“A Film Permanently On Fast-Forward”: The ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Reviews Are In
"The good news is 'The Rise of Skywalker' is the send-off the saga deserves."
Yesterday, after the film’s official premiere, first reactions to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker started to roll in. They weren’t very good. After years of anticipation, the final entry in the Skywalker saga has been met with a mix of hisses, boos, and titanic shrugs.
Since then, that initial blowback has been clarified in the form of reviews, most of them pretty negative — the film currently sits on 56% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it officially Rotten.
The first reviews are in for Star Wars: #TheRiseOfSkywalker – currently it's #Rotten at 56% on the #Tomatometer, with 117 reviews: https://t.co/e1WYY9r3jR pic.twitter.com/k0oL07kwOw
— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) December 18, 2019
And though no critic has gone so far as to call The Rise of Skywalker an utter disaster, most agree that it’s a disappointing mess that falls back on the past without giving any reason to care other than simple nostalgia.
Let’s dive in.
It’s A Mess
Early reactions were unanimous on one thing and one thing only: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is all over the place. For some, that chaos is part of the fun. For others, it is a roadblock on the path to truly getting on board with everything that director J.J. Abrams is trying to do.
Adi Robertson of The Verge notes that the film has a lot to do, and gets to it fast. “The resulting film is permanently on fast-forward, too busy ticking off boxes to let audiences revel in its world-shifting twists,” Robertson writes, noting that those revelations are rushed to the extent that they become nonsensical.
David Sims of The Atlantic is neither entirely on or off-board, though he notes that the film hamstrings itself by doing too much too fast. In fact, he calls it “an experience so convoluted and overstuffed that I wondered whether the whole cast would board a flying kitchen sink for the final battle.”
THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is a loud, manic mess of a movie that frantically tries to tie up every narrative thread it can find but totally loses sight of all its great characters in the process https://t.co/heixWXieRg
— David Sims (@davidlsims) December 18, 2019
Most of Sims’ criticism centres on Abrams’ breathless attempt to resuscitate Emperor Palpatine, a character very obviously and terminally dispatched in the original trilogy. “As The Rise of Skywalker strives to explain just how the emperor, who died with explosive finality in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, is involved in this new saga, it neglects to do any work to ground its story in a more compelling and modern context,” he writes.
More worrying still, Michael Rougeau of Gamespot reckons that the mad dash to explain away the reoccurrence of the Emperor doesn’t even make sense. “He has indeed returned,” Rougeau writes. “And — well, let’s just say you’re going to have a lot of questions when it’s over.”
Rise of Skywalker Plays Things Safe
The reviews aren’t all that bad. Steve Rose of The Guardian gives the film three stars, and notes that it has a sense of fun and lightness to it. The problem, however, is how closely it aligns with expectations. “The good news is The Rise of Skywalker is the send-off the saga deserves,” Rose writes.
“The bad news is, it is largely the send-off we expected. Of course there is epic action to savour and surprises and spoilers to spill, but given the long, long build-up, some of the saga’s big revelations and developments might be a little unsatisfying on reflection.”
Other critics see that predictability as part of the point. “It’s of a piece with the pointedly unambitious The Mandalorian, just good enough to get people’s attention but fundamentally terrified of rocking the boat,” writes Sam Adams of Slate.
“Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don’t feel much of anything at all.”
Ouch.