Note: This is a spectacularly spoiler-heavy review of Rise of Skywalker. Don’t come here if you want parts of the movie to surprise you.

BE WARNED

There’s a new Star Wars movie! Sometimes I write about Star Wars. It’s something that, as a child and a young man, was very important to me, and I used to be quite obsessed with.

So I got lucky, and got to see Rise of Skywalker on opening night. Then I rewatched it again, because I will literally see anything that anyone buys a ticket to.

A lot of people are already talking about the Big Themes, and “what it means,” and there’s a lot to say, but I want to let you know what you’re getting into. Consider this an overview, not a nit-picking, because I could be here all day with questions like “who built those Star Destroyers?” and “how do all the ships show up at the end?”

BUT IT BEGINS with a title crawl that somehow wins the “most ridiculous Star Wars opening” prize. This is a hard prize to win.

JJ Abrams' dedication to getting hyperspace technology "wrong" according to the fictional rules of the universe he's writing in is something that probably only makes like three nerds mad, but as someone who spent endless hours in high school and college writing fan fiction about a character who was a hyperspatial physicist, goddamnit I am exactly who he set out to hurt there.

And just because I need - NEED - to get this off my chest: TIE fighters do not have hyperdrives, nor can you technically “follow” someone through hyperspace NOR COULD A TIE FIGHTER KEEP UP WITH THE MILLENIUM FALCON IN HYPERSPACE.

Anyway. The beginning of this movie was terribly dreadful for me, between the title crawl and the abuse of my favorite Star Wars technology, but then it eased up a little.

Most of how I feel about it could be summed up with three things: One, there are interesting bits throughout. Two, some of that shit is extremely metal. Three, this all seems so futile.

Futility: The returning badguy is Palpatine (not exactly a spoiler, given the trailers, but YOU WERE WARNED) This is not revealed in the movie, it comes out in the title crawl, to avoid any surprise. Yes, the movie occurs because Palpatine is SHITPOSTING on the HOLONET. They even take a break to tell the rebellion that Palpatine is STILL SHITPOSTING, about ¾ through the movie.

Metal: There is some seriously metal imagery surrounding Poppa Palpatine. Metal bands WISH they’d had the copyrights to some Star Wars art to do what happens in Rise of Skywalker. Star Destroyers bursting through lightning-filled icebergs, towering stone statues of the cloaked emperor. Frankenstein machinery and a sky full of ominous triangles, massive chains and dark caves lit only by eerie blue light, it’s stunning and appropriately evil.

Interesting bits: Stun and spectacle are what Abrams is good at, which is why he was a good choice to open the new trilogy: someone who could remix familiar elements into something more spectacular than it was the first time. There’s call-backs and easter eggs and visual references a-plenty. Star Wars legends fans will recognize the silhouette of the World Devastator as Palpatine’s base, and there’s others that I’m not going to exhaustively list.

But back to the futility, because Abrams is NOT a good choice to close your epic. His pacing is frantic and the writing (co-written by the dour lackwit that wrote Batman vs. Superman) is basic.

Look, basic writing is fine for Star Wars. Star Wars does not need elaborate plots and justifications to get things interesting. A New Hope and Rise of Skywalker are both McGuffin hunts. Empire and The Last Jedi are entirely devoted to “escape and regroup.” Force Awakens and Return of the Jedi are both “well there’s a Death Star we gotta blow up and a Sith to fight.”

But combined with the disjointed feel and the lackluster dialogue, you get a movie that is thrashing around and, to quote Palpatine: “weak.”

There are some great set pieces, like the massive stone throne with Palpatine on a Stick. And, it has one of the better lightsaber fights in all the movies - the one between Rey and Kylo in the wreck of the Death Star.

It doesn’t wrap things up, though. There’s a lot left to ponder when you leave the theater. All of the new issues are all laid out at the beginning and wrapped up in 2 hours and 20 minutes later. Yet, none of the plot threads from the first two movies are addressed, or even acknowledged, unless it’s to rather cruelly yank them away from fans.

I did not appreciate the Palpatine-parentage. The reveal seems mean-spirited, Rey has no reason to believe Kylo when he attempts to use it against her, and it throws away an important part of what made The Last Jedi interesting.

JJ Abrams, the son of a hollywood power couple who has gotten his own son a cush writing gig at Marvel, dives fully into the idea of power in lineage. Part of that may be to quell fanboy terror that Rey was “too powerful,” because the force does more in this film than it has in any other - leaps and bounds more, on par with the more over-the-top moments from video games.

Rey is doing things Luke would never do, and Kylo’s on-screen power far surpasses Vader. They pull down starships. Destroy freighters with force lightning. Teleport objects across time and space. What Palpatine does in the climax gives credence to the “more powerful than any battlestation” line, but Rey and Kylo don’t feel like students “learning an important lesson.” The idea Yoda states in The Last Jedi, that “we are what they grow beyond,” is shed in favor of something much more like leveling up.

Others will probably speak to Kylo’s redemption arc, the way the Kylo/Rey relationship is fraught, and things like that, but instead I’m going to tell you the central metaphor for Rise of Skywalker.

The Knights of Ren.

In TFA, we are teased with “The Knights of Ren.” They are made out to be a dark force, ex Jedi, fallen, fantatical followers of Kylo Ren and Snoke. “I can’t wait to see THESE guys,” you tell yourself.

In TLJ we don’t see them.

In RoS they pop up, and they do indeed look cool as hell (But also, like a goth boy band?) and then, they do absolutely nothing for 2 hours until the end of the movie where they’re gratuitously killed by Kylo Ren.

That’s about as direct a comparison between this movie and Star Wars that I can give you.

Inevitably, comparisons are going to arise between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. Some of those comparisons will be incredibly dumb, so let me offer one that is not.

The strength of The Last Jedi is the weakness of Rise of Skywalker, and that is “Let the past die.”

JJ is about as capable of this as Quentin Tarantino is. He brings back the original antagonist in the form of an insanely metal cyber zombie, in a typically Abrams-esque bit of “but it’s cool” subtlety.

“Let the past die” is something that’s wild to hear from a character in chapter 8 of a 9 chapter movie series, but it really made it feel like episode 8 WAS setting the stage for something interesting to come out of episode 9, that things would grow, change, and still be Star Wars.

RoS is not about letting go of the past. It’s about revisiting it, under glass, and thinking to yourself “that WAS badass, wasn’t it?”

Then you recreate it with more power and new special effects, which is a pretty good analogy for the plot that Palpatine has in RoS. Empire good? More empire better. Sith power good? More power better. Is it a deeply hidden cry for us to look at the special editions and prequels and sequels as a dark side artifacts, unnatural extensions of a thing that has ended? I doubt that’s intentional.

The original Star Wars trilogy had a strength the sequels and prequels never seem to grasp. The idea that the characters exist in a sort of ecosystem. A New Hope lays out “here is a desert world, look how the people here act!” Then, “here are scoundrels and rebels, they do the things that you think.” Empire says “here’s the ice planet, ice planet things are gonna happen,” Return of the Jedi says “here’s the woodland planet, fucking ewoks live here and they’re terrifying murder bears.”

This doesn’t happen in RoS. We’re whisked through settings, places, people, ideas, just one after the other in a rapid-fire sequence not unlike “hyperspace skipping” for two hours.

And at the end you bounce in, on fire and confused and thinking ‘well, that was fun,’ but once you start thinking about it, you begin to wonder what JJ’s deal with The Millenium Falcon IS, can the man just not trash that ship? Except the ship is you, enjoying Star Wars.