It's October 2012. Lance Armstrong is outed as a cheat and sponsors abandon him in droves. Boosted by his unexpected cameo along Her Royal Highness at the London Olympics, Daniel Craig's new outing as 007 smashes box office records in the UK. Malala Yousafzai is gunned down by the Taliban. Justin Timberlake marries Jessica Biel. Walt Disney acquires the rights to the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion.
Only one of these images is uplifting.
Three years later, it's October 2015 and the official trailer for Disney's Star Wars: The Force Awakens lands on the internet.....
I am six years old again: I'm grinning from ear to ear and the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. I book twenty tickets for midnight of the opening night.
THE FORCE AWAKENS
I will never not want to watch The Force Awakens. It is, hands-down and with very little hesitation, not just my favourite Star Wars film but my favourite film, period.
If you're not already a fan of The Force Awakens I'm not going to try and win you round because this discussion has circled round and round the internet a million times already, don't worry. If you've followed me through all of my Rewatch-athon reviews you'll already know that I've been siding with the films that entertained me over those that laid out the Star Wars universe and lore in great and satisfying depth or detail. I loved the sense of humour in A New Hope over the way The Phantom Menace veered between slapstick pratfalls and deadpan seriousness. I was swept up by the excitement of Rogue One's battle scenes over the breathless but pointless action of Attack of the Clones. And even in the great Empire Strikes Back it was the relationships between the lead characters that had me hooked rather than learning more about the nature of the Force.
Yes, I hear all those people who just call it a rehash of A New Hope and I agree a little bit, at least superficially (although I think it's actually a pretty different film when you dig under the surface). I really wish that Starkiller Base hadn't been quite such an obvious Death Star clone, or that JJ Abrams hadn't so clearly put the Rathtars in just to tick the Indiana Jones/rolling ball thing off his bucket list. But I can shrug all those annoyances off because that's not what I'm into Star Wars for.
Fun. Excitement. Characters. The Force Awakens delivers all these things to me in spades.
Rey, Kylo and Finn would easily all fit within my top five Star Wars characters (at least the version of Finn that we meet in The Force Awakens). "He's just a rubbish Darth Vader" the internet loved to say about Kylo, to which I thought 'yes, that's the point'. He's not ready but he's been pressured into playing a part that doesn't fit him, to be a figurehead for the First Order even though he knows deep down that the boots are too big for him to fill. He's conflicted and scared and weak and only knows how to cover it up by hiding behind a mask and lashing out with rage. That's way more interesting to me than Darth Vader was in A New Hope.
Finn is the stormtrooper who only wants to run and hide but whose character arc sees him finding something worth standing and fighting for - Rey - even against incredible odds. Finn's just a grunt who only knows how to follow orders, but when he finds himself the only thing between Kylo Ren and Rey then he's going to grab that lightsaber and go down swinging even though he knows it's certain death.
And Rey... there's something about Rey I can't identify that just made her so compelling as a character. There's a confidence and a poise to her that wasn't there for Luke the whiny farmboy in A New Hope and it really works for me. Rey leads when Luke would follow, and although I know a lot of the internet hated her 'Mary Sue' traits of turning out to be good at everything I always saw that as being a mark of just how special this girl from Jakku was going to be. She was always a somebody. But also in that performance, and you can see from Daisy Ridley's audition tape that they were casting for it, there's so much pure emotion... Rey gets terrified, furious, wondrous, frustrated - she's a real person, a rounded character not the plot device that the 'Mary Sue' moniker makes out.
And the Millenium Falcon. And Han and Chewie back together. And BB-8 is great fun. Oh, and "It's the Resistance". I like the design on all the First Order stuff, I like Captain Phasma, I even like General Hux regardless of how little he's in it, we're given enough to see how he and Kylo and being played off against each other. It's a funny movie, it's an exciting movie, and I love the characters both old and new.
Fun. Excitement. Characters.
The Empire Strikes Back is definitely the better film. But this one is my favourite.
