Star Wars movies. Directed by J.J. Abrams and released in 2019, The Rise of Skywalker had to bring the already divisive and controversial sequel trilogy to a close, while also trying to provide a denouement to the entire Skywalker saga. Although the film has its fans, the general response from audiences and critics suggests that it failed at that task.
It's fair to say that Star Wars: The Force Awakens, struck the right balance between hewing closely to the first Star Wars movie and introducing some great new elements, but The Rise of Skywalker felt like a lot of fan-service strewn together. But might it have been better with a whole different approach from Disney?
In fairness to The Rise of Skywalker, it had an almost impossible task on its hands. Star Wars is one of the biggest and most beloved pieces of pop-culture in the world, and as such any installment is already under a lot of pressure to deliver the goods. That goes tenfold when you factor in that The Rise of Skywalker was ending over 40-years of storytelling in a single movie, an enormous effort it was ill-equipped to deal with in-part because of the hand it'd been dealt. That's because Disney's trilogy were sequels, but the majority of the plot elements from the first movies were relatively contained to the new story. Old characters returned, the new ones had to deal with the weight of their legacy, and there was plenty of nostalgia, but in of pushing the narrative forward, it was largely reliant on elements introduced in these new movies.
That was particularly difficult for The Rise of Skywalker when it was tasked with rounding out the entire Skywalker saga. The main elements it had to work with were intrinsic to the sequels, rather than all nine movies: the dichotomy of Rey and Kylo Ren, and the battle between the Resistance and the First Order, were the key plot points. If it only had to address those, then the film might've stood a better chance of succeeding. Instead, it had to take those and make them part of a much bigger role: Rey's storyline is suddenly consumed by representing the culmination of the eons-long clash between the Jedi and the Sith; the First Order becomes the Final Order, once more led by Palpatine; the film has to attempt tie-up or reference an unfathomable number of narrative threads and character arcs all in the service of "ending" Star Wars as viewers know it.
In that sense, it's really no surprise that The Rise of Skywalker failed in its mission. The amount it had to deliver was enough to fill two movies, perhaps even more, so condensing it down into a single two-and-a-half-hour installment that concluded its own trilogy and six other movies before it was a huge ask, and it resulted in an overstuffed, often incoherent mess. That's not to say Abrams and is co-writer Chris Terrio shouldn't take their fair share of the blame for many of the decisions involved, ranging from Palpatine's return to The Last Jedi, and more, but that even if they had done a better job, The Rise of Skywalker still would've struggled.
If, instead, The Rise of Skywalker had been able to fully focus on the best elements of the sequels - in particular Rey and Kylo Ren, but also other new faces such as Finn and Poe Dameron (both of whom are short-changed by the final movie) - then it might've been a better movie. It needed to be able to focus on completing all of those stories - there were fascinating directions to take those characters in, but ending the Skywalker saga meant such journeys were cut short to service the bigger picture - and with that, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker could have been a better movie than the one audiences got.
