. . . TROS

What's Wrong With:

STAR WARS

The Rise of Skywalker

The void of cable in my house in the last year has been filled with Sling, high definition broadcast television captured via the same broadband cable inputs that used to bring overpriced Comcast offerings and soon, Disney+, so that I can re-watch as many of the Star Wars movies as often, and whenever, I'd like.

One of the channels on this "high end" version of "cable", is called "Decades." The day after I saw The Rise of Skywalker (TROS), a mini-marathon of Charlie's Angels, a small screen contemporary of the original Star Wars, was playing on the aforementioned station. I tuned in for several episodes because I remember the show with fondness from my youth, and because Kate Jackson, Jacklyn Smith and Farah Fawcett are still not difficult to look at, like, at all. Farah was niptacular back then. Bosley was a lucky, lucky guy. Charlie's Angels was the original babe-watch, long before filming running in slow motion on the beach was in vogue.

Moving along. At the end of every episode of Charlie's Angels, the title character, voiced by John Forsythe, whose face is never seen in any of the episodes- (he's usually getting a back rub poolside or in his posh office), calls the beauties to congratulate them on the success of that episode's mission- of running in skimpy outfits from bad guys, probably future Stormtroopers, who can't shoot straight. While watching, I am reminded of all kinds of characters whose presence was important to certain programs despite their relative absence.

In Home Improvement, we never see the bottom half of Wilson's face, though he volunteers wisdom  via historical anecdotes, which propels his tool man neighbor to almost immediately misappropriate that wisdom for comedic effect. In shows like Cheers and Frasier, we never meet Norm's wife Vera, nor Nyles' wife Maris; we never, and this is fine with me, see the Friends' ugly naked guy. Every TV generation (that's every 7-12 years), boasts a character whose presence is noteworthy despite their absence- the Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show and The Mary Tyler Moore show also support "missing" characters.

Unfortunately, the movie-watching public of the last three sequel episodes in the Star Wars franchise weren't treated to that kind of premeditation. The Emperor, whose absent presence, or before TROS, present absence, fixes a couple critical flaws from TLJ. Could it have been done better- yes, but we'll take it nonetheless.

There is a bonus coming (see my next post)- a criticism of criticism centered on reviews of TROS. Even I am aware of how long-winded I am, so I won't include it here.

I've seen the movie once to date, so I'll be updating the below eventually.
That was too much ado, here we go, the Star Wars DNA QA's view of TROS:

1) The words in the previewing synopsis text crawl were very well written. I remember thinking that whoever wrote them was channeling the word choices and tone of the best of them.

2) Nothing wrong with the opening action sequence of seeing the Millennium Falcon used to smuggle information and jump from one instance of hyperspace to another. Visually, the action sequences through most of the movie are magnificent, and there are plenty of them.

Low
3) It would be nitpicking, but a quick montage of Ren's violent attempts to find Palpatine on multiple planets would be more appropriate than a misguided, fruitless endeavor of slaughtering dozens in a snowy forest. Still, something that has remained consistent with Ren is his uncontrollable rage. So this isn't as much out of character as it is limiting in scope- that is why it is only a "low".

4) I'm going to give Abrams a pass on a certain number of things because he had so much to fix from the misadventures and terrible decision-making of the last film.

5) Including Carrie Fisher, even at her supposed, pain-killer-infused worst, was a necessity. Abrams can't help that she passed away after The Last Jedi. She is the general/leader of the Resistance. Telling us she died off-screen, and not honorably in some kind of selfless sacrifice, would have been an unfaithful ending for Leia. We're not killing South Park's Kenny here. Fisher's Leia is the grand-daughter of strong female leads like Katherine Hepburn, and Bette Davis.

Severe
6) Including Dominic Monaghan (Charlie from Lost), is a mistake. If Abrams had a special favor he owed the actor, or the director lost a bet, give old Charlie a shave and a helmet, or turn him into an alien and give him the commendation for appearing in the film, in the credits. I've already written about Laura Dern's inclusion in the TLJ. Making this same mistake again is a higher severity because casting keeps doing it. I love Charlie, and Lost is one of my favorite shows of all time. But I don't like someone from contemporary television to appear in a timeless mythological space epic. Doing this kind of crap is like putting cookie monster in The Matrix, or adding Judd Nelson's John Bender, from The Breakfast Club, into Frozen 2. Let's add Seinfeld's Kramer, dressed in floods and a hipster dufus Hawaiian bowling shirt into an episode of Game of Thrones and see if anyone notices, or not care when everyone does. Closed circuit to GOT show runners who put Ed Sheeran in an episode. It didn't work for them; making a similar decision definitely doesn't work here.

