(upbeat string music)
- Hey, Wisecrack-- Jared here, coming from the self-isolating comforts of my own apartment.
And let me tell you, I got a bad feeling about this… No, I’m not just talking about my
dwindling supplies of Top Ramen and Coffee. But, well, this --
- I Have a bad feeling about this - I got a bad feeling about this
- I got a bad feeling about this - I’ve got a bad feeling about-
- K! - Quiet!
- Yes, the time has finally come to delve into the least controversial subject on the
internet
(Orchestral strings)
A little yarn called ‘Star Wars’.
When The Rise of Skywalker was set for release, director JJ Abrams promised this final entry
in the saga would tie up everything that had come before. Per the filmmaker: this wasn’t
just the end of a single movie or even a trilogy, it was the end of an entire nine film saga.
It had to be the end of not just three movies, but nine movies.
The question, of course: Could The Rise of Skywalker possibly tie up every loose end
and story thread in a satisfying way? I mean -- this is a gargantuan, seemingly impossible
task… and yet somehow, they did it!
After the film’s release, The Rise of Skywalker was lauded as the best Star Wars film of all
time, and the internet came together in universal celebration… Oh, wait. Sorry, I was imagining
an alternate timeline where going out to the grocery store isn’t an episode of Black
Mirror. No, The Rise of Skywalker was, of course, a colossal disappointment -- filled
with awkward exposition, plot-holes, and strange retconning of its predecessors.
So what the hell happened? How did The Rise of Skywalker fail so absolutely? Well, the
answer lies in the past. Ya know, that thing the last film kinda-sorta tried to kill.
- Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
- Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on The Rise of Skywalker: What Went Wrong? And, of
course, spoilers ahead for the whole Skywalker Saga.
Alright let’s get into a quick recap. The Rise of Skywalker begins with The Resistance
intercepting a message that Palpatine is somehow not only alive & well, but amassing a fleet
of ships on the hidden planet Exegol. Our heroes - Rey, Finn & Poe - go in search of
a wayfinder that will lead to the mysterious planet. Meanwhile Kylo Ren (at the behest
of Palpatine) is tasked with killing Rey and ending the Jedi once and for all. From there
-- you get your typical lightsaber duels, chases, rescue missions, and cameos by beloved
characters
There’s even some new character revelations and backstories: Kylo basically tells Rey
not to pay attention to anything that happened in The Last Jedi.
- They were filthy junk traders. Sold you off for drinking money.
- (sniffels) - They’re dead. In a pauper’s grave in
the Jakku desert.
- Instead -- turns out Rey isn’t a “nobody,” but actually--
- You don’t just have power. You have his power. You’re his granddaughter.
- This is followed by some more lightsaber duels, chases, and rescue missions interspersed
with a classic character heroically sacrificing themselves.
The film culminates in an aerial battle between The Resistance and The First Order, while
Rey faces off against Palpatine with the help of bad-guy-gone-Light Kylo Ren. Rey kills
Palpatine, but in doing so dies… Of course, 10 seconds later, Kylo brings her back to
life, sacrificing himself in the process. We end with Rey taking up the mantle of the
Skywalkers.
- Who are you? - I’m Rey.
- Rey who? - Rey Skywalker
- If all this sounds very familiar -- like you’ve seen this same story play out before…
Well, that’s because you have. Oddly enough, George Lucas spells it out…in a behind-the-scenes
featurette on the making of The Phantom Menace. Lucas explains how Anakin is directly modeled
after Luke Skywalker.
- You see the echo of where it all is going to go. Instead of destroying the Death Star,
he destroys the ship that controls the robots. Again it’s like poetry, they sort of, they
rhyme.
- For Lucas -- the story of Star Wars was all about how history is constantly repeating
itself. There are hundreds of ‘echoes’ in the prequels directly correlating to the
original trilogy: A young Anakin blows up the Control Ship just as Luke will blow up
the Death Star. Both guys lose a hand in a lightsaber duel. Obi Wan watches helplessly
as his mentor Qui-Gon Jinn is killed by Darth Maul, mirroring Obi Wan’s own eventual demise
with Luke helplessly watching from the sidelines. And it isn’t just these plot elements that
bridge the two series together. Even the visual language of the prequels directly mirrors
the original trilogy…
To quote another sci-fi epic: All of this has happened before, and all of this will
happen again..
- All this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
- There’s one person who took Lucas’s approach to heart: J.J. Abrams. In an interview
for The Force Awakens, Abrams stressed the importance of repetition:
“Part of the story of this movie is history repeats itself.”
