star wars the rise of skywalker movie review

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

“If this mission fails, it was all for nothing. What we’ve done. All this time.”

This may just be another inspirational line of dialogue from “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” but I couldn’t help thinking it defined the production of the film, too. After the divisive response to “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the firing of original director Colin Trevorrow , J.J. Abrams swooped back in to make sure the “mission” of this franchise was for something. And you can feel that weight of history and obligation, especially in the first hour of “Skywalker,” as Abrams delivers a movie that practically lifts off directly from “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens,” using that film’s combination of action and fan service as a storytelling template way more than the previous movie. However, the inherent rush that came in revisiting this world four years ago is naturally lessened, replaced by something closer to desperation. Whatever one thinks of “The Last Jedi,” if that film was trying to build a new house on familiar land, this one tears it down and goes back to an old blueprint. Some of the action is well-executed, there are strong performances throughout, and one almost has to admire the brazenness of the weaponized nostalgia for the original trilogy, but feelings like joy and wonder are smothered by a movie that so desperately wants to please a fractured fanbase that it doesn’t bother with an identity of its own.

“The dead speak!” This is the opening line of the crawl of the last “ Star Wars ” movie in the new trilogy, and such an appropriate overture to a film that relies on your knowledge of dead characters to appreciate it. The “dead” in this case is Emperor Palpatine ( Ian McDiarmid ), who is revealed in the prologue to still be alive, planning a return of the Sith and the Empire. He’s been underground on a distant, untrackable planet, where he reportedly created Snoke, waiting for the heir to his throne to lead the resurrection of the Sith in the form of something new called the Final Order. Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver ) finds Palpatine, who instructs him to go find Rey ( Daisy Ridley ). A lot of “Rise of Skywalker” is about finding things or people, especially for the first half.

Rey is with the Resistance, still led by General Leia Organa ( Carrie Fisher ), and including Poe ( Oscar Isaac ), Finn ( John Boyega ), Rose ( Kelly Marie Tran ), Chewbacca ( Joonas Suotamo ), C-3PO ( Anthony Daniels ), and more, but their numbers and hopes are dwindling. The news that Palpatine is back and leading a fleet of ships strong enough to destroy planets means that they need to act quickly or risk total annihilation. Rey learns that she must find something called a Sith Wayfinder to get to Palpatine’s location, and the gang sets off on an adventure to find it.

The midsection of the movie is its most effective. After a clunky first act that’s filled with way too many scenes of people talking about who they are, where they need to go, and what they need to do when they get there, the film finally settles into a groove with an excellent chase scene that somehow both echoes “ Return of the Jedi ” and “ Mad Max: Fury Road .” There is a nice subplot with an old acquaintance of Poe’s named Zorii Bliss ( Keri Russell ), and a fantastic, water-soaked lightsaber battle between Rey and Kylo. These scenes don’t have the weight of course-correcting that drags the first hour or the desperate need to please of the final half-hour. When “Rise of Skywalker” can just be its own fun, sci-fi adventure, it succeeds.

And, to be fair, the craft of “Skywalker” is incredibly high. Abrams knows how to design a major blockbuster like this one, and there are some remarkable set-pieces. He also is an underrated director when it comes to performers and gets the best one that Ridley has delivered to date. She’s the center of this film in many ways, and arguably the best thing about it. (Driver is very good too, for the record. Don’t @ me, Kylo fans.) There are sequences and character beats in “Rise of the Skywalker” that truly work, especially when it doesn’t feel like it’s trying so hard to complete its “mission.” One just wishes they were embedded in a better film overall.

