I Defend The Rise of Skywalker, Because I Can

    The Rise of Skywalker was not a good movie. But what if it was? What if it was actually a masterful work of art, and we’ve all just been understanding it wrong? That’s probably not the case, but if majoring in English taught me anything, it’s that you can make any argument about something if you find even a little bit of evidence for it. 

  So, in the interest of being as annoying as possible, I’m going to argue that the most universally-disliked Star Wars movie is actually a work of genius. Not because I actually think that, but just because I can. Because I’ve gone mad with power.

  Just like Palpatine.

    TROS has a difficult job because it needs to serve as an end to the Star Wars saga – not just the sequels, but the entire thing. TROS has a relatively large amount of allusions to the prequel trilogy. More than The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi did, at least. Commercials for TROS used Duel of the Fates, the de facto theme song of the prequels. Other tracks from the prequels appear throughout the film, and we can’t forget when Palpatine says the line about abilities some consider to be unnatural.

Source: knowyourmeme.com

   That line wasn’t simple fanservice, and it wasn’t a handwave-y attempt to explain away Palpatine’s return, either. That line was meant to make us think about Anakin’s downfall, the thing that led to the rise of the Empire in the first place. In that line’s original context, Palpatine was telling Anakin about how he could use the force to save Padme. Anakin learned that he could use the force to heal people. Thus, it makes perfect sense that, in the final movie of the saga, where Rey defeats Palpatine and the forces of evil for good, she learns how to force-heal.

    Now, I know what you’re saying. Isn’t force-healing a dark-side power? Doesn’t it contradict the prequels, where Anakin fell away from the Jedi order to learn that power? Yes, and that’s the point. People hate the whole force-healing thing because of the plot hole they think it creates. They typically point to the Jedi belief in forgoing attachments and not interfering in the natural order of things. The prequels, however, show that these strict beliefs led to the fall of the Jedi order. The Clone Wars especially deconstructs the Jedi to the point where you could consider them the bad guys. To create a new, lasting Jedi order, Rey must reverse Anakin’s fall while accomplishing what the old Jedi order never let him do: she must learn to hold onto her feelings, and to heal others, while remaining a Jedi.

  With this in mind, we see how the kiss between Rey and Ben forms an essential part of the movie’s message. It represents a reversal of the doomed romance between Anakin and Padme, the very romance that undid the Republic in the first place. By expressing her love for Ben and healing him, Rey resolves the conflict plaguing the Jedi since the prequels. It also makes sense that the kiss comes right after the defeat of Palpatine, who capitalized on this conflict in the first place.

    The movie needed Palpatine as its antagonist to make the end of Rey’s story a fitting end for the saga as a whole. When the prequels came out, they recast the main character of the saga from Luke to Anakin. Suddenly, this was no longer a story about Luke’s adventures with the rebels. It now told the story of Anakin’s fall and redemption. The sequels take this another step further, turning the saga’s focus into the rise and fall of Palpatine. In fact, as far as I can tell, he’s the only living character in TROS who was present all the way back in TPM.

    Before we get much further, I should mention that the basis for my understanding of the sequels, and of Star Wars in general, comes from Mike Klimo’s Ring Theory. Basically, the theory posits that the prequels are the original trilogy but backwards. The prequels show Anakin’s fall to the dark side and the rise of the Empire as the inverse of the Empire’s fall and Anakin’s redemption in the OT.  TPM parallels ROTJ, AOTC parallels ESB, and so forth. Klimo breaks down plot points, themes, and even individual shots from the OT that reoccur in the prequels. 

    When people try to apply the Ring Theory to the sequels, they typically assume that the sequels will also mirror the original trilogy: The Force Awakens paralleling ROTJ, etc. But these interpretations misunderstand the Ring Theory’s purpose as a narrative device. The prequels mirror the OT because they tell a story that’s opposite the original trilogy: the good guys losing vs. the good guys winning. The sequels tell a story parallel to the original trilogy: the scrappy good guys winning once more against a formidable evil empire. This, of course, leads us to one of the biggest complaints levied against the sequels, particularly TFA and TROS: that they repeat the original trilogy verbatim and add nothing of their own.

    These same people often argue that the sequels invalidate the events of the original trilogy. After Anakin’s sacrifice and everything the rebels went through to bring the Jedi and the Republic back, all of the sudden we have a new bad regime that looks just like the Empire, and the Jedi are gone again. But the sequels aren’t a repeat of the original trilogy. The sequels are about the good guys learning not to make the same mistakes that led to the fall of the old (and new) Republic.

Source: radiotimes.com

    When Luke starts the new Jedi order, he falls into the same mistakes the old order made. We see this in The Mandalorian, where Luke preaches the same no-attachments creed that the prequel-era Jedi espoused. Grogu’s love for Mando puts him in the same position as Anakin. They both find themselves torn between following the Jedi code and being with the ones they love. This caused Anakin to go to the dark side, and Grogu to abandon the Jedi to become a Mandalorian. Eventually, this could have contributed to Ben Solo falling to the dark side as well. The failure of Luke’s order leads him to become the person we see in The Last Jedi: bitter and ready to give up on the Jedi entirely.

Source: gffa.tumblr.com

    TROS represents the culmination of the lesson Luke learned in TLJ. After Yoda burns the sacred texts, Luke realizes that truly being a Jedi is about being a hero, not about following strict rules.  