7) Rose is treated like Jar Jar. In Attack of the Clones, Jar Jar barely makes an appearance compared to his major player status in TPM. That ostracism was a welcome change; so was this one. I could do the Ewok dance, dance with an Ewok, hug an Ewok, or fornicate with one, in celebration. This is huge. Dub, Dub.

Low
8) Could have just been wishful thinking, but it seemed like there were more aliens represented in the Resistance in the huddle of their makeshift forest base. There weren't enough aliens however, and still not enough of them in positions of influence (i.e. allowed to speak at logistic military meetings). Still, this is a low defect for under-utilizing the volume of systems, galaxies and planets at your disposal filled with freakish revolutionaries in terms of political leanings and physical appearance.

9) Comedy and Jokes were much, much better. This was not over the top contemporary humor. The one exception was when Chewie, Finn and Poe were all going to be executed. Finn and Poe make light  of the moment by playing another note of a running gag before Hux shoots the troopers who were tasked with the aforementioned execution. This scene reminded me of the "hilarious" exchanges between Anakin and Padme, in the pit on Geonosis in AOTC.

Low
10) Speaking of Hux. The fact that there was another level to the character = good. The idea that this was a bad guy selling out the bad guys rather than a conflicted guy making life for the good guys more difficult was a welcome change. However, his motivation, of simply wanting Ren to fail, isn't reason enough to do it. Only a low for the effort. If the creatives hadn't spent so much time in dizzying action sequences and had focused more on character development, this could have been an interesting subplot.

Medium
11) Richard E. Grant, plays a somewhat alluded to Sith underling to the emperor, judging by the waxiness of his eyes. He was under-utilized. His is the type of character you can build on over the course of a couple of films. Since you had two different directors with two separate visions, one playing chicken with common sense and the franchise's lore and with that- wasting all kinds of screen time, leaving time for character development isn't possible- see #10 above.

12) Lando! Excellent. You just waited one movie too late. Also a nice touch to have him allude to the mission he and Luke were on together. That is a comforting thought to all of the nihilistic aloofness perpetuated by the lack of story development through the first two installments of this trilogy- Luke on an island throwing lightsabers over his shoulder, Han and Leia separated by time and resentment, all of the new cast barely sharing any screen time together.

13) Keri Russel/Zorii- I knew that voice from somewhere. The difference between her role and Monaghan's is that she's in costume. Felicity and Elizabeth Jennings (from The Americans) didn't just pop up on the screen. Monaghan is sporting the equivalent of the Darth Vader costume I wore for Halloween when I was 8; by the end of the night, the strap around the back of my head was ripping into the mask, doing a Mike Tyson impression on the top of my ear, and the cape looked like something that would do better to keep dust from falling on a jello mold than lend authenticity to the menacing guise of a candy beggar.

For a reason I'll get into later, I decided against giving this a low, but here's a hint- her character was believable because of the quickly touched upon back story between her and Poe. Also, she was allowed to act decisively for herself- giving Poe the medallion and deciding to stay on her planet. I think it was a mistake to not have her join the band out on a mission. In that way, she would have been like Lando, who significantly added to the dynamic of the group in the first trilogy.

Note: Like numbers 10 and 11 above, not having more of Keri Russell in the movie was a miss, even if it were only because we could see more of her running in tight pants which would have reminded me of Charlie's Angels.

14) New little droid- D/O and Cheech and Chong miniature guy . . . superb! And hilarious.

15) I mentioned the jokes, particularly at 3PO's expense earlier, but bringing up again under its own number because of how effectively they fit in with the characters and the story. Anthony Daniels, inside of that golden costume, is still hitting the right notes and brings one back to how amusingly high-maintenance he was in the originals.

Severe
16) Still no aliens in the First Order. Are members of the alien races all over the galaxy just more intelligent and less gullible than white supremacists? I guess that is a universal truth. I think I saw a black man or two among the leadership on First Order cruisers however. A step in the right direction- must be affirmative action. I'll take it, but leave this defect severity where it is. I can't believe how much the writer-directors are getting paid despite this oversight.

17) Jannah, the strong-willed, young lady trailing along with Finn is a welcome improvement in a role that would have been given to Rose if Rian Johnson had written the script. Nice call. I led off this review with a comment on presence; Jannah's got that.

Critical-Unconscionable
18) Let's put more people on the Falcon, or at least trailing behind in other ships on the missions, so that we can have more Resistance fighters become casualties, making it more realistic. I'm thinking specifically of those instances when clumps of characters are running through hallways, not getting hit by hundreds of bullets. Given this late date, as often as this has been cited, and by how many people, particularly by this QA, this can't have any other severity, but critical. The movie should not have been released with this defect. The severity above critical would probably be "unconscionable." You just can't put a dozen good guys into all kinds of life-threatening situations, have them all come out unscathed (Jannah, and Finn running in the Lithosphere on a Star Destroyer with lasers fired all around them) and expect to be taken seriously as a film-maker. At this point in movie history, and in the franchise, I have no more disbelief to suspend.

