we really have?
I think it will take a few more days and maybe even a few more viewings to fully process how I feel about this concluding chapter. There’s still room for many further stories to be told in this particular galaxy; if Rise of Skywalker has a message beyond “we’re stronger together,” it’s that nothing lost must remain that way for long.
(image: Disney/Lucasfilm)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
Source: Earl Gibson III / Getty
Y’all ready to do it again? It seems that the hit television series, “The Game,” which fans once lobbied to get back on tv is coming back for its third go ‘round.
According to Deadline, the series is returning to the network where it originally debuted, The CW. The network is reportedly developing a revival of the series, this time in a one-hour format. Mara Brock Akil, the show’s creator, will write alongside “American Soul” creator Devon Greggory.
This revival will take place on the East Coast, in Baltimore to be exact. According to Deadline, the premise of the new iteration is as follows: “ This time, our out-of-touch old-timers are determined to help a bunch of knuckle-head new-schoolers navigate the ruthless game of football on and off the field. They will clash through the pitfalls of fame, fortune and love. Some will win, others will lose, but that’s what happens when you play The Game.”
Greggory will serve as showrunner and executive producer with original executive producers Mara Brock and Salim Akil and Kelsey Grammer, who was the man behind getting the show “Girlfriends,” The Game’s prequel on television.
“The Game” was originally canceled on the CW after the network shifted away from 30-minute comedies. It was eventually picked up by BET where it ran for six more seasons. Many fans will tell you that the show lost some of its essence with the change of network and behind-the-scenes personnel.
It could work. What do you think about “The Game” coming back?
Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the season one finale of Watchmen.
Watchmen had a lot off proverbial eggs to juggle in its finale. It needed to resolve multiple “vast and insidious” conspiracies in a way that also connected every major character. It had to conclude numerous plotl ines while offering emotionally fulfilling conclusions to its more personal stories. And it needed to pull all that off under the incredible weight of its own expectations and standards. The show’s first eight episodes were television at its best. The writing and acting were both sublime. Its story, full of mysteries and flashbacks, was wild, surreal, and at times totally crazy, yet it was still accessible and heartbreaking. Considering this, calling the finale “only good,” which it was, may feel like an insult. On the whole it just didn’t reach the same transcendent level as the rest of the season. But two amazing scenes did.
A major pitfall to offering so many intriguing elements on a show full of mysteries is that they all start to feel equally important. That builds expectations, fair or not, for what role they will play in a story’s endgame. Ultimately, not everything that seemed vital on Watchmen ended up mattering in the end, which did feel like a letdown.
HBO
Cyclops’ mesmerism technology, which Will used to make Judd Crawford kill himself, didn’t end up proving otherwise important. Despite Will’s decades-long fight against the white nationalist organization, there was no poetic justice to their demise. They were unknowingly used by an impossibly brilliant woman, but she quickly disintegrated them once they were defeated. There was no larger payback using their own awful methods, and their scores of followers were essentially let off the hook, because there was no great white reckoning.
The gigantic Millennium Clock also ended up feeling like a red herring. Lady Trieu’s massive and mysterious structure, the one that literally loomed so large all season, was really just a big battery. All it did was power up her much smaller Manhattan-draining machine. The show did a good job combining Trieu’s plan with the Seventh Kavalry’s in a way that made sense and logically brought everyone together, but it ended up feeling much smaller in scope than what the show seemed to be building towards.
HBO
As did Lady Trieu herself. She wasn’t quite as interesting in the end as she was before we knew what she truly wanted. The series did a superb job showing how Vietnam was Dr. Manhattan’s greatest victim. And it gave us a shadowy figure named for a real-life warrior hero who fought for Vietnamese independence. Yet Lady Trieu’s plan wasn’t really about revenge, which would have made her story more personal. Her goal ended up being a classic case of someone craving power. Lady Trieu might have hated Dr. Manhattan, but her attempts to destroy him weren’t really about Vietnam. She just thought she’d be a better god than he was. She ended up feeling more like a stereotypical comic book stock character and less like the dynamic figure she had been previously.
Her demise at the hands of her father also contributed to an oversized role for Adrian Veidt. He was a huge part of this episode, and that came at the expense of two other characters who were more important figures during the season. Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman felt like minor secondary figures to a man who spent the entire season in an intergalactic Looney Tunes subplot. Jeremy Irons was brilliant again, but there was too much Ozymandias in the finale. And even if he’s finally going to answer for his squid, him getting a chance to legitimately save mankind first seems like too good a fate for him.
HBO
But these complaints are all relative to the show’s previous excellence, which created an incredibly high threshold to live up to. The Millennium Clock ended up being a Millennium Ball, but it was still a cool plan to kill Dr. Manhattan. And all that time on Europa with Ozymandias did matter in ways that made sense both plot-wise and thematically. This was a good finale that featured outstanding acting, logical conclusions, and some beautiful cinematography.
The most personal elements of the episode were also its best. The conclusion to Dr. Manhattan and Angela’s relationship was tragic and beautiful. He always knew being with her would lead to his death, but he didn’t care. It was worth it, and it might have left the world in a better place. And while he used his godly powers to send others away to safety, his human side made him keep Angela nearby. He didn’t want to die alone.
HBO
In his final moments, the man cursed to experience his entire life all at the same time finally got to enjoy that power. As his life truly flashed before his eyes, all he felt was love; all he saw was Angela. It was as powerful a moment as any during the season, which was no easy feat considering many there were.
Yet, somehow, just a few minutes later, it was matched by Angela and her grandfather’s scene in the theater, which rendered the emotional weight of 100 years of pain and fear and anger with quiet dignity. Will’s story ended where it began, and it came with a family that had been stolen from him long ago. Angela was finally able to open up and let herself feel all the emotions she had been covering up her whole life. Two superheroes took off their masks and let the other one see them for what they really were, good and bad.
HBO
Even if nothing else had worked in this episode, those two scenes with Angela would have made it a success. They were Watchmen at its absolute best, and a fitting and worthy end to what was a great season of television.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
Featured Image: HBO
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