Force Rating: 9/10
THE LAST JEDI
Unfortunately an unexpected side effect of being possibly the world's #1 fan of The Force Awakens is that I detested The Last Jedi all the more as it took all the things that I loved about the first film and threw them away. All the characters took immediate turns for the worse - Finn pratfalled his way into this film squirting gunk only to be shunted off into a sidequest to repeat his character arc from The Force Awakens, Rey's emotional contortions are left behind as she dons the trademark deadpan Jedi straight face from Attack of the Clones and Kylo spends half the film channeling Jacob from Twilight. Don't even get me started on this version of Luke Skywalker that we're given, I think Mark Hamill and I are on the same team there.
Coming into this rewatch I was fully ready to hand out a -2/10 Force Rating to The Last Jedi.
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| In the cinema I pretty much noped out of The Last Jedi the second this happened. |
Then, as sat there watching The Last Jedi and mentally composng this blog about how much I love The Force Awakens, I realised I'd been really unfair to the film every other time I'd watched it. I was going to say something along the lines of 'don't judge it for the film you wanted it to be, judge it for the film that it is'... and I had certainly not been doing that for The Last Jedi.
So this time I watched it with new eyes.
Yes, my boy Finn gets shafted with his character arc but at least in this film Poe actually gets to have a character - he gets personality flaws and learns lessons and everything. Yes, all of the potential of Rey's origin apparently gets blown off as she's a 'nobody', and the arc of her training at the hands of Luke doesn't go the way I may have wanted but it is a pretty satisfying arc, even if it's not the arc I wanted. Yes, Kylo flip-flops his way annoyingly through the whole film trying to make you guess which side he'll land on but ultimately his line of letting the past die is a great one. It's not an ethos I want to hear because I'm a Star Wars fan and I don't want the past to die, I want it to be recycled and respun endlessly to entertain me... but he's probably got a point.
And so the Holdo Maneuver was stupid, but so was Starkiller Base and I overlooked that. And the Porgs are a bit daft and hokey but so were the Rathtars and I overlooked that. Phasma comes and goes in two seconds but I overlooked "I'm in charge now Phasma, I'm in charge!". And I know people seem to hate the crank call at the start but I like funny things and I thought it was funny.
I still can't say that I like The Last Jedi because so many things do grate with me, and I still feel like I got my chain yanked a few too many times in the name of subverting my expectations. But at least on this rewatch I could see what it was trying to do even if I didn't agree with it, and I don't feel quite so personally aggrieved by the fact it didn't all play out the way I wanted it to.
Force Rating: 6/10
RISE OF SKYWALKER
From my rewatch review of Solo....
"I often think that modern Star Wars fans can be separated into two distinct types: there's those who want love the Star Wars universe and want to see how that develops and how all the pieces and characters and events fit together, and then there's those who have the simpler motivation of simply wanting to be swept up and entertained by a space adventure for a couple of hours. I think Solo probably serves the second group pretty well but massively lets down the first group."
That right there is my capsule review of Rise Of Skywalker.
If you wanted to know how the world of Star Wars had unfolded, how all the pieces fell into place and made sense of the whole. If you valued world-building or well constructed plotting. If you wanted a coherent final chapter to the story told in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi... then my god Rise of Skywalker is a total shitshow.
Nothing makes one iota of sense. A secret world of the Sith we've never heard about before. There's only two ways to find it, which we'd never heard about before. The Emperor is back from certain death, which we'd never heard about before. They can build hundreds of Star Destroyers with superlasers now, which we've never heard about before. Kylo and Rey are a 'diad' in the Force, which we've never heard about before. You can 'lightspeed skip' from one random CGI environment to another and be followed by TIE Fighters in each jump, which we've never heard about before. Rey is the daughter of Palpatine's son, who we'd never heard about before. Jedi can heal things and bring people back to life, which (arguably) we've never heard about before. There's a handy Sith dagger owned by an agent of the Emperor, who we'd never heard about before, that will point to exactly where the Emperor hid his Sith Holocron on the shattered remains of the Death Star so long as your YT-1300 freighter happens to crash in exactly the right spot on the coastline, which we'd never heard about before.