What’s telling about “The Rise of Skywalker” is how much I would have rather just learned more about Poe’s background, or the story behind Zorii, than experience the numbing overkill of the final act of this trilogy. For those who get a chill down their spine at a familiar John Williams composition in just the right place or even locations that this film returns to that you probably never thought you’d see again, “The Rise of Skywalker” offers just enough to make them happy. It’s not unlike a rollercoaster ride in that it has just enough thrills to satisfy fans, but you can also see exactly where the ride begins and ends before you strap in. Real movie magic comes with surprises and risk-taking, and those are undeniably absent here—I believe for the reason that people thought there was too much of both in the last film. I wanted more of Zorii because she’s one of the few characters or plot threads here that feels like it has potential to surprise. Almost everything else has been workshopped, focus-grouped, and even twitter hive-minded to a fine paste. It’s easy to digest, but not that filling or memorable.

Perhaps the best in-movie self-criticism is in the fact that Kylo Ren rebuilds his destroyed mask. Some fans of the series believe that “The Last Jedi” destroyed their favorite franchise, and here’s J.J. Abrams literally picking up the broken pieces and putting them back together. And yet, as he’s told, you can still see the cracks, meant as a criticism of Kylo’s uncertainty but reflective of the movie too. Sometimes you can’t just put things back together, and revisit history in a way that doesn’t feel craven and desperate. People will see the cracks.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Daisy Ridley as Rey
Adam Driver as Kylo Ren
John Boyega as Finn
Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron
Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker
Anthony Daniels as C-3PO
Naomi Ackie as Jannah
Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux
Richard E. Grant as Allegiant General Pryde
Lupita Nyong’o as Maz Kanata
Keri Russell as Zorii Bliss
Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca
Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico
Ian McDiarmid as Darth Sidious / Palpatine
Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian

Writer (story by)

Chris Terrio
Colin Trevorrow
Derek Connolly
J.J. Abrams

Cinematographer

Writer (based on characters created by).

George Lucas
John Williams
Maryann Brandon
Stefan Grube

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Reviews

A beautiful capper to not only just this new trilogy but the entire Skywalker saga...

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 4, 2024

I had a lot of fun with this film, but this finale that supposedly concludes a nine-film franchise has to be the worst out of the entire Skywalker saga.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2023

Though The Last Jedi left more than one question unanswered and plenty of room for developing certain themes that are only hinted at in the film, The Rise of Skywalker strays from Johnson’s direction and takes a different path entirely.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 10, 2023

The lack of artistic integrity plus the constant disappointments regarding each big moment’s climax ruins one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Next time, just build a roadmap, Disney…

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 24, 2023

There’s a fine line between familiarity and predictability, and The Rise of Skywalker crosses that line more than any of the previous chapters. It also undoes or ignores virtually everything that occurred in The Last Jedi.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

The Rise of Skywalker is a messy film that contains too much plot for its own good but also a really entertaining movie that showcases why audiences love Star Wars.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 16, 2023

Star Wars has lost its mystique, and The Rise of Skywalker is to blame.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2023

As for me: this is where I get off the Star Wars train. I was happy enough to wrap up some unfinished childhood business, although if they'd stopped at Force Awakens that would have done the job just as well.

Full Review | Dec 1, 2022

The story is messy, there’s enough plot to fill two movies, and some of its characters need more attention. But this is still very much a Star Wars film and will evoke many of those same old feelings of kid-like joy and excitement for those who allow it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2022

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the creators of the new Star Wars Trilogy must be dedicated environmentalists, because they keep recycling the same old material over and over and over.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

The Rise of Skywalker is a satisfying and spectacular end to the third trilogy.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 12, 2022

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is the best thing the sequel trilogy gave us. The film has way too many flaws, but my fandom couldn't help to enjoy every minute of it. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 7, 2022

Capably made but misguided in its attempts to satiate its fanbase, The Rise of Skywalker marks some kind of end to the franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 22, 2022

The Last Jedi took some narrative risks that didnt pay off, but a follow-up that plays it safe hardly seems preferable. What should feel like an epic conclusion to a 42-year-old story instead acts as proof that the franchise has lost its way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2022

Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver are the MVPs of Rise of Skywalker. Both give their all in their final performances as Rey and Ben Solo.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 18, 2022

The Rise of Skywalker might play it safer than its predecessor, The Last Jedi, but it so effective in its messages that it connects and provides a more a very satisfying conclusion.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

A noteworthy farewell to the Skywalker saga, with the heart and action we have come to love from the Star Wars franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 20, 2021

I had a great time, I loved it!

