Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker ** (2019, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver) – Movie Review

J J Abrams’s Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019) brings the 40-year saga to a lame and limping end in the final chapter. It feels reheated and lukewarm.

In the movies, nobody is ever really dead but in the real life people die. It’s a horrible problem that the late Carrie Fisher’s role is central to the story, and re-animating her appearances is at best uncomfortable and desperately sad. It doesn’t feel respectful, as it was no doubt meant to be, just exploitative, like Paul Walker’s recreated scenes in Fast & Furious 7 (2015). They don’t seem to have enough archive footage or skill to create a satisfactory star role for Carrie Fisher out of nothing. Well, nothing comes of nothing, and is never could.

But then again, in the movies, nobody is ever really dead, and the two surviving Star Wars stars, though actually alive, are playing characters elaborately killed off in the previous episodes, but now resurrected for ghostly, and fairly ghastly, cameos, spouting nonsense, Mark Hamill to Daisy Ridley, and Harrison Ford to Adam Driver. However, another ‘dead’ character Emperor Palpatine, is also resurrected as the main ghostly villain, giving Ian McDiarmid a great opportunity, which he eagerly grabs. It is one of the two hit turns of the show.

The other hit turn is Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, who manages to bring a lot of power and brio to his bad gut role, though even he is defeated by the ridiculous final turns of the plot.

Daisy Ridley on the other hand has way too much to do as the heroine/ hero Rey, and she shows no rapport with her co-stars Oscar Isaac, John Boyega and Naomi Ackie, all of whom are under-employed and a bit spare. You know a film is in trouble if Oscar Isaac and Richard E Grant can’t make their roles work. Oscar Isaac would be up for some funny lines and witty banter, but all he gets is lame dialogue. The film has no sense of fun or of funny. Grant plays the second main villain, the sneering, snarling General Pryde. The way he plays him it seems like Gay Pryde, but not in a good way. It is one-note naff.

[Spoiler alert] On the other hand he is so much better than Domhnall Gleeson, continuing h’s appalling performance as General Hux. However, we are in for a major treat. He turns coat and helps the good guys: ‘I’m the spy.’ But General Pryde is too good for him, or too bad that is, and just wastes him in a very happy shock moment.

It is disappointing that Kelly Marie Tran’s bantering Rose Tico role is peripheralised, and Billy Dee Williams has nothing much to do except be there as Lando Calrissian. So both of them are wasted really.

The film rambles on from one scene to another, over a draggy, way extended 142 minutes, in the most random of ways, with no seeming plot you can discern, heading for its idiotic climax and finally the sunset. Did I mention this is one of this Christmas week’s two CGI nightmares, along with Cats? they continually over-egg the pudding visually, just because they can. And more is just less. The human scale is lost. We have to believe that Daisy Ridley’s Rey could actually do this stuff (suspension of disbelief and all that), but the super-human CGI ensures we can’t. Then it’s just a posh English actress doing acting.

[Spoiler alert] J J Abrams calls Rey and Kylo Ren’s big Rise of Skywalker moment a ‘Brother-Sister thing’. But this scene drew derisive laughter and even boos from the audience in the cinema. And so Stars Wars ends in the most unsatisfactory sort of way. But how could it be otherwise? Stars Wars was basically played out after the first three films. Six more have dragged it on and got it nowhere except super-rich. As with Harry Potter, it is great just to have it finally over, and maybe we can go on to something else. J K Rowling, however, did manage coherent and compelling plotting through her seven Harry Potter stories and eight films. Nobody could say this of the nine Star Wars movies.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com