The Film Experience

by Ginny O'Keefe

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars fan since I was four years old. I had been eagerly awaiting the release of Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker since 2017. With the film rapidly losing screens now in its 9th weekend and approaching a final box office tally that's significantly less than its predecessor, I began to think about my own enormous disappointment. I must not be alone. To preface my reaction I should say that I have seen EVERY SINGLE Star Wars movie that has been released since I was born more than once in theatres. Until now...

Why? Because I genuinely loathe this movie and it didn’t even take me a full watch to realize it. There is a lot wrong with this film. The clunky editing, the bad MacGuffin-centered storytelling, the regression of almost every single character’s development, the lack of stakes, the Millenium Falcon-sized plot holes, the retconning of the previous two films (one that Abrams even directed himself), the pacing that makes you feel like you’re in the middle of a fever dream, new characters that have nothing to contribute to the story, the very obvious reshoots. And let’s not forget the erasure of Rose Tico (played by the wonderful Kelly Marie Tran who was a breakout in the The Last Jedi and yet received massive online hate).

But the thing about the 'final' movie that left me absolutely heartbroken was the shafting of the leads and heart of the trilogy: Rey (played electrically by the lovely Daisey Ridley) and Ben Solo/ Kylo Ren (the amazing Adam Driver). Their characters were shrouded with mystery and juicy potential when we first met them. As Rian Johnson once said, Rey and Ben “are two sides of the same coin”. They both had struggled in life and on opposite sides of the same war, and both have a power that few had seen before. It scares and fascinates those around them. Their pairing felt right from the second they met in the woods of Takodana in The Force Awakens. Their bond grew in The Last Jedi and throughout that film it blossomed into a beautiful if wary understanding of pain and lonelines, aspects of their lives that they had never shared with anyone else. Or at least, not with anyone who could understand what they were going through. Their bond on screen and their chemistry (thanks to Ridley and Driver) couldn’t not be seen as a suggestion of a complicated romance, and Star Wars always has one of those. I personally wanted to see where their relationship would go. I wanted to see them find happiness and their place in this world. And in my mind (as well as the minds of many others) that place seemed to be at the side of one another.

This is where the trouble starts.

REY

When we first meet Rey in the trilogy, she is struggling to survive on a desolate desert planet. She has no friends or family. She works for her meals (which are barely meals at all). And she is stuck in her ways, believing that if she stays put, her parents (whom she doesn’t remember) will finally come back for her and rescue her from her misery. Then in The Last Jedi she gets a rude awakening. Her parents sold her for drinking money, they were no one special and she was tossed away like trash when she was just a little girl. It was a hard blow for her. But it was something that made sense from a character arc standpoint. She needed to let go of this idealized fantasy of her parents and those that might give her a life worth living because she figures out that she needs to make a life and a legend for herself. It was a powerful message in The Last Jedi, one that said, “It doesn’t matter where you come from or who your parents are, you can become a hero and you can still be someone special.” So, what does The Rise of Skywalker do with this? They retcon it. They basically start her over from scratch. Apparently, Rey is now the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine (a character with confusing motives who has no business whatsoever being in this movie and, according to George Lucas, has never fathered any children) and her parents were actually great people who sold her into slavery to protect her.

This was a cheap move but worse, it reinforced misogynistic fanboy belief that Rey is too powerful on her own; she has to get that power from someone/somewhere. In this case a grandfather. They strip her of her own unique identity by giving her one that makes no sense. Her story isn’t about finding out who she is anymore, it’s about the challenge of being related to an evil man. This movie easily could have granted her a darkness all on her own from her troubled abandoned childhood. But this was something that screenwriter Chris Terrio thought was “too easy” (he actually said that). Kylo Ren even tells her behind his mask, “You have his power” AKA “You’re not that special after all. You’re just related to someone who is.” And the whole notion that Rey’s parents sold their only child into slavery to protect her is so nonsensical that it’s almost laughable. Why should we feel sorry for these people? Who sells their child to a greasy predator like Unkar Plutt to protect them? How drunk were they?

By the end of The Last Jedi Rey is wearing darker robes and her hair is down. There is no doubt that she has gone through a significant change both mentally and physically. She has matured and she has a new mission. She has learned that the Jedi order isn’t all it is cracked up to be and Luke Skywalker cannot be a hero to rely on, she has to rely on herself. The resistance has to fight for themselves. She has grown. But even the hair and costume design of The Rise of Skywalker aids in the retcon mission, “Here put on these fairy wings and tutu and put your hair back up in pigtails.” She wears pure white and has her hair back up and looks like a proxy Leia from A New Hope. Everything is borrowed from the original trilogy: her power, her lineage, and her look.