    Look at the titles of each trilogy’s final movie. We all know that George called Episode III “Revenge of the Sith” as a counter to “Return of the Jedi”. They could have easily called Episode IX “Return of the Jedi Again”, or “Rise of the Resistance” or something else to symbolize that this trilogy would end in the same way as ROTJ. But we don’t always associate “Skywalker” with the light side. The Skywalker family is complicated. In Episode IX, "Skywalker" refers to a new kind of Jedi that adopts the loving, passionate qualities embodied by Anakin and (sometimes) Luke. Rey’s yellow lightsaber also symbolizes this new way, standing in stark contrast to the typical blue we associate with dogmatic Jedi like Obi-wan.

    Now you might say, “Sure. That’s great, but does the movie actually tell us any of this? Can we really call a movie “genius” for having tenuous connections that most people won’t pick up on, especially when even the surface level plot contains glaring holes? These complaints about TROS's “plot holes” assume that they exist just because J.J. Abrams can’t string a coherent story together. In actuality, TROS creates blank canvases that harken back to an earlier era of Star Wars when the saga contained many more unknowns.

Source: starwars.fandom.com

    Star Wars has a tradition of tie-in material building on the story shown in the movies. Just think- did the original trilogy ever utter the words “Devonian”, “Mandalorian”, “Bith”, or even “Sith”? No, but people got to know the species and the lore through action figures and other tie-in material. Star Wars was built for that kind of stuff. The original cantina scene was meant to show us how much we don’t know about the galaxy. The mere presence of all the different aliens implied that each of them had different home planets, cultures, and entire evolutionary histories that existed beyond the 2-hours we spend in the movie. To audiences in 1977, it made Star Wars stand out from other sci-fi movies that simply portrayed our humanity’s future. This galaxy seemingly existed on its own, its history progressing whether we saw it or not.

Source: starwars.com

   By 2019, the Star Wars landscape had changed considerably. The franchise was saturated with novels, comic books, video games, TV shows, spinoff films, and now a theme park land all taking place in the same world. The same movies that once offered fleeting glimpses into an alien world became nostalgia-laden journeys through familiar cultural touchstones. Viewers watch the movies knowing that every place and background character has a name and backstory, from whatever source. Unlike the earlier films, though, Abrams created TROS with the knowledge that other creators would build up a plethora of tie-in material all around. In 1977, Star Wars didn’t have that luxury. It had to start with exposition just to ease us into this new world. Now, we know a lot about this world and we need more unknowns.  

    TROS, and the sequel trilogy as a whole, carved out new space in Star Wars. Palpatine could plausibly resurrect himself and build a fleet of Star Destroyers while remaining completely unnoticed by any of the characters we know. This is a big galaxy where lots of things happen outside of what we see. The Final Order, the Sith cultists, and even the Knights of Ren remain prime foundations to tell even more stories. It can be easy to forget because of the surface-level resemblance the sequels bear to the original trilogy, but the sequels introduced more new stuff to the galaxy than the Disney Plus shows have. Maz Kanata’s storied castle, the hyper-rich culture surrounding Canto Bight, the ruins and their caretakers on Ach-To, the festival on Pasaana, that bounty hunter who used to have a thing for Poe – these are all brand new. This isn’t the trilogy that had Anakin building C3PO or Yoda crossing paths with Chewbacca.

    Again, I know what you’re saying: isn’t there a huge difference between a story that hints at a larger world, and a story that’s incomprehensible without having consumed vast amounts of supplementary material, some of which doesn’t even exist yet? Yes, and that’s entirely the point. TROS understood that people love Star Wars so much that they can and will watch just about anything that fleshes out what they’ve already seen. The sequels created a story that had space for more. TFA didn’t waste time explaining how the First Order came to power because it knew we’d get things like The Mandalorian to show us the rocky, Weimar Republic-esque, interim period. TROS left Finn’s story open-ended because it knew the character could appear in later stories. The sequels leave space for the Somehows.

    The fact that the sequels try to escape the shadow of the original trilogy also mirrors the way that the sequels’ new characters come into their own. At this point in the saga, Luke, Leia, and the gang are just as famous within the galaxy as they are to us at home. Remember the end of TLJ, where the slave kids pretend their doll is Luke Skywalker? Rey and Finn themselves know Han as soon as he introduces himself to them, and she has an old rebel helmet on Jakku that she plays with.

Source: starwars.fandom.com

    The new characters spend TFA and TLJ looking for these old heroes that ultimately let them down. The Force Awakens’ plot basically boils down to a treasure hunt for Luke, the most famous Jedi by that point (That’s one of the interesting differences between it and A New Hope. Both movies feature droids that the bad guys want because of the crucial information they hold. In ANH, it’s the bad guys’ weakness, in TFA, it’s the location of the good guys’ last hope. Not quite sure what to do with that distinction yet). In TLJ, the characters realize the futility of relying on the past. Finn and Rose search in vain for a famed codebreaker, Luke lectures Rey on the failures of the Jedi, and Poe learns to stop showy manuevers that seem akin to Luke toppling the AT-AT with a tow cable. Bad guy Kylo Ren, on the other hand, wallows in nostalgia. Even after proclaiming himself Supreme Leader, he succumbs to the influence of a more powerful sith once Palpatine reveals his presence.

Source: starwars.com

    In TROS, Rey, Finn, and Poe reunite to save the day by themselves. Once again, they track down a famous figure from the past, but instead of looking to him for guidance, they want to end him. By the end of the trilogy, they forge a new path that takes the good from the old, without repeating its mistakes.

    By recognizing this through-line, you might be able to appreciate how the sequel trilogy is much more masterful and deliberate than the vast majority of people give it credit for.

…but then I remember how they faked us out with Chewie’s death for absolutely no reason at all, and suddenly I remember all the reasons that this movie is actually terrible.