Star Wars is like sex & pizza - even when it's bad it's still good

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker ««½
PG-13, 141m. 2019

Cast & Credits: Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Anthony Daniels (C3P0), Naomi Ackle (Jannah), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Richard E. Grant (General Pryde), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Keri Russell (Zoril Bliss), Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico), Ian McDiarmid (Emperor Palpatine). Screenplay by Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams. Directed by J.J. Abrams.

The most positive thing I can say about the Star Wars movies released between 1977 and 2017 is they came off being “event films.” Whether one liked only a few of the eight installments released, there was no disputing that seeing all of them on the big screen was always something to look forward to. In my opinion that is.

Furthermore, the third installments from the prequels, Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Return of the Jedi (1983) in the original trilogy didn’t succumb to the ailment that has befallen several sequels of franchises past when the third films came out called a “threequel.” Dictionary.com defines the term as “the third in a series of literary works, movies, etc.; a second sequel: The first two films in this underworld anthology were cinematic gems, but the threequel was at best a disappointment.”

Which is what Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019) is - a disappointment given it being the final installment of the entire franchise to feature the original cast fans like myself grew up on from episodes IV, V and VI (1977-1983). Sure, there will be more Star Wars movies in years to come, if not television series to air on Disney plus, but episode IX marked the final time we would see Leia (Carrie Fisher), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), droids C3P0 (Anthony Daniels) and R2D2, Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). The reason would have been logical for fans to expect this installment to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

There is no arguing that upon returning to the director’s chair since helming The Force Awakens (2015) that J.J. Abrams not only had to figure out how to win back disenfranchised fans angered by director Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2017) from eighth installment’s unanswered questions (who were Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) parents and seeing a shirtless bare chested villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) to their online hatred for actress, Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico, a member of the Rebellion’s Resistance. The question concerning Tran’s character was who did the haters loathe more, the character Tran played or her Asian heritage and how the producers committed a sin casting her in a Star Wars movie. The online barrage of criticisms Tran endured forced the actress to delete all posts from her Instagram account in 2018.

The last time such a character got this much criticism was in 1999 with the release of The Phantom Menace. Die-hard fans, myself being the exception, expressed similar hatred for Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best), the off-world alien character whose dialect included such phrases as “How wude” (short for How rude) and “Mesa free!” (short for I’m free) as a racist comparison of Amos ‘n’ Andy, a radio and television show that ran from 1928-1960 that featured mostly an African-American cast and “Stepin Fetchit” the stage name black actor, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, portrayed in the 1930s. Black Americans found Perry’s Stepin Fetchit character echoed too many negative stereotypes of the black culture.



In a 1999 story of the Chicago Tribune, actor Best said Jar Jar’s dialect came from director George Lucas’ screenplay.

Actor Ahmed Best as Jar Jar Binks.

"To me, he was a creature from another world trying to learn to talk, to assimilate a language foreign to him," Best said. "As for those different accents people say they hear, that's false. There was no implied accent to us when we were working on this guy. I've never seen anything resembling a Stepin Fetchit. The character has nothing to do with any racial intent. If he'd been anything other than what I created him to be, which is a noble, honest, 7-foot alien, I wouldn't have done the movie."

"I think the people who are saying those things are very much in touch with the racism inside themselves,” Best added. “They sense African-American descent, and all they can think of is Stepin Fetchit. They can't compare it to Jerry Lewis or Buster Keaton or even Jackie Chan. It's not a downer. I don't pay attention to that stuff. I can recognize stupidity."

It was that criticism of Jar Jar Binks, however, which forced Lucas, who also doubled as the prequel trilogy’s screenwriter, to focus less on the alien in Attack of the Clones (2002) and reducing him to a brief walk-on in the third film with zero dialogue.

The same, it seems, applies to how Tran’s character in Rise of Skywalker was given less screentime here where, like Lucas, Abrams, who co-wrote episode IX’s screenplay along with Chris Terrio gave in to all the negative criticisms. Or did they?

