- UK release: December 2019
- Director: J. J. Abrams · Writers: Chris Terrio, J. J. Abrams
- Studio / distributor: Lucasfilm; Bad Robot; Walt Disney Studios
- Genre: Space opera / science-fiction adventure · Runtime: 142 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Daisy Ridley (The Force Awakens, Murder on the Orient Express) as Rey; Adam Driver (Paterson) as Kylo Ren; John Boyega (Attack the Block) as Finn; Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina) as Poe Dameron; Ian McDiarmid (Return of the Jedi, Revenge of the Sith) as Emperor Palpatine
- IMDb: 6.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 51% critics / 86% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
This is the one that has to land the plane. The Force Awakens relaunched Star Wars in 2015 by lovingly tracing the shape of the original film, and The Last Jedi in 2017 took the controls and steered somewhere stranger and more divisive, splitting the audience down the middle in a way no Star Wars film had managed before. J. J. Abrams, who started this trilogy, has been brought back to finish it, and you can feel from the first scene that his brief is partly to tell a story and partly to make peace. The Rise of Skywalker is the rare blockbuster that arrives with a fan war already raging around it, and a good deal of its running time is spent trying to satisfy both sides at once.
The setup
A year has passed since the Resistance was cut down to a handful of survivors. A broadcast goes out across the galaxy in a voice everyone thought was gone for good, and the First Order is no longer the whole of the threat. Rey (Daisy Ridley), still training and still uncertain about where she comes from, sets out with Finn, Poe and the old droids on a scavenger hunt across a string of new worlds, chasing the clues that might explain the signal and stop whatever is gathering behind it. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), meanwhile, is pulled towards the same source for his own reasons. The two of them remain bound together in a way neither of them asked for, and the film treats that connection as its real spine. I will keep the rest under wraps; this is a film built on reveals, and some of them are worth meeting cold.
The cast
Ridley carries the film, and she is good enough to make you wish the script trusted her more. Rey’s struggle is the most human thing here, and Ridley plays the doubt and the temper without ever tipping into self-pity. Driver is the standout, as he was last time; Kylo Ren is the only character in this trilogy whose inner life feels genuinely unresolved, and Driver gives him a wounded, dangerous weight that the cleaner heroes cannot match. The double act of Boyega and Isaac is loose and likeable, and the film is at its most relaxed when the three leads are simply bickering their way across a desert. Ian McDiarmid returns to a role he first played decades ago and clearly relishes every hiss of it. The losses around the edges, some of them written into the story by events off screen, give the whole thing an undertow of real farewell.
The craft
On pure spectacle this is the most confident the trilogy has looked. Dan Mindel shoots it big and warm, the desert chases and the climactic fleet battle have genuine scale, and one duel staged on the wreckage of a Death Star amid crashing seas is the best single image in the new films. Abrams keeps it moving at a sprint, which is both the film’s saving grace and its central problem: there is barely a moment to breathe, and the plot lurches from planet to planet on a fetch-quest structure that never quite settles. John Williams, scoring the final chapter of a saga he opened in 1977, does extraordinary work, threading old themes through new ones so that the music carries the emotional memory the script sometimes leaves on the table. When the film slows down enough to let his score land, it is genuinely moving.
How it stacks up
Against the rest of the trilogy it sits in an odd place. It is more entertaining moment to moment than The Last Jedi and far less interested in surprising you. Where Rian Johnson’s film picked at the franchise’s assumptions and asked awkward questions about heroes and bloodlines, Abrams spends a fair amount of energy quietly tidying those questions away, reaching back past the previous instalment to the comfort of Return of the Jedi. As a finale it inevitably invites comparison with the way the original trilogy closed, and it does not have that film’s clean emotional payoff; it has three or four endings where one would do. It is closer in spirit to a victory-lap team-up like Avengers: Endgame, all reunions and callbacks and crowd-pleasing returns, than to the leaner adventure that started everything.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark, and it tells you something. Critics have landed around the low fifties, the harshest reviews the sequel trilogy has drawn, with the recurring charge being that the film reverses course on its predecessor and substitutes nostalgia for nerve. Audiences are far warmer, sitting up in the eighties, and the gap is real rather than a fluke. My own reaction lands between the two and closer to the crowd. The criticisms are fair: the plotting is rushed, the reversals are transparent, and you can see the machinery of fan management grinding away. But the film is never boring, it looks magnificent, and it sent me out of the cinema having had a thoroughly good time in spite of myself.
Verdict
So this is a film I enjoyed more than I can entirely defend. It is visually stunning and it moves like a rocket, and the central pull between Rey and Kylo Ren still works when almost nothing around it does. It is also a film that flinches, that would rather reassure than provoke, and that tries to please everyone at the cost of leaving the trilogy’s most interesting threads frayed. It could have been so much better, and the frustration of watching real craft poured into timid storytelling never quite leaves. For all that, it is handsome, propulsive, often stirring, and the kind of thing I will happily put on again for the spectacle and the Williams score alone. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, and the IMAX presentation is worth the upgrade for the scale of the final act.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: this closes the nine-film Skywalker saga, and in the years since release it has settled as the most contested of the sequel trilogy, the film fans argue over most when they argue about where the new Star Wars went wrong. Lucasfilm’s storytelling energy moved largely to television after this, with The Mandalorian and its spin-offs carrying the franchise on Disney+, where this film also streams. It is widely available on 4K, Blu-ray and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Fights with fantastical weapons include impalements and decapitations, although there is little detail. A character’s face is melted by fantastical energy.
Threat and horror: A young woman finds herself alone amidst an arena of sinister enemies, taunted by their leader. A character briefly becomes fanged and demonic.
Injury detail: There is brief sight of blood and injury.
Language: There is infrequent mild bad language, including ‘ass’, as well as use of milder terms such as ‘hell’ and ‘damn’.
Sex: Sexual content is limited to kissing.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