Full Review | Sep 15, 2021

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final entry in the series' nine-film Skywalker story, is the cinematic equivalent of Anakin and Obi-Wan landing that gigantic ship at the end of Revenge of the Sith's opening space battle.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2021

A disjointed, rushed, and incohesive mess of fan service and B genre plotting.

Full Review | Original Score: 26/100 | Aug 19, 2021

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the Force ghost version of a movie: Review

“I’m doing what you did,” says Rey ( Daisy Ridley ). Who’s she talking to? Does it matter? In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker , newer characters go through old familiar motions, and so do old familiar characters, who won’t die even when they’re dead. Director J.J. Abrams imitates anything from the original trilogy he didn’t already xerox into 2015’s The Force Awakens . Did you see Return of the Jedi ‘s second Death Star in the trailer? If you think that’s the only superweapon in this movie, then Abrams has a thousand bridges in Brooklyn to sell you.

“The dead speak!” proclaims the opening crawl. The voice of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is mysteriously broadcasting across the galaxy. The Emperor expired long ago, so it would be just stupid to assume he is still alive. But what uninspired hack could be resurrecting his image, and to what purpose?

It’s a surprisingly meta concept, since General Leia is still quite prominent. She’s played by Carrie Fisher , despite the performer’s untimely death long before production started. I don’t really know how Fisher’s appearance was created. It looks like a very high-tech combination of unused footage, digital effects, and terrible writing. Her presence plus the Emperor’s shadowy appearance multiplied by other ghosts from the past equals yet another Disney-branded Star Wars looking ever backward, never forward.

The nostalgia festival proves one final kneecap-slice for the heroes of this sequel trilogy. Rey still suffers from a nasty case of flashbackitis, always almost remembering her parents. Her mysterious past is her entire arc now, and Ridley has to spend another adventure staring with pensive urgency, dutifully waiting to find out what character she’s playing.

Along with her friends Finn ( John Boyega ) and Poe ( Oscar Isaac ), Rey’s stuck in one of those fetch-quest plots you tend to get from later Pirates of the Caribbean s. Our heroes need to [ deep breath ] find a green glowing rock on one planet, and the location of that rock is etched onto a special dagger on another planet, but the coordinates are written in a language that can only be translated on another planet.

Keri Russell appears, briefly and awesomely, as a behelmeted old friend. Naomie Ackie plays a new ally who explains her backstory in her only extended dialogue scene, before blastjumping ensues. Isaac gives Poe a new pranksterish edge, which is fun. Finn keeps yelling Rey’s name loudly, which isn’t.

The best thing I can say about Rise of Skywalker is that it is sometimes incoherent on purpose. The Millennium Falcon escapes TIE Fighters by “lightspeed skipping” between locations in short bursts: hyperspace, crazy planet with tentacles, hyperspace, asteroid field, hyperspace, etc.

It’s an offense to whatever spatial reality George Lucas demanded from fighter jets screaming in outer space, and a few scenes in Skywalker represent chaos cinema unbounded from all logic. Rey still sees Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver ) in galaxy-crossed tele-conversations, a contrivance that develops goofy new dimensions. Sacrifices get un-sacrificed, and superpowers become super-DUPER-powers. In a sacred moment of apex silliness, Resistance fighters ride starbeasts of burden across the surface of a low-flying Star Destroyer. If I understand gravity correctly, the evil pilots could defeat the rebel cavalry by just slightly dipping the ship’s port side.