But Abrams took Lucas’s approach one step further, getting super meta. To the filmmaker,
it wasn’t just history that was repeating, but the actual films themselves.
“[I wanted] to tell a story that was not just history repeating itself, but a story
that embraced the movies that we know as the actual history of this galaxy… This was
not about a nostalgia play. It felt, to me, like a way of saying, 'Let’s go back to
a Star Wars that we know, so we can tell another story.”
For Abrams, the fact that The Force Awakens is pretty much a carbon copy of A New Hope
is in and of itself the point. For a pop culture savant like Abrams, it’s not enough to merely
echo the events that came before. Instead, he has to repeat them and copy the previous
trilogy wholesale. Thus Rey’s a stand in for Luke, Kylo for Darth Vader, Poe for Han
Solo… Even the basic story is the same: A group of rebels fight against a nefarious
imperialist army. Hell, there’s even a droid with an important message that can turn the
tides of the war.
Now, Lucas and Abrams aren’t the first people to claim history has a tendency to repeat
itself. This notion dates all the way back to the dialectic badboy himself -- Georg Wilhelm
Hegel. In Hegel’s Lectures on The Philosophy of History, the philosopher famously stated
that revolutionary acts always tend to occur twice.
Per Hegel: “In all periods of the world, a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s
opinions, when it repeats itself… By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter
of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.”
As proof, Hegel cited the formation of the Roman empire. See-- Caesar first led a revolution
to take over Rome, end the Republic, and become its de facto Emperor. Many objected to Caesar’s
reign, though, leading to a second revolution, in which he was assassinated. But in the aftermath,
this second revolution only reinforced the idea that one single Emperor was needed to
rule, in effect cementing Caesar’s initial revolution to destroy the republic. In a nutshell--
the revolution has to happen a second time to make the first one work.
The latest trilogy of Star Wars films adopts this same philosophy. In the original trilogy,
the rebels defeat Emperor Palpatine and the Empire. But this revolution is short lived.
In the ashes of the Empire’s defeat, The First Order rises to power -- thereby prompting
a second revolution. In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey, Finn & Poe lead this second rebellion
to victory, finally cementing the Rebel’s victory that came before. It’s pretty much
exactly as Hegel himself described-- the revolution repeating twice in order to fully take effect.
Yet in channeling the spirit of Hegel, Abrams has fallen into a kind of historical trap
set forth as an addendum to Hegel’s philosophy.
In 1852, philosopher Karl Marx stated that history doesn’t quite repeat itself, instead
it parodies itself. As he writes: “Hegel [stated] that all great world-historic facts
and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce.”
For Marx, when a revolution repeats itself, it’s not the cement that reinforces the
original, but is instead a mockery of what came before. Marx most famously applied this
criticism to Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon -- who, much like his uncle, led
a rebellion to seize France and become Emperor. Louis even led his coup on the anniversary
of his uncle’s coronation as the Emperor of France. Yet for Marx, Louis was nothing
but a “caricature of the old Napoleon,” dressing up like his famous uncle, repeating
his same populist rhetoric, but betraying Napoleon’s own principles.
For Marx, lil’ Louis “duplicates” the cult of Napoleon in order to legitimize himself.
But without the values of his uncle, he became nothing more than a hollow parody. History
had repeated, but merely as a farce of the original.
Just like Napoleon 2.0 dressed up as his legendary uncle without understanding what made him
a competent leader, Rise of Skywalker dresses itself in the nostalgia of Star Wars without
understanding what made the original trilogy great. Instead of crafting a new mythos, the
film borrows from what’s come before -- using the exact same plot points, archetypes, and
even sets. But the end result becomes nothing more than a parody of its predecessors.
For example, consider how The Rise of Skywalker treats Rey’s flirtations with the Dark Side.
This is the same arc as Luke’s in the Return of the Jedi. But in that film, Luke truly
did grapple with joining his father, at one point even succumbing to his darker impulses.
Yet in The Rise of Skywalker, this arc is never fully dramatized. Rey has a dark-vision,
does a little force lightning, and that’s pretty much it. Palpatine tries to tempt Rey
into succumbing to her darker impulses, just as he tempted Luke. But Rey barely flinches
from her morals. It’s all talk. The ‘arc’ exists simply for the sake of repetition.
It’s just as Marx said -- history repeats, first as tragedy and then, well, as this--
- (scream)
- Even The Rise of Skywalker’s twists are lifted from the original trilogy -- the Rey-Palpatine
granddaughter reveal is basically just a watered down--
- I am your father
- But the Palpatine reveal lacks any of the dramatic weight of its predecessor. In the
original trilogy, Luke believed his father was a Jedi hero who was betrayed and murdered
by Darth Vader.