Co-writer Terrio claimed this wasn’t the case in a series of online interviews.

“One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie [Fisher]’s footage (my commentary on that in a moment) in the way we wanted to. We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together. As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes unfortunately fell out of the film.”

In an ironic twist some users on Reddit differed in opinion on the Rose Tico character with one user named ReverendPalpatine criticizing Abrams’ giving in to pressure.

“I will never understand the hate for this character and I will never understand why the filmmakers chose to listen to the internet and basically leave her out of The Rise of Skywalker. She’s a mechanic and couldn’t go on the adventure in the Falcon and fix it every time it breaks every 5 minutes? Instead they got an armless alien that has no lines instead.”

While another Redditor user - jayive35 didn’t like Tico’s character he objected to the online attacks Tran was subjected to.

“I understand the hate for the character, but not for the actress. It’s not her fault her character was garbage.”

Backlash from fans wasn’t the only item on Abrams’ plate. Before her death in 2016, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy in a quote on imdb.com said Fisher told her, “'I'd better be at the forefront of IX!' Because Harrison (Ford) was front and center on VII, and Mark (Hamill) is front and center on Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017). She (Fisher) thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been."

Fisher’s untimely death caused rewrites of the original screenplay with Lucasfilm stating they would not attempt to digitally recreate her character’s likeness like they did with the actress’ approval for her one scene in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016); a decision which had fans wondering how her character’s absence would be explained in episode IX. Enter once again the wonders of digital technology with director Abrams’ announcing her character would be brought back for the final installment using deleted scenes from both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

“Finding a truly satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker saga without her eluded us,” Abrams said in a statement in July 2018 in an article in The Washington Times. “We were never going to recast, or use a CG character. With the support and blessing from her daughter, Billie [Lourd], we have found a way to honor Carrie’s legacy and role as Leia [Organa] in Episode IX by using unseen footage we shot together in Episode VII.”



Therein lies part of the problem with the Rise of Skywalker. Seeing Fisher’s scenes as Leia made me understand why those shots landed on the cutting room floor in the first place. (Warning-spoilers ahead) As members of the Resistance mourn Leia’s death in the first hour, I found it hard not to be reminded of the actress’ passing four years ago.

At its worst, the Rise of Skywalker’s screenplay is best described as “half-assed” – a typical rush job that’s befallen many sequels past where the studios’ powers-that-be limit the creativity on what the director and/or screenwriter(s) can do.

Lucas' villain for 7-9 - a female Sith Lord.

The recent revelations I read in a new coffee table book called The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005 in which Lucas revealed to author, Paul Duncan, what episodes 7-9 might have been had he chose not to sell the franchise to Disney in 2012 and again take the reigns for the third trilogy like he did for the prequels. I couldn’t help but dwell upon what might have been had Lucas returned to the franchise he started.

“I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren. Episodes VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War,” Lucas told Duncan.“‘Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?’ Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.”

“They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country, and their own rebellion. There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos,” Lucas continued. “The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons—he brings all the gangs together. [Maul]’s very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.”

Instead of Driver’s Kylo Ren as the antagonist, Lucas stated the villain would have been a red female tattooed Sith Lord trained by Darth Maul from the Phantom Menace and Solo: A Star Wars Story named Darth Talon.

Lucas' proposed villains for 7-8-9.

“Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books, as his apprentice,” Lucas explained. “She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over. The movies are about how Leia—I mean, who else is going to be the leader?—trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.”

“By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.”

Oh if only…

Seconds after seeing that famous quote “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” that no Star Wars movie could live without flash across the big screen, my heart sank upon reading the three words that opened episode IX.

“The dead speak!”

Reading that brought to my mind another quote uttered throughout all nine Star Wars movies by the main characters.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

I am no video editor, let alone a copy editor (though I have gotten better over the years as I consider myself the Stanley Kubrick of writing meaning I will go through over fifty rewrites of an opinion piece before I’m happy with it the way the legendary director shot more than one take of a scene when making movies before deciding which shot to use).