Abrams co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Terrio, who also worked on on Batman v Superman and Justice League , poor guy. Those smash-ups had their own weird fixation on resurrecting dead flesh, but you have to credit Abrams for Rise of Skywalker ’s top-speed pointlessness. He’s always been an excessive filmmaker, and excess is all he has left for his second Star Wars : huge fleets, bigger stormtrooper squads, the most droid pals ever.

Every character suffers, squeezed between action scenes and runscream hyper-emotionality. Kylo Ren’s turn toward counterculture anarchy was the best part of 2017’s The Last Jedi , and now this sequel rewinds him toward another internal Dark-Light thumbwar. I didn’t love Last Jedi , but it’s notable that director Rian Johnson was fascinated by Driver’s face, letting the idiosyncratic actor play simmering rage and melancholy. Abrams’ camera prefers Driver’s towering frame, shooting upward to emphasize his room-filling physicality. Rise of Skywalker ragdolls all its humans. Rey, Poe, and Finn keep crashing, tumbling, and jumping between ships. Just once, couldn’t someone in this sequel trilogy chill out?

If you enjoyed The Last Jedi , you’ll be disappointed by the walkback qualities of this follow-up. Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) gets demoted to screenstaring at the command center. (She can’t join the main adventure because she has to “study the specs of old Destroyers,” now come on.) Another key Last Jedi personality returns with their whole philosophy pointed in an opposite direction. Johnson was anxious about the franchise’s influence, and not shy about suggesting that it would be weird to inherit somebody else’s saga. Abrams is the franchise era incarnate, producing Star Trek s and Mission: Impossible s when he isn’t Cloverfield ing stray ideas into new spin-offs. Unsurprising, maybe, that his tale requires rigid focus on inheritance and legacy. “I will earn your brother’s saber,” Rey tells Leia, still obsessed with another man’s weapon.

There is one exciting planetscape, where greatwall waves crash skyscraper-high. A couple rando stormtroopers jetpack skyward off speeder bikes. “They fly now?” asks Finn. “They fly now!” says Poe. It’s way cool; they never fly again. Unlike the graytech sci-fi of the other recent Star Wars entries, Rise of the Skywalker embraces the operatic possibilities of spaced-out fantasy: hidden planets, forbidden deserts, a dark pyramid. C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) has a moving speech that dissipates into plotstuff. One nefarious character announces the First Order’s intention to “harvest more of the galaxy’s young,” a rather reflexive sub-subplot for a Disney movie. Domhnall Gleeson is off in his own mad farce as officious snarlfart General Hux, who gets the best line in the film.

The story concludes (sure!) the nine-part saga that famously began with a tax dispute on Naboo. The final act aims for tearjerkery with sincere appreciations of franchise lore. Don’t buy it. There’s always been a secret cynicism underpinning Abrams’ Star blockbusters, which adrenalize the pop-est culture of his youth and avoid anything requiring originality or imagination. Now he’s left grasping for source material he hasn’t already replicated — and one late montage even copies a sequence added into Return of the Jedi’s 1997 Special Edition. We need a new franchise designation for this stumbling, bloodless conglomeration of What Once Was. Rise of the Skywalker isn’t an ending, a sequel, a reboot, or a remix. It’s a zombie. Grade: C

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — our spoiler-free review

Far, far away.

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

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I thought a lot about Rey’s bread while I was watching Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . The weird green food is a completely extraneous detail from Rey’s life as a desperate scavenger on the desert planet Jakku, where she began her journey in The Force Awakens , director J.J. Abrams’ first entry in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. But it’s the kind of memorable quirk that makes Star Wars feel like a fantastical world still inhabited by real human beings.

The characters in Rise of Skywalker don’t have time to bake bread, which is understandable for a third-act finale involving a galaxy-spanning war. Unfortunately, they don’t really have time to be human either. Abrams has assembled a sweeping conclusion to Star Wars , pulling together stories that span both real and fictional decades. He’s guiding a deeply nostalgic series past an entry that decried nostalgia: Rian Johnson’s ambitious and polarizing The Last Jedi . It’s a vision that’s far too big for one movie, though — and the resulting film is permanently on fast-forward, too busy ticking off boxes to let audiences revel in its world-shifting twists.