At the end of The Last Jedi she was heartbroken and tearfully begging Ben Solo to not go down the wrong path. But their development has been pushed back to its volatile misunderstanding from The Force Awakens. She doesn’t see him as Ben Solo anymore, despite all they have learned from each other. Abrams doesn’t understand the concept of balance between the light and the dark. Rey’s beliefs are now, “Jedi good! Anyone else EVIL!”. Seeing things in black and white is not very interesting from a character perspective.

The final kick in the crotch for this heroine is at the end of the film when we see her back on another desolate desert planet, but this one being the home of Luke Skywalker: Tattooine. She’s apparently paying respects to Luke and Leia by burying their lightsabers where Luke was raised. A place that holds nothing but terrible memories for the Skywalker family (just ask Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen), and that Luke hated. She lands on the planet with a smile on her face and slides down a sand dune as a direct callback to her humble beginnings in The Force Awakens (more regression) and has decided to take up the Skywalker name after a random old woman asks her who she is.

It was at this moment, two months back, when I heard the entire theatre let out a collective breath of absolute frustration. Someone in my crowd even shouted an actual “Noooo”. This amazing heroine’s journey over the past two movies has now ended with Rey alone, in another wasteland, still denying who she is. All Rey has ever wanted and craved was a family, to be loved unconditionally. And for some reason the final installment of the new trilogy decides that she relates the most to the Skywalker family, but the only member of the family she has ever truly connected with was Ben Solo (who is literally the LAST Skywalker). Ben knew her secrets and her fears inside and out, but inexplicably she is seen at the end of the film with a Stepford wife smile idolizing two ghost twins, Luke and Leia.

Rise of Skywalker doesn’t even give her the chance to be happy and have a full-fledged romance with someone who is literally her soulmate. I’m not making this up. They explicitly state that she and Ben are one soul in two different bodies. They get one kiss and then he dies. Skywalker perpetuates the anti-feminist notion that if you want to be a strong, complex female character, then you can’t have a romance. It will make you weaker. Romance is something, along with an independent identity, that Rey is denied. One of the worst lines ever muttered in this franchise comes within the first 30 minutes when Rey says to Leia:

“Someday I will be worthy of your brother’s saber”.

Huh? Honey, you’ve literally been wielding it for the past two movies, and when did Luke Skywalker become a God who can do nothing wrong? This saber has literally killed children and was damaged dozens of times. It’s not that special. This film tells Rey that she is unworthy at nearly every opportunity. She can’t be someone all on her own so she has to take up new names and a new heritage that has no emotional resonance and causes a severe disconnect with the audience. Her story now seems to be all about why she doesn’t have a last name when she doesn’t even need one! Rey didn’t have to be related to anyone to be special. She also didn’t need to become a Jedi to achieve a sense of belonging. It breaks my heart when I think about where this character ended up because all I can think about is her line in The Force Awakens when Maz Kanata tells her, “The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead”. Well, apparently her belonging is alone in a desert with stories to tell the ghosts.

BEN SOLO (AKA KYLO REN)

When we first meet Ben Solo he is hidden behind a terrifying mask and a new persona known as Kylo Ren. We learn that since he was a young boy he was groomed and mentally abused by evil Supreme Leader Snoke. His parents (Han and Leia) also struggled with raising their son who held such great power so their relationship with him crumbled. He was sent away to his live with his Uncle Luke when he was a teenager in order to reign in his power and we learned in The Last Jedi that Luke actually contemplated killing him in his sleep because he could sense growing darkness within the boy. That was the last straw for Ben Solo. He ran away from Luke’s training academy and became the feared Kylo Ren. A second in command for the First Order. Ben Solo has done terrible things. We learn more about Ben Solo’s past in The Last Jedi and it puts him and Rey on the same side for once. We see that he isn’t a heartless monster, but troublingly wishes that he could be, so he doesn’t feel pain anymore. A sense of belonging with Rey) and freedom after killing Snoke (his longtime abuser) felt right.

He offers her his hand and to rule the galaxy at his side, she refuses. This is another hard blow for Ben. Rey rejects him and he is now Supreme Leader, but lonelier than ever. Adam Driver gave an unbelievable performance in The Last Jedi, filled with pain and rage but also unexpected gentleness. He made the movie his movie. By the end, though it's quite a leap, you're hoping for his redemption. He is a tortured character with a very complicated past. So, what does The Rise of Skywalker do with him? Torture him a lot more.

In The Last Jedi, Ben Solo was shown maturing and coming out of Vader’s shadow. He destroys his signature terrifying mask in a fit of rage and never puts it back on again for the rest of the film (now the audience gets a chance to look at Adam Driver’s gorgeous face). But in The Rise of Skywalker, he gets the mask put on again and repairs it…a year after he destroyed it. It's a shameful regression and quite frankly, an insult to Driver. Why are you masking one of the best actors of this generation for his final bow in the franchise?!

