(upbeat string music)
- Hey, Wisecrack-- Jared here, coming from
the self-isolating comforts of my own apartment.
And let me tell you, I got a bad feeling about
this… No, I’m not just talking about my
dwindling supplies of Top Ramen and Coffee.
But, well, this --
- I Have a bad feeling about this
- I got a bad feeling about this
- I got a bad feeling about this
- I’ve got a bad feeling about-
- K!
- Quiet!
- Yes, the time has finally come to delve
into the least controversial subject on the
internet
(Orchestral strings)
A little yarn called ‘Star Wars’.
When The Rise of Skywalker was set for release,
director JJ Abrams promised this final entry
in the saga would tie up everything that had
come before. Per the filmmaker: this wasn’t
just the end of a single movie or even a trilogy,
it was the end of an entire nine film saga.
It had to be the end of not just three movies,
but nine movies.
The question, of course: Could The Rise of
Skywalker possibly tie up every loose end
and story thread in a satisfying way? I mean
-- this is a gargantuan, seemingly impossible
task… and yet somehow, they did it!
After the film’s release, The Rise of Skywalker
was lauded as the best Star Wars film of all
time, and the internet came together in universal
celebration… Oh, wait. Sorry, I was imagining
an alternate timeline where going out to the
grocery store isn’t an episode of Black
Mirror. No, The Rise of Skywalker was, of
course, a colossal disappointment -- filled
with awkward exposition, plot-holes, and strange
retconning of its predecessors.
So what the hell happened? How did The Rise
of Skywalker fail so absolutely? Well, the
answer lies in the past. Ya know, that thing
the last film kinda-sorta tried to kill.
- Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
- Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on The
Rise of Skywalker: What Went Wrong? And, of
course, spoilers ahead for the whole Skywalker
Saga.
Alright let’s get into a quick recap. The
Rise of Skywalker begins with The Resistance
intercepting a message that Palpatine is somehow
not only alive & well, but amassing a fleet
of ships on the hidden planet Exegol. Our
heroes - Rey, Finn & Poe - go in search of
a wayfinder that will lead to the mysterious
planet. Meanwhile Kylo Ren (at the behest
of Palpatine) is tasked with killing Rey and
ending the Jedi once and for all. From there
-- you get your typical lightsaber duels,
chases, rescue missions, and cameos by beloved
characters
There’s even some new character revelations
and backstories: Kylo basically tells Rey
not to pay attention to anything that happened
in The Last Jedi.
- They were filthy junk traders. Sold you
off for drinking money.
- (sniffels)
- They’re dead. In a pauper’s grave in
the Jakku desert.
- Instead -- turns out Rey isn’t a “nobody,”
but actually--
- You don’t just have power. You have his
power. You’re his granddaughter.
- This is followed by some more lightsaber
duels, chases, and rescue missions interspersed
with a classic character heroically sacrificing
themselves.
The film culminates in an aerial battle between
The Resistance and The First Order, while
Rey faces off against Palpatine with the help
of bad-guy-gone-Light Kylo Ren. Rey kills
Palpatine, but in doing so dies… Of course,
10 seconds later, Kylo brings her back to
life, sacrificing himself in the process.
We end with Rey taking up the mantle of the
Skywalkers.
- Who are you?
- I’m Rey.
- Rey who?
- Rey Skywalker
- If all this sounds very familiar -- like
you’ve seen this same story play out before…
Well, that’s because you have. Oddly enough,
George Lucas spells it out…in a behind-the-scenes
featurette on the making of The Phantom Menace.
Lucas explains how Anakin is directly modeled
after Luke Skywalker.
- You see the echo of where it all is going
to go. Instead of destroying the Death Star,
he destroys the ship that controls the robots.
Again it’s like poetry, they sort of, they
rhyme.
- For Lucas -- the story of Star Wars was
all about how history is constantly repeating
itself. There are hundreds of ‘echoes’
in the prequels directly correlating to the
original trilogy: A young Anakin blows up
the Control Ship just as Luke will blow up
the Death Star. Both guys lose a hand in a
lightsaber duel. Obi Wan watches helplessly
as his mentor Qui-Gon Jinn is killed by Darth
Maul, mirroring Obi Wan’s own eventual demise
with Luke helplessly watching from the sidelines.
And it isn’t just these plot elements that
bridge the two series together. Even the visual
language of the prequels directly mirrors
the original trilogy…
To quote another sci-fi epic: All of this
has happened before, and all of this will
happen again..
- All this has happened before and all of
it will happen again.
- There’s one person who took Lucas’s
approach to heart: J.J. Abrams. In an interview
for The Force Awakens, Abrams stressed the
importance of repetition:
“Part of the story of this movie is history
repeats itself.”