The Last Jedi often felt more like a conclusion to the Star Wars sequel trilogy than a midpoint, either resolving or short-circuiting The Force Awakens’ biggest mysteries. It took a harsh look at the Jedi, the Resistance freedom fighters, and the monstrous Sith, suggesting that these institutions might be fundamentally broken and potentially clearing the way for something new. But Abrams has criticized Last Jedi’s deconstruction-focused approach, and he spends a lot of Rise of Skywalker’s 141 minutes walking those choices back.

This doesn’t mean that Rise of Skywalker simply rehashes earlier Star Wars installments. The film complicates the series’s long-standing alliances between noble Jedi and scrappy rebels on one side and evil empires and monstrous Sith lords on the other. It reveals plot twists that recast major figures’ origins in unexpected ways. It uses a new (to the films, at least) Force power from The Last Jedi to great aesthetic and narrative effect. It’s just determined to deliver as many answers and as much plot momentum as possible, even when slowing down or holding back would give its revelations far more weight.

An interplanetary scavenger hunt with a cat-and-mouse game

The Rise of Skywalker retcons a few particularly controversial points from The Last Jedi , and it starts with just enough distance to let that film’s brutal conflict fade into the background. Instead of being split across several interlocking plots, the three protagonists — Resistance leader Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), former stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), and scavenger-turned-Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) — are facing down a familiar threat that’s linked to villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his quasi-fascist First Order. This fight leads them on a long, planet-hopping adventure that doubles as a cat-and-mouse game between Kylo Ren and Rey, who share a mysterious connection with each other.

A lot of the film amounts to an interplanetary scavenger hunt, and a lot of its stopovers evoke familiar Star Wars settings. But the best vignettes also capture the feeling that this world is bigger than any single story, no matter how high its stakes.

That single story, unfortunately, sweeps the characters along in ways that range from clumsy to downright unsettling. The moment-to-moment banter between Rey, Finn, and Poe (as well as supporting players like C-3PO) can easily carry a scene. But beyond that, most of the conversations are bluntly expository, designed to arrange everyone in the right place at the right time with the right justification.

Daisy Ridley is Rey in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

The film introduces new supporting figures like the criminal Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell) who has a snazzy crimson jumpsuit and a long-buried connection to Poe, and the freedom fighter Jannah (Naomi Ackie) who shares some important background with Finn. But Zorii, in particular, is more of a narrative device than a person because, in general, characters’ convictions and motivations matter far less than their utility to the plot. At multiple points, they exclaim that they have no idea why they’re making some horribly risky decision, which feels almost like a metatextual cry for help. And Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), who could be the heart of the film, is ill-served by the snippets of footage that could be shot before Fisher’s death — consisting almost entirely of vague, contextless platitudes.

The Rise of Skywalker plays with the expectations set by series like The Avengers where a final installment is a sign that all bets are off and anyone can die. The film feints at darkness more than it actually plumbs it, but it builds on The Last Jedi’s exploration of guilt and sacrifice. Its protagonists are determined to defeat the First Order, but after their earlier bitter defeats, they’re aware that heroes don’t always triumph.

The film addresses a lot of questions, but it doesn’t seem very interested in the answers

Or at least… they should be. The story delivers a few moments that should be heart-wrenching for its protagonists, putting beloved characters at risk. They’re passed over so quickly, though, that there’s no time for anyone to react. Star Wars has long struggled to categorize exactly which lives matter; the sequel trilogy asks us to care for individual stormtroopers like Finn but still cheer their deaths as brainwashed mooks, for example, and it depicts droids as fully sentient entities while still casually accepting them as property. But The Rise of Skywalker pushes this to the breaking point, depicting what could be one of the most painful personal sacrifices in the entire nonology — and then bizarrely playing it for laughs before taking the whole thing back.