Note: Poe gets shot- that's something. But the creatives shepherding these movies to the screen should have learned something from Rogue One- simply, good characters can die and the story can be the better for it. I'm not advocating that Poe should die, but something more serious than a, let's be honest, off-target (because the troopers were probably aiming for his head) shot in the arm is in order. He should have gotten shot in the leg due to an incessant barrage of inaccurate shooting.

As an enlightened member of the paying audience, a customer, it comes to that, and a QA by trade, if you stop giving the customer what they want, and what they think they are paying for, eventually that customer is going to spend their money somewhere else. I would have thought Disney had learned that with Solo. If I were Kathleen Kennedy, I'd have stopped them from adding my name as Executive Producer to the credits after the TFA backlash.

Critical
19) Characters v Story. The characters lost . . . that is why you fail. How you sprinkled in the old cast was marginally well done. However, casting "The Dude" to stand in for Mark Hamill, was probably the wrong call. In fairness, you did a disservice to the new crew. For a story intent on featuring the dynamic of Rey, Finn, Chewie, C-3PO, BB-8, and Poe together, the story is busy, the visuals are overwhelming and the characters suffer because of it. You had something when Poe and Finn were playing Chewie on the monster chess board and in exchanges between the characters here and there, most notably when 3PO has his memory wiped by little Cheech, or little Chong. Linger- please god, not like the Cranberries, but roam a bit more, somewhat aimlessly, even if the new critical intelligentsia thinks it slows the pace of the movie a little. Abrams has proven he can do it, or at least sanction it being done, because he led the story and character development in the aforementioned Lost, for six seasons. There is richness, depth and value in that.

High Severe Critical
20) Do we need that many Star Destroyers to create the idea that the good guys are over matched from a numbers standpoint? Did we need 500 Star Destroyers on film? Couldn't we have had a more realistic number of Star Destroyers for our heroes to combat? I'm not buying, even after the Resistance brings in a galaxy's worth of gnat-sized ships to counter the Star Destroyer offensive, that the band of good guys stands much of a chance.

The idea that all of the characters we are supposed to care about survived after being put in continual long-odds situations is "unbelievable"; and if it isn't clear, I'm using that word in the dictionary sense of "too improbable for belief" not its connotative sense- that of something being incredibly fortunate. I would have an easier time believing drinking feral cat urine with a turnip blood chaser could . . . I got nothin' . . . see, Star Wars creatives, that is what it looks like when you edit your own imagination rather than assume the masses will swallow their own incredulity (or the concoction I just invented), in silence.

One more thing- what sense does it make for something indestructible through most of the firefight to suddenly be completely vulnerable just so the good guys can prevail? I just upped the severity to "severe."

See, if you didn't have a screen's worth of Star Destroyers, the Resistance's victory wouldn't seem so implausible. Imagine stacking all kinds of ceramic bowls on the counter in a pile larger than the turtle throne Yertle sat upon, and asking a toddler to clean them without unstacking them. Given all that frustration, I upped the defect severity again. And yeah, I get that in this instance the reason all those Star Destroyer's were more vulnerable because the generator was taken down, but who does this- ties the fate of all that hardware to one generator? We've seen this ploy too often in this franchise to tolerate it any more.

High
21) Knights of Ren. Their armor looks like what Oscar the grouch would put on before battling big bird. That's no inside joke at the size of Adam Driver's nose. Ren is able to stand on his own, almost, without the light saber. This is just another example of the villains not being utilized to their full potential so that the "hero", in this case Ren, can prevail via lazy storytelling. If the franchise wanted to subvert our expectations, give us villains, more consistently, (both Vader and Palpatine rank in the top 10 all time in movie history) capable of extending the skill set of the hero. Great villains make worthy heroes. The severity on this defect also could have been raised.

Severe
22) Because science, and, and, and nature. Ren and Rey, both humans, who, word has it, breathe oxygen, stand feet and inches respectively from the edge of space in the hangar of some outpost space station. To compound this problem, Rey leaps, passing into space, defying gravity.

No puny little human is successfully navigating to the Death Star for that distance, in those crafts/skiffs, with those waves. I think these characters have all watched Castaway a few too many times. The odds on two separate people making it to the Death Star (because Finn, not a Jedi, also makes it) alive given the natural impediment of a near tsunami are probably higher than C-3PO can calculate.

23) Speaking of the Death Star. I think it was a master move to include it in the film, so that we could also say goodbye to it.