Buuuuuuuuullllllllllllllllllllllllllllllshit.
But if you like fun. And action. And characters....
I actually like Rise of Skywalker quite a lot. I have to turn off a pretty big part of my brain that is screaming at me how much of this is wrong. And on this rewatch-athon occasion that part of my brain was also physically manifest next to me on the sofa by my wife, who kept asking me why things were happening that had nothing to do with any of the films we'd just watched.
But it IS funny. The one bit where Threepio gives the crew his Tourist's Guide to Pasaana and then wonders why they're all looking at him is funnier than pretty much the whole of The Last Jedi. The speedy wit of The Force Awakens was something I really missed in the second film and it's back with a vengeance in Rise of Skywalker.
And it IS exciting. Almost too much so, in fact, the film starts off at breakneck speed and never really slows down for its mammoth runtime. But it does also mean that the almost three hours seem to whizz past, from chase to fight to chase to fight... I certainly shovelled my way through a fair amount of popcorn when I was in my cinema seat.
And it IS full of characters. The gang is all together for this film, pretty much for the first time in the whole series, and it's joyous to have them all bouncing off each other again. Rey gets to be angry and sad and scared and have emotions again, allowing her to be the heart of the movie that she was in Force Awakens. Threepio steals scenes left right and centre whenever he's thrown a line, there's a satisfying end to Kylo/Ben's story arc even if the kiss is unnecessary, the Finn and Poe team is back together. I loved these guys in The Force Awakens and I thought a major mistake of The Last Jedi was splitting everyone up just as I was enjoying them... I get them back in Rise of Skywalker and I'm happy.
And maybe Rey is a Skywalker after all. A line that felt really forced on every other watch made a bit more sense this time. She never had a mother or father in her life and Luke and Leia have filled that gap for her. That's a story that's been told and accepted many times before in other films and TV shows and on this rewatch that little piece really fell into place for me.
Rey can be a Skywalker if she wants to be, that's fine by me.
Oh, Rise of Skywalker is so much bullshit. But I enjoyed the ride.
Force Rating: 7/10
WRAPPING UP
This rewatch-athon has taught me something: I love Star Wars even more than I realised. Something about watching them back to back, and with my wife's casual eyes next to me, has helped me to see some of the flaws I'd been hung up about in a different light.
Probably the only downright BAD Star Wars film is Attack of the Clones and aside from the peerless The Empire Strikes Back the others all have a real mix of flaws and strengths. Watching and enjoying these films is really just about whether you're prepared to go into them with an open mind and to try and enjoy them for what they are rather than get stuck on what they're not, and I think that's especially true when you're a hardcore Star Wars fan like so many of us X-Wing players are.
We could all have written a better ending to the series than Rise of Skywalker... and yet they would all have been different from each other. Our vision of what Star Wars is, what we enjoy about it, what we want from it, is probably too uniquely personal because we're all so invested in it.
Enjoy the films that are there for what they are - I think they're pretty darn good!
Before I sign off, I'm going to indulge a few final rankings and ratings:
OFFICIAL SOTL REWATCH-ATHON FORCE RATINGS
- The Phantom Menace - 4/10
- Attack of the Clones - 2/10
- Revenge of the Sith - 5/10
- Solo - 6/10
- Rogue One - 9/10
- A New Hope - 8/10
- The Empire Strikes Back - 10/10
- Return of the Jedi - 7/10
- The Force Awakens - 9/10
- The Last Jedi - 6/10
- Rise of Skywalker - 7/10
MY PERSONAL PODIUM (it's my party and I'll cry if I want to)
- The Force Awakens
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Rogue One
FAVOURITE CHARACTERS
- Director Krennic
- Kylo Ren
- Rey
- Han Solo
- Luke Skywalker
Honourable Mention: Finn in The Force Awakens
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