Rey of light?

Just so we're keeping score, we started this final trilogy in the original Star Wars canon with J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens, a film welcomed after the disastrous second trilogy that George Lucas helmed before selling LucasFilm to the Mouse in the early 2000s.

That film offered fans a return to the old, swashbuckling style of the first series (and, yes, to make a continued petty point, my utter disdain for the last film in the original trilogy is such that I only count the first two), even if it followed, in many places nearly beat-for-beat, the original film's plot points and trajectory. There wasn't a lick of originality to the thing, but it aped A New Hope well enough to still be a relief for Star Wars fans everywhere.

The second installment, The Last Jedi, was, as a friend of mine likes to say, a horse of a different color. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, a genuinely clever filmmaker with a delicious sense of plotting (see his latest film, Knives Out for confirmation), Jedi veered far from the staid course Abrams had set up, and instead gleefully pushed the series forward into more uncharted territory. It was also the first film since The Empire Strikes Back that felt laden with possibility, as if freed from the weighty baggage of what had happened before. It felt new and daring.

The result was a full-on uprising from certain sects of the fanboy collective: Johnson, they felt, hadn't "respected" Lucas' original characters as much as he should have, and the film's turn towards greater diversity got him labeled derisively as a Social Justice Warrior. Many fans (and critics) felt otherwise, but the outcry was enough that the Disney overlords obviously heard the wailing (even if it still made $1.3 billion worldwide).

Which brings us to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams' return to bring the series home. A safe bet to better abide by the strict fanboy rules, Abrams has repaid Disney's faith in him by delivering a dutiful, on-point final installment, albeit one bereft of any sort of genuine inspiration. Gone is the sense of new possibilities, and the storytelling juice to explore them, in place of that, we have what Abrams (and many other filmmakers before him) nearly always resort to when their storylines are weak: Relentless, often unjustified, action. Like a little kid who's feasted on a box of Honey Smacks, the film jumps around as if it's afraid to keep still. It rips from scene to scene so quickly that the pace itself becomes its primary attraction, a blurry whirl of plot points hurtling past that make little sense outside their need to happen for the story to continue pushing its turbo-injected RPMs.

In such a rush to close all loops and answer all questions, the plot careens us around the galaxy in full hyperspace mode, but to condense it into a usable paragraph: As the film begins, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is meeting on a secret, secluded planet with Dark Lord Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who wants the lad to continue his legacy of evil dominance, even as Ren himself has plans to take him out and rule the galaxy himself. Meanwhile, Rey (Daisy Ridley) continues her Jedi training with Leia (the late Carrie Fisher, using archive footage and CGI), as Poe (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) race around gathering intel against the rising First Order. As Ren pursues Rey, both across space and the mind-meld they established in the last film, she learns more and more from him about who she is, and what her lineage has to do with Palpatine's horrible "final order" (any resemblance between the First Order and Nazi Germany is absolutely intended). As these things naturally go, everything ends up in a cataclysmic final battle against the First Order, with everyone putting everything on the line, one last time.

A major issue with this last trilogy has been the indistinct nature of the new group of characters. With Awakens, it seemed as if too many of the new faces were simply younger replacements for the old guys (in this scenario, Rey=Luke, Poe=Han, Ren=Vader, and so forth). If nothing else, at least Abrams' follow-up has finally made at least Rey feel more her own person, at least as much of a fleshed-out character so as not to seem so transparently Luke-esque.

Poe remains a weak and lazy Solo ripoff (I'm generally a fan of Isaac's, but it must be said the actor adds very little to the thin gruel of a role).

And as much as I admire Driver, I still don't feel as if he was a good choice for Ren. But at least Ridley has come into her own. The best moments in this film all revolve around her conviction as Rey, as powerful and conflicted as she is.

Abrams had a particularly thankless job here, admittedly, but it's a terrible shame that the series lands here with such a thud. Everyone played it safe, placating the lifers whose feelings were bruised by The Last Jedi, ensuring a stream of holiday money, but with the exception of Jedi, I very much doubt these films will be much remembered beyond their initial cash grabs. The fanaticism of Star Wars was built from the unadulterated love of its initial wave of fans, whose adoration fueled all these sequels; only, after Empire, there have been diminishing returns, at least beyond the box office. There is still a nostalgic love of the original films -- yes, even the one with the damnable Ewoks -- that these subsequent films will never generate. It's worth asking what original content the next generation of filmgoers will be nostalgic for, where this generation's entertainment legacies might take hold. By this point, it feels as if this series has been feeding off its own carcass long enough there are only spindly bones remaining.

Some 36 years ago, the world was met with The Return of the Jedi, a cynical, sell-out insult of a film that George Lucas completely punted on, in favor of little kid marketability (not that I'm the least bit bitter about this) and gummy plot resolution. For fans of Empire, the strongest film of the series, it was a total betrayal, with Lucas more or less ignoring the intriguingly salient elements of the previous film in order to provide his younger viewers with what they might have wanted (Unmitigated happy ending! Everything resolved! More muppets!). It was, of course, his universe to do with as he wished, but his choices (which apparently went contrary to what even Harrison Ford wanted) made for a deeply uninspiring capstone to his vision.

It is at once dispiriting and all too perfect that the trajectory of the last trilogy so directly follows the first. Maybe Abrams, in biting so much from the first film, put this in motion from the start, an ironic repetition of the past, but we have arrived, again, with a depressingly cynical final installment of a franchise that, at one point at least, certainly deserved better.

As a mysterious, dark Lord of the Sith once confidently announced to his former master, "The circle is now complete." As such, it's very much time to put the Skywalkers to bed, at last, and free up the galaxy for entirely new possibilities. The force is strong with them, and all of that, but it's clear that there's nothing more to see here.

MovieStyle on 12/20/2019