Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is fun and fantastic (in parts)
There’s swashbuckling and explosions, but Adam Driver is the real star of the ninth and final film in the Skywalker saga
The never-ending story has ended. The last word-crawl about galaxies far away has crawled its way across the John-Williams-fanfared cosmos. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a fitting last movie. It’s long; maddening; fun in bits; fantastic in parts; and so desperate to stir itself into legend that we urge it on, like parents screaming at their tots in an egg-and-spoon race.
Oh go on, Rey (Daisy Ridley), be the story’s striding, radiant, marvel-working Amazon. Oh go on, Finn (John Boyega) and whatever-your-name-is (Oscar Isaac), be the two-man Han Solo the writers so want you to be. (But it takes more than two gamely jobbing tyro-swashbucklers, we realise, to be Harrison Ford.) The only actor in the final series who needs no wishing-on has been Adam Driver. He is its true star. As Kylo Ren, the dark prince, he is so sumptuously troubled, so multidimensionally moody, so craggily crypto-Shakespearean that we believe everything — even, in this new, last film, a moral journey so complex and counterintuitive that it out-switchbacks everyone.
The Empire and the resistance are at it again. Giant oyster shells scream across the voids. Explosions bloom like flowers. A whole bunch of British Isles actors (Domhnall Gleeson, Ian McDiarmid’s ghostly-snarling Emperor, Richard E Grant having a final Withnail-ectomy as menacing General Pryde) stride the cockpits of the Dark Side; while wholesome Americans, two more Brits and a gaggle of droids and beasties fight for the Force.
There are fur’s-breadth ’scapes in the imminent deadly breach. “They’ve got Chewie!” yells Finn — so early it’s not a spoiler — when the walking hearthrug is invited to sample enemy hospitality. (A hundred minutes to go: we know he’ll be back.) More dangerously, C-3PO undergoes brain surgery. Will it damage his nuanced babble; his Jeevesian, even Joycean stream of speaking consciousness?
Last episodes of sagas or series are often no-win propositions. They demand too much. They have to be encompassing; we must re-encounter every main theme and character. (“Can’t leave the party without saying goodbye to . . . ”) So don’t expect death, of an actor or character, to inhibit the completism. I hardly dare ask how Carrie Fisher got to the party, speaking, emoting and decreeing. “Rediscovered unseen footage,” says director JJ Abrams. Seriously? Well then, there must be a Force, negating normal mortality to feed and freshen a mega-franchise.
At the same time a last episode must leave us wanting more. And I’m not sure I do. I have been a paid reviewer for this entire, blow-me-down saga since 1977. Entire rooms and wings of my subconscious are tenanted by Leias and Chewies and Yodas. They disturb me in the night; demand breakfast; surprise me by walking past my windows; play the TV too loud. I can’t say I actually “like” the Star Wars magnum opus. (The best films are still the first two: Stars Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.) But none of us will be the same who have experienced it. Like it or not, they’re part of a family, a parallel family, that will be living with us forever.