The exception to all of these problems is Rey’s ambivalent antagonism with Kylo Ren, which provides some of the film’s most fleshed-out and engaging scenes — as well as a series of complex lightsaber battles that rival anything in the earlier sequel films. The Star Wars sequels have always centered on the idea that both characters are struggling with their own personal light and dark sides, even as they’re attempting to turn the other toward good or evil. In earlier films, this conflict has been filtered through larger battles between the First Order and the Resistance, as well as secondary villains like Supreme Leader Snoke and Kylo Ren’s partner General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson). In The Rise of Skywalker , the pair finally get a chance to confront each other as individuals.

But The Rise of Skywalker too rarely connects its big plot reveals to their human consequences. Abrams delivers answers to some of The Force Awakens’ biggest questions. Critics of The Last Jedi were upset with Rian Johnson for evading these same questions, but the answers are almost more confounding than silence. They raise possibilities that could keep Star Wars fans busy for years because they cut so close to so many of the entire series’s big relationship dynamics. It’s frustrating that the film doesn’t acknowledge this better. Instead, once the puzzle box has been opened, its contents are no longer treated as interesting.

There’s plenty of spectacle and space-fighting to keep The Rise of Skywalker entertaining. Minute to minute, it’s an enjoyable movie. And at its brightest points, it captures Star Wars at its best. But Abrams just hasn’t pared down the bombast enough to keep his story grounded — and with the trilogy at its end, it’s strange to be left with as many new questions as resolutions.

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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: Revolution No. 9

Resistance is futile. Rey, Finn and Poe are back; so is Kylo Ren. No spoilers here.

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By A.O. Scott

Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place.

You know I’m right, even if you insist on making a case for “The Empire Strikes Back” or “ The Last Jedi ,” to name the two installments that are usually cited as the best individual movies. (Please do not insist.) At least since “The Return of the Jedi” (1983), the point of each chapter has been consolidation rather than distinction. For a single film to risk being too interesting would be to imperil the long-term strategy of cultivating a multigenerational, multinational fandom. “The Rise of Skywalker” — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the series has evolved — or was designed, if you favor that theology — to average out over time, to be good enough for its various and expanding constituencies without alienating any of them. Over the years, my own allegiances have shifted. When I was a kid back in the “New Hope” era , I liked the action and the wisecracks and Princess Leia. By the end of Anakin Skywalker’s grim journey to the Dark Side in “Revenge of the Sith” I had developed a scholarly preoccupation with the political theory of galactic imperialism. More recently I’ve grown fond of some of the cute new droids and space creatures, and also of the spunky resistance fighters with their one-syllable names. Rey. Finn. Poe.

They are back, of course — played with unflagging conviction by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac. Also back is everyone’s favorite Dark-Side-curious emo-Jedi bad boyfriend, Mr. Kylo Ren, formerly known as Ben Solo and irrefutably embodied by Adam Driver. I will say very little about what any of these people — or C-3PO, Chewbacca, BB-8 and any new characters or surprises — actually do for two and a half hours, because the spoiler-sensitive constituency is especially large and vocal.

Also because they do and say quite a lot. “The Rise of Skywalker” has at least five hours worth of plot, and if that’s your particular fetish, I’m not going to get in the way of your fun. Suffice to say that various items need to be collected from planets with exotic names, and that bad guys cackle and rant on the bridges of massive spaceships while good guys zip around bravely doing the work of resistance. Mysteries are solved. Sacrifices are made. Fights are fought in the air, on the ground and in deep cavernous spaces where … but that’s enough for now.

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Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker Review

19 Dec 2019

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker

For the third time in many adults' lifetimes, a conclusion of the Skywalker saga. Once again, a trilogy has built to this finale; once again, the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. This one features no Sarlaac pit, nor is it as much of a step up from its predecessor as Revenge Of The Sith . But it does feel like a conclusion to the story that director JJ Abrams began in The Force Awakens , for better and sometimes for worse.