The first hour of episode IX is hampered by clumsy fast-pace editing as though there was more to various scenes but got cut due to time constraints. Certain characters like the First Order’s General Hux (Domhall Gleeson) suddenly turn traitor with not much reasoning as to why other than he wants to see “Kylo Ren fail.” Richard E. Grant’s role as the First Order’s leader, General Pryde has lesser lines to say than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killer cyborg said in The Terminator (1984). It’s as if Grant took the role without reading the script just because he wanted to be in a Star Wars movie. I still don’t fully understand how Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) are related and even if I read the screenplay I still wouldn’t get it.

What this script needed was someone who was familiar with this universe and these characters since the original trilogy and that person should have been screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan who co-wrote the scripts for The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Force Awakens (2015) and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). I would not have been surprised if Kasdan had a better way of explaining Leia’s absence without having to use her deleted scenes in the opening crawl than go off with the current screenplay explaining that the Emperor never died in episode VI when Darth Vader threw him down that chasm aboard the second Death Star and was back from the dead decades later.

That being said there’s a lot I embraced during film’s second hour as the end drew near. I enjoyed seeing the original cast, albeit briefly and not a moment by them was wasted. Blink once and one might have missed the walk-on cameo of a certain rebel pilot who lived to battle the Empire’s two Death Stars. Anyone hard of hearing either because of the theater’s sound system or the one they got at home might have missed hearing the ghostly voices of Jedi Knights past from the prequels who Rey hears as she lays dying in the film’s climax in her battle with the Emperor.

I loved the Emperor’s lair which looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno as one of the nine levels of Hell if not inspirations of how artist Ralph McQuarrie envisioned what the villain’s sanctuary should look like for Return of the Jedi.



Oscar winning composer John Williams’ musical score brought back memories of the soundtracks he did for episodes 4-6 and evoked a sense of finality given his comment in 2018 found on several websites that episode IX would be the last Star Wars film he’d do a score for.

After seeing Fisher’s Leia the past five films exhibit abilities that she too can use “The Force” it was great to see her finally, albeit a younger digital version of herself, wield a lightsaber while training on Endor with Luke following the Empire’s downfall.

In my 2017 review of The Last Jedi I wrote of Rian Johnson’s intention to do a whole new Star Wars trilogy in the coming years with new characters who would have no ties to the previous movies. That may be the real test whether audiences flock to the box office to see those films, should Disney/Lucasfilm give the go-ahead which isn’t likely. Up until now the only reason audiences bought advance tickets to see episodes 7-9, prior to their release before every Christmas, is because they featured the original cast who grew up watching them in episodes 4-6.

I wrote in that review of how The Last Jedi reminded me of what the filmmakers did in giving Captain Kirk (William Shatner) a final send-off in Star Trek: Generations (1994) and years later, Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in the new set of Star Trek (2009-2016) movies. They paid homage to the original characters while introducing audiences to new ones and stories. In giving us new characters like Jedi trainee Rey, First Order traitor Finn (John Boyega), rebel pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), the soccer ball droid BB-8 of the Resistance, and villains, Kylo Ren and General Hux of The First Order, the powers-that-be over at Disney/Lucasfilm did just that with this new trilogy but not without giving the original cast from 1977 to 1983 a proper send-off.

In the end, The Rise of Skywalker got to me emotionally, but it was more of sadness than joy and that wasn’t the emotion I was looking forward to having when the end credits rolled.

Of the nine installments along with the two standalone movies, I consider episode IX to be the one I liked the least. With all the praise and backlash the Star Wars films received since 1977, I’m reminded of a meme I saw on Facebook or somewhere on the Internet in 2017 that said, “Star Wars is like sex and pizza. Even when it’s bad it’s still good.”

©12/16/20