![]() ![]() ![]() So they have to travel to a renegade planet to find a black-market droid tech, who has to erase C-3PO’s memory. They find a dagger inscripted with the information they need - except that it’s written in the forbidden runes of the Sith, which C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) is programmed not to translate. It follows Rey and her team as they bop from one planet to the next, all in order to locate the wayfinder crystal that will lead them to Exogol, the hidden land of the Siths where Palpatine, bent on domination of the galaxy, has set up his stone-throned, dark-shadowed supervillain hell cave. The story, abetted by trademark John Williams music cues that always manage to drop in at the perfect moment, is a digressive but satisfyingly forward-hurtling MacGuffin that stays on course. Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams, in his first part in the series since “Return of the Jedi,” wrapping his velvet baritone around lines like “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”), plus one or two other returning icons you might not expect. Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher), still guiding the Resistance and mentoring Rey, and an older and wiser but feisty-as-ever Gen. It has the irresistible presence of old friends, like Gen. “The Rise of Skywalker” has rousingly edited battles, like the opening dogfight, with Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) trading quips as they race the Millennium Falcon back from an intel mission. That said, maybe there’s no escaping that the final entry of this series, coming 42 years after the original “Star Wars,” is - at best - going to be less a brilliant piece of stand-alone escapism than a kind of exquisitely executed self-referential package. It was like a pharmaceutical drug called Starzac. Abrams (the script is by Abrams and Chris Terrio), with much the same neo-classic-Lucas precision and crispness and verve that he brought to “The Force Awakens,” though in this case with less of the lockstep nostalgia that made that film such a direct clone of the first “Star Wars” that the thrill of going back to 1977 was mitigated by the fact that the entire thing had been transparently engineered to give you that feeling. It’s revealed in the opening 20 minutes.) If you look past its foibles, though, “The Rise of Skywalker” has been directed, by J.J. (Actual dialogue: “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” “Wait, do we believe this?” And no, that’s not a spoiler. Does it feature several dead characters coming all too conveniently back to life? Yes. At two hours and 28 minutes, is it too long? Yes. It’s a puckish and engrossing movie, fulsome but light on its rocket feet. (The very notion that “Star Wars” fans are a definable demographic is, in a way, outmoded.) What I can say is that “The Rise of Skywalker” is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (I mean that, but given the last eight films, the bar isn’t that high.) It’s the ninth and final chapter of the saga that Lucas started, and though it’s likely to be a record-shattering hit, I can’t predict for sure if “the fans” will embrace it. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” might just brush the bad-faith squabbling away. “The Last Jedi” was admired by some and disliked by many, with the divide often carrying an ugly subtext: a resentment at the film’s diversity casting, while others leapt to its defense for that very reason, turning what was supposed to be a piece of escapism into an ideological turf war as messy and overblown as some of us thought the movie itself was. Yet that isn’t exactly a consensus to take heart in.Īnd the last two films? Fans fell hard for “The Force Awakens,” until they woke up and realized that they’d been seduced by a kind of painstakingly well-traced “Star Wars” simulacrum. Most agree, at least, that the George Lucas prequels were an eye-popping but empty experiment in technologically driven brand enhancement. In the 40 years since, there has been less to agree on about “Star Wars,” which may be one reason why this distended-through-the-decades space-opera odyssey now feels, by turns, inspiring and dispiriting. The universality of the adoration for “Star Wars” became one of the cornerstones of its aesthetic. And that’s part of why they changed the world. In 19, “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back” were two movies that the whole wide world agreed on (to put it in fanboy terms: that they were the greatest things ever).
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