Adding insult to injury Rey and Luke still even refer to him as Kylo Ren, when in the last movie they were both calling him by his birth name. The latest film, has him playing wannabe Vader again and it’s incredibly uninteresting. We already had a Vader. Ben Solo was never meant to be Vader and that’s the point! But this movie fights his character progression at every point, right down to the mask.

In The Last Jedi, it was revealed that Ben Solo had officially turned to the dark side when he was in his early 20’s at the Jedi academy, after Luke Skywalker tried to kill him in his sleep. Luke failed his nephew by thinking his choice was made to go the dark, when it wasn’t... yet. He had these awful voices in his head since he was a baby that told him he would be abandoned and they fed the growing anger inside him. Recent comics and novelizations and the movies themselves have clearly set up Ben Solo to be a misunderstood victim rather than a true villain. You would think a happy ending and chance at a new life would be what’s in store for him right? Wrong.

The Rise of Skywalker never follows through with any of Ben Solo’s familial relationships. His mother, Leia, dies before he can see her one last time. The only thing he has from his family is a memory that he conjures up of his dead father. That’s the only comfort the trilogy can give him. No force ghosts to help him out or give him a pep talk or any supportive voices in his head. All that support goes to Rey, the “good child” and worthy of support and help. But the final slap in the face for this character comes at the very end. He is tossed in a pit during the climactic battle and the glory of victory is given to Rey. Rey and Ben being a Force dyad (soulmates) would more satisfyingly have suggested that they defeat Palpatine together and create the balancer. When Ben crawls out of the pit with some serious injuries, he gives his life force to Rey in order to save her from the brink of death. He does this out of love and they share a sweet kiss. It is in this one instant we get to see Ben Solo smile. He has finally found happiness and belonging. But this doesn’t last. He falls backwards and then disappears, becoming one with the force. And the editing rushes by it, Rey doesn’t even bat an eyelash…This sacrifice is not played as earned or even celebratory, it's just cynical. No funeral, no memorial, no force ghost magic. Nothing. Even Darth Vader got a freakin’ memorial! The emotional investment with the franchise has always been with the Skywalkers and Episode Nine callously kills off the last one with a pathetic sendoff, making the entire trilogy pointless. His father, uncle and mother all died trying to bring him back to the light. This film even states that Leia gave her up her Jedi training because she had a vision that if she continued on the Jedi path, her son would die. He died anyway…Just kick her while she’s down! They all had hope for him in the end. Every Star Wars movie has been about hope. But this movie puts hope in a blender and presses the ice crusher button.

There’s a reason why so many people (myself included) have connected with Ben Solo and why there has been such an outcry over his meaningless death. It’s because they can relate to him. Ben Solo has been equated to that child in that seemingly perfect family with a mental illness. His parents just don’t know what to do with him because he is a “problem”, so they send him away for his own good hoping to be “fixed”. You would hope that the child in this scenario would get to heal and learn to live with his mental illness and return home to his family. Nope. In Star Wars, the answer is that death is the only way out. If you’ve been abused and depressed your entire life, then there is no chance for happiness now. This movie actually encourages the stigma that mentally ill children need to be “fixed”, and it also feeds into the child’s fear that their family would be better off without them. When I was a teenager struggling with depression, I felt like a terrible daughter. I thought my parents wouldn’t want me like this and I couldn’t be around them. Ben Solo felt the same way. He even explains to Rey, in this film, that due to his “dark nature” he can never return to his mother. He can, the problem is that he believes he can’t. So instead of Ben Solo carrying on his family legacy, this movie replaces him with a “better” child to take up the Skywalker name: Rey. Terrio and Abrams put her in Ben Solo’s place as if saying, “Look, a good kid. Way less problems and complications!” This idea in movies and television that a character whose life has been marred by tragedy and depression can only find happiness and redemption through death, is an unhealthy message. If anything needs to die, it's that message. By the time the credits in my theatre rolled, a girl in front of me said out loud, “So after all that he just dies? After all that bullshit?” Preach sister.

The shafting of Ben and Rey is the most egregious of the final chapter's sins and surely one of the reason for the franchises dwindling power at the box office . The characters and the actors, deserve better. Now I understand why Adam Driver was such a ghost during the promotion of this film, and why Daisy Ridley couldn’t even give a straight answer at the premiere when a reporter asked her if she loved the movie (look it up, I’m not kidding). Honestly, I don’t blame them. As for my final stance on The Rise of Skywalker, as it fades into movie history? For the sake of my mental health, I’ve decided to take the Mariah Carey approach as the film leaves theaters. “I don’t know her.”

Rise of Skywalker is still in theaters. It is expected on DVD and Blu-Ray in April, 2020