High
24) Sentimentality. Too much music made this whole movie into a melodrama. We don't care as much about these characters; they know it and we know that they know it. This is the first time, and I'll wager the last time, that anyone would ever say that John Williams' talents were overused. The music never effing stopped. It was actually sickening. It was the worst case of mush since the last thirty minutes of the Return of the King (the final Lord of the Rings movie). By the end there, I was ready to take Frodo out myself.

25) Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok- think Joe Pesci in the 2nd Lethal Weapon movie- I know what people are going to say. Dude, you can't have a problem with the science and nature violations and commend them on the mixed location interactions between Ren and Rey. In this third movie- Ren grabs a necklace from Rey's throat and she drops a lightsaber into his hands. Each time, Ren and Rey are miles or blocks distant. I don't see some of that interplay as too different than some of the time traveling stuff Abrams included in Lost. Also, it isn't like Abrams just made the dual spatial reality thing up in this movie. Unlike the Leia, being sucked into deep space and surviving sequence in TLJ, where it had never been established she was force-sensitive, it was perhaps assumed, Abrams' hand was actually made for him in the two earlier films that created the precedent of the two characters, Ren and Rey, connecting psychically, that force contact intensifying, and leading them up to its final use, into a physical manifestation and as a means to a Force Dyad partnership against Palpatine. Hell, this is one of the few things all three films have in common; I may as well give someone credit for it.

Severe- getting on to Critical
26) Palpatine's minions. Do we need an arena full of Sith, or followers of the dark side of the Force, to bear witness to Palpatine's culminating rejuvenation? Do we buy that he would have that many followers or that many followers who could keep his existence a secret? What purpose do they actually serve? Do none of his acolytes have force powers allowing them to escape the fate of being buried in rubble? If none of them have the means of escape, what possible use could he have for them? Were they members of the clone army? Future Snokes? Force ghosted into the arena? The scene involving the confrontation between the Emperor, Ren and Rey would have made more sense if it was a private affair. Again, what do numbers and size actually mean. These are old, cliched devices and I would think that Abrams was above that kind of tripe.

Note: I'm not penalizing Abrams for the missteps of Johnson's version of The Last Jedi. The notion of Palpatine as the overarching villain of these last three films was an idea that millions of fans could have come up with before the script for the first film, TFA, was underway.

High
27) At this point, I'm just indiscriminately assigning defects to things, which is kind of how it felt when the creatives leading this movie assigned melodrama to the characters, action sequences to the story and serendipity to scientific and natural laws. We knew heading into this movie that this trilogy was a train wreck crossed with a dumpster fire. But my god did you people eff this up. Rey is a Palpatine. The Disney team hired "professionals" to write, storyboard, direct, consult upon, cast, score, act in and edit three films. They wasted one on a repeat of the original, and a second on butchering everything beloved about the entire franchise. The third could only correct so many missteps.

Think what an entirely different group of professionals could have done with claws for hands and chimpanzee DNA, provided their midichlorian count was in a respectable range. That is an insult to chimpanzees and DNA, and believe it or not, whoever came up with the idea of midichlorians. This is a cumulative defect, one that considers the three films as a whole, because after the first movie we know Rey had a lineage question for the creatives to resolve.

This is a "high" because Abrams underused Palpatine. Abrams cleaned up Johnson's mess about Snoke; cleaned up Luke tossing a lightsaber over his shoulder, Rey's lineage and even made a comment about Holdo.

Medium
28) Ren and Rey kissing. C'mon. I'd rather watch Jar Jar and the Ewoks light each other on fire . . . see, at first, I was thinking of that happening sexually, then I got aroused when I considered them actually all lighting matches in one orgy of roasted amphibian and flaming bear midget fur.

29) Two women kissing during the celebration following the First Order and Palpatine defeats. I don't have a problem with that, but I still wish the out of box thinking (ha!) extended to Lando fondling Mrs. Ackbar, or that it was two of Charlie's Angels in their prime, even if one of them was Shelly Hack.

In fact, adding Farrah, in her prime, shot from the waste up, and on Hoth, into one of the scenes with Carrie Fisher, would have made a lot of sense . . . ok, not a lot of sense, but about as much sense as most anything else in the whole trilogy.

30) Voices of Jedi past in the credits and as inspiration within the film for Rey's rise to defeat Palpatine and the title of the film. Magnificent!


Before the good and bad accounting from above, I was about half way through the movie thinking, "I'm worn out on this stuff." I couldn't rate this movie, with any kind of letter grade. The only other movie I have never been able to rate besides this one- The Passion of the Christ- another movie that wore me out, about the resurrection of a supernatural being, not unlike the Emperor.

I started out the article by hearkening back to old television shows whose creators imagined real fake spouses, neighbors and bosses and how measured, responsible, clever and creative that was and I'm disappointed that as many highly-compensated Disney employees couldn't consider a well-meaning, honorable, thoughtfully-planned and credibly-detailed set of sequels, well before the third reel.