But Abrams took Lucas’s approach one step
further, getting super meta. To the filmmaker,
it wasn’t just history that was repeating,
but the actual films themselves.
“[I wanted] to tell a story that was not
just history repeating itself, but a story
that embraced the movies that we know as the
actual history of this galaxy… This was
not about a nostalgia play. It felt, to me,
like a way of saying, 'Let’s go back to
a Star Wars that we know, so we can tell another
story.”
For Abrams, the fact that The Force Awakens
is pretty much a carbon copy of A New Hope
is in and of itself the point. For a pop culture
savant like Abrams, it’s not enough to merely
echo the events that came before. Instead,
he has to repeat them and copy the previous
trilogy wholesale. Thus Rey’s a stand in
for Luke, Kylo for Darth Vader, Poe for Han
Solo… Even the basic story is the same:
A group of rebels fight against a nefarious
imperialist army. Hell, there’s even a droid
with an important message that can turn the
tides of the war.
Now, Lucas and Abrams aren’t the first people
to claim history has a tendency to repeat
itself. This notion dates all the way back
to the dialectic badboy himself -- Georg Wilhelm
Hegel. In Hegel’s Lectures on The Philosophy
of History, the philosopher famously stated
that revolutionary acts always tend to occur
twice.
Per Hegel: “In all periods of the world,
a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s
opinions, when it repeats itself… By repetition
that which at first appeared merely a matter
of chance and contingency becomes a real and
ratified existence.”
As proof, Hegel cited the formation of the
Roman empire. See-- Caesar first led a revolution
to take over Rome, end the Republic, and become
its de facto Emperor. Many objected to Caesar’s
reign, though, leading to a second revolution,
in which he was assassinated. But in the aftermath,
this second revolution only reinforced the
idea that one single Emperor was needed to
rule, in effect cementing Caesar’s initial
revolution to destroy the republic. In a nutshell--
the revolution has to happen a second time
to make the first one work.
The latest trilogy of Star Wars films adopts
this same philosophy. In the original trilogy,
the rebels defeat Emperor Palpatine and the
Empire. But this revolution is short lived.
In the ashes of the Empire’s defeat, The
First Order rises to power -- thereby prompting
a second revolution. In The Rise of Skywalker,
Rey, Finn & Poe lead this second rebellion
to victory, finally cementing the Rebel’s
victory that came before. It’s pretty much
exactly as Hegel himself described-- the revolution
repeating twice in order to fully take effect.
Yet in channeling the spirit of Hegel, Abrams
has fallen into a kind of historical trap
set forth as an addendum to Hegel’s philosophy.
In 1852, philosopher Karl Marx stated that
history doesn’t quite repeat itself, instead
it parodies itself. As he writes: “Hegel
[stated] that all great world-historic facts
and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce.”
For Marx, when a revolution repeats itself,
it’s not the cement that reinforces the
original, but is instead a mockery of what
came before. Marx most famously applied this
criticism to Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of
Napoleon -- who, much like his uncle, led
a rebellion to seize France and become Emperor.
Louis even led his coup on the anniversary
of his uncle’s coronation as the Emperor
of France. Yet for Marx, Louis was nothing
but a “caricature of the old Napoleon,”
dressing up like his famous uncle, repeating
his same populist rhetoric, but betraying
Napoleon’s own principles.
For Marx, lil’ Louis “duplicates” the
cult of Napoleon in order to legitimize himself.
But without the values of his uncle, he became
nothing more than a hollow parody. History
had repeated, but merely as a farce of the
original.
Just like Napoleon 2.0 dressed up as his legendary
uncle without understanding what made him
a competent leader, Rise of Skywalker dresses
itself in the nostalgia of Star Wars without
understanding what made the original trilogy
great. Instead of crafting a new mythos, the
film borrows from what’s come before -- using
the exact same plot points, archetypes, and
even sets. But the end result becomes nothing
more than a parody of its predecessors.
For example, consider how The Rise of Skywalker
treats Rey’s flirtations with the Dark Side.
This is the same arc as Luke’s in the Return
of the Jedi. But in that film, Luke truly
did grapple with joining his father, at one
point even succumbing to his darker impulses.
Yet in The Rise of Skywalker, this arc is
never fully dramatized. Rey has a dark-vision,
does a little force lightning, and that’s
pretty much it. Palpatine tries to tempt Rey
into succumbing to her darker impulses, just
as he tempted Luke. But Rey barely flinches
from her morals. It’s all talk. The ‘arc’
exists simply for the sake of repetition.