- A young Jedi named Darth Vader… who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped
the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.
- Thus when the big Vader turn happens, it shatters everything Luke believed to be true.
It undermined the foundation of his moral compass. His father wasn’t a hero but the
villain who betrayed the Jedi, and killed his surrogate father. Now let’s look at
Rey: Rey thinks her parents were junk traders who abandoned her. So the reveal that Palpatine
is her grandfather doesn’t hold the same emotional weight. It’s not like she wanted
to be a great Jedi to emulate her dead parents. Also, Rey hasn’t even met Palpatine yet,
and knows nothing about him other than that he’s a bad guy. And once she finds out Palpatine
is her grandfather, not much changes. He’s still just a guy that needs to be defeated.
Her world hasn’t been shattered in the same way that Luke’s was. If anything -- the
Palpatine twist is more a revelation for fans as they recount all the great prequel memes
they’ve seen.
Rise of Skywalker is filled with these moments. Like Louis dressing up like his uncle, the
film incessantly dresses itself up like the originals, repeating word for word, shot for
shot, what happened in them - but without any of the context that made these moments
work.
These moments only exist as hollow call-backs. Any emotional or dramatic heft is entirely
dependent on the viewers relationship to the original trilogy. Just look at how Rise of
Skywalker butchers Han Solo’s most famous line--
- Dad… - I know.
- This, of course, harkens back to one of the most famous moments in Empire Strikes
Back.
- I love you! - I know.
That simple exchange was the culmination of Han and Leia’s tumultuous will-they-or-won’t-they
romantic relationship. The reason the line has become a touchstone for the characters
and the series as a whole is because of the build-up beforehand. The original films put
in the work with their relationship to make this single line iconic. But in the Rise of
Skywalker, the line’s re-used just as a reference for fans. It doesn’t have any
narrative value in the film except as a way to remind viewers of a movie they feel nostalgic
for. Rise of Skywalker is built on references, but it doesn’t take into account the hundreds
of moments beforehand that made these iconic moments work: the relationships, the characters,
the world-building that were the foundation to the original series success. And without
this footing, these references are just that -- hollow and empty, a farce of the original
trilogy.
Rise of Skywalker becomes so obsessed with harkening back that it even sacrifices logic
and its own characters’ motivations at the behest of these ‘call backs.’
For one-- How the heck is Palpatine even alive? Why bring him back as the villain in the first
place? Well, let’s take it from JJ Abrams--
- The more we talked about it, the more inevitable it felt. That this character who was so important
in the first two trilogies, come back, in some form.
- That’s the truth in a nutshell. Palpatine is the villain only because he’s the villain
from the first six films. Does it make any sense that the Emperor has somehow survived
being thrown down a reactor shaft, and blown to smithereens in Return of the Jedi?… Ehh,
Rise of Skywalker doesn’t care.
- Somehow Palpatine returned. (Sad music)
- Without any clear, logical reason for Palpatine’s return, the character feels like a farce of
who he once was. Even Palpatine’s motivations now don’t make a lick of sense. He sends
Kylo to kill Rey; yet when Rey shows up and confronts him at the end of the film, Palpatine
changes his tune completely --
- I never wanted you dead, I wanted you here
- This, yet again, is a direct call-back to the original trilogy where Palpatine tried
to convert Luke to the dark side.
- I’m looking forward to completing your training. In time you will call me Master.
- Thus the only reason why Palpatine’s motivation in Rise of Skywalker changes… is to mirror
his motivation in Return of the Jedi.
And Rise of Skywalker is littered with these inconsistencies-- How does Palpatine suddenly
amass a fleet of ships, all equipped with planet destroying weapons? It doesn’t matter
-- because Rise of Skywalker has to end with an aerial space battle, just like Return of
the Jedi.
The Rise of Skywalker attempts to elevate itself to the heights of the original films
by playing on their success, structure, and nostalgia… But instead, the film becomes
nothing more than a sad copy of a copy. It’s so obsessed with harkening backwards that
it never creates an identity of its own. History has now become Star Wars' own undoing.
But what do you guys think? Are we being too hard on the ninth Star Wars film, or is it
really just a bargain bin version of the Return of the Jedi? Let us know what you think in
the comments. Please don’t yell at us. A big thanks to all our patrons for supporting
our podcasts and the channel. Execute order 66 on that subscribe button, and as always,
thanks for watching. Peace.