It’s just as Marx said -- history repeats,
first as tragedy and then, well, as this--
- (scream)
- Even The Rise of Skywalker’s twists are
lifted from the original trilogy -- the Rey-Palpatine
granddaughter reveal is basically just a watered
down--
- I am your father
- But the Palpatine reveal lacks any of the
dramatic weight of its predecessor. In the
original trilogy, Luke believed his father
was a Jedi hero who was betrayed and murdered
by Darth Vader.
- A young Jedi named Darth Vader… who was
a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped
the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi
knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.
- Thus when the big Vader turn happens, it
shatters everything Luke believed to be true.
It undermined the foundation of his moral
compass. His father wasn’t a hero but the
villain who betrayed the Jedi, and killed
his surrogate father. Now let’s look at
Rey: Rey thinks her parents were junk traders
who abandoned her. So the reveal that Palpatine
is her grandfather doesn’t hold the same
emotional weight. It’s not like she wanted
to be a great Jedi to emulate her dead parents.
Also, Rey hasn’t even met Palpatine yet,
and knows nothing about him other than that
he’s a bad guy. And once she finds out Palpatine
is her grandfather, not much changes. He’s
still just a guy that needs to be defeated.
Her world hasn’t been shattered in the same
way that Luke’s was. If anything -- the
Palpatine twist is more a revelation for fans
as they recount all the great prequel memes
they’ve seen.
Rise of Skywalker is filled with these moments.
Like Louis dressing up like his uncle, the
film incessantly dresses itself up like the
originals, repeating word for word, shot for
shot, what happened in them - but without
any of the context that made these moments
work.
These moments only exist as hollow call-backs.
Any emotional or dramatic heft is entirely
dependent on the viewers relationship to the
original trilogy. Just look at how Rise of
Skywalker butchers Han Solo’s most famous
line--
- Dad…
- I know.
- This, of course, harkens back to one of
the most famous moments in Empire Strikes
Back.
- I love you!
- I know.
That simple exchange was the culmination of
Han and Leia’s tumultuous will-they-or-won’t-they
romantic relationship. The reason the line
has become a touchstone for the characters
and the series as a whole is because of the
build-up beforehand. The original films put
in the work with their relationship to make
this single line iconic. But in the Rise of
Skywalker, the line’s re-used just as a
reference for fans. It doesn’t have any
narrative value in the film except as a way
to remind viewers of a movie they feel nostalgic
for. Rise of Skywalker is built on references,
but it doesn’t take into account the hundreds
of moments beforehand that made these iconic
moments work: the relationships, the characters,
the world-building that were the foundation
to the original series success. And without
this footing, these references are just that
-- hollow and empty, a farce of the original
trilogy.
Rise of Skywalker becomes so obsessed with
harkening back that it even sacrifices logic
and its own characters’ motivations at the
behest of these ‘call backs.’
For one-- How the heck is Palpatine even alive?
Why bring him back as the villain in the first
place? Well, let’s take it from JJ Abrams--
- The more we talked about it, the more inevitable
it felt. That this character who was so important
in the first two trilogies, come back, in
some form.
- That’s the truth in a nutshell. Palpatine
is the villain only because he’s the villain
from the first six films. Does it make any
sense that the Emperor has somehow survived
being thrown down a reactor shaft, and blown
to smithereens in Return of the Jedi?… Ehh,
Rise of Skywalker doesn’t care.
- Somehow Palpatine returned.
(Sad music)
- Without any clear, logical reason for Palpatine’s
return, the character feels like a farce of
who he once was. Even Palpatine’s motivations
now don’t make a lick of sense. He sends
Kylo to kill Rey; yet when Rey shows up and
confronts him at the end of the film, Palpatine
changes his tune completely --
- I never wanted you dead, I wanted you here
- This, yet again, is a direct call-back to
the original trilogy where Palpatine tried
to convert Luke to the dark side.
- I’m looking forward to completing your
training. In time you will call me Master.
- Thus the only reason why Palpatine’s motivation
in Rise of Skywalker changes… is to mirror
his motivation in Return of the Jedi.
And Rise of Skywalker is littered with these
inconsistencies-- How does Palpatine suddenly
amass a fleet of ships, all equipped with
planet destroying weapons? It doesn’t matter
-- because Rise of Skywalker has to end with
an aerial space battle, just like Return of
the Jedi.
The Rise of Skywalker attempts to elevate
itself to the heights of the original films
by playing on their success, structure, and
nostalgia… But instead, the film becomes
nothing more than a sad copy of a copy. It’s
so obsessed with harkening backwards that
it never creates an identity of its own. History
has now become Star Wars' own undoing.
But what do you guys think? Are we being too
hard on the ninth Star Wars film, or is it
really just a bargain bin version of the Return
of the Jedi? Let us know what you think in
the comments. Please don’t yell at us. A
big thanks to all our patrons for supporting
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66 on that subscribe button, and as always,
thanks for watching. Peace.