Although The Last Jedi split fan opinion, it unquestionably caused the biggest shake up in Star Wars lore since that revelation in The Empire Strikes Back . That opened up the story’s universe to exciting new possibilities: to characters beyond the small Skywalker group and to injustices and shortcomings in the Resistance as well as the Empire. Yet Abrams almost entirely ignores the doors it opened and goes back to his first instinct, sticking close to elements established in The Force Awakens . So abandoned ideas like the Knights of Ren are back, and the conversation about Rey's parentage that Johnson seemed to lay to rest is reborn like the Emperor. Perhaps it should feel like a relief after Last Jedi ’s shocks, but instead the effect is to make this story feel like a step backwards at times rather than a great leap forward, and to make the whole trilogy feel disjointed instead of just one film in it.

Still, some elements are wonderful. Daisy Ridley 's Rey is training now under Leia ( Carrie Fisher ) and has become more confident in her power, if not in her capacity to resist the Dark Side. She is still linked, bound even, to Adam Driver 's Kylo Ren, and their clashes gives the film most of its best emotional scenes. Their strange connection has outlasted Snoke and grown stronger; they can duel no matter where they are in the galaxy, and taunt each other with visions of the future that support their own beliefs. And Ridley’s terrific, tormented by the idea that it is her destiny to go to the Dark Side and afraid of her own power.

She and Kylo are therefore strangely well matched. Rey is passionately invested in her friendships and her cause; he is passionately cynical and suspicious of everyone. Rey is convinced by Finn that she doesn’t have to do everything alone here; Kylo still has terrible impulse control and flits off after her instead of Supreme Lead-ing the First Order whenever possible. But don’t worry, he leaves Domnhall Gleeson 's Hux and Richard E. Grant 's Allegiant General Pryde in charge, both sneering competitively and delightfully at, well, the entire universe but neither seeming entirely reliable.

The story more or less ends up in the right place, despite the threads left hanging.

Meanwhile Finn ( John Boyega ) now travels with Poe ( Oscar Isaac ) and Chewie (Jonas Suotamo) harvesting information from spies for Leia. Poe – in full Indiana Jones mode – is loads of fun here, though these capers bear little relation to his learning curve last time. Boyega is strangely underserved: he gets more screentime than before but less forward motion. While Finn’s bond with Rey is repeatedly said to be important to both, they get no room to actually develop it. He's too busy being introduced to new rebel Jannah ( Naomi Ackie ), a charismatic actress without much to do. It might have been more economical storytelling to just let Finn shack up with Poe – or to give Rose Tico ( Kelly Marie Tran ) more than a few lines. Keri Russell 's Zorii Bliss is another interesting figure who’s ultimately mostly there to flirt with Poe. Does he really need another love interest when he can generate heat with literally anyone? Alongside other newcomers like Babu Frik (Shirley Henderson) and droid D-0, and the glorious return of Lando ( Billy Dee Williams ) and others, there’s a whole lot of distraction on our heroes’ journey. Sometimes it’s fan service, but too often it feels more like pandering.

That journey, too, is more complicated than normal. To defeat the Emperor, our heroes face a quest straight from high fantasy or average gaming: find the thing that points to the other thing to do the next thing, with a couple of bonus rescues along the way. The trail leads to the storm-battered remnants of the second Death Star, the "Forbidden Desert of Pasaana" and the snow-flecked world of Kijimi. The level of craft and design in these films remains extraordinary; visually they’re all gorgeous, particularly the towering waves of that world in the Endor system.

As they search, destiny keeps calling. Rey and Kylo must face one another again; the Emperor must be defeated without the victor simply taking his place on the Sith Throne. And Emperor Palpatine is back, terribly changed but still potent, more machine now than man. Whether that is a good thing for Star Wars storytelling is less clear.

That’s because, for all the visual panache, pleasing cameos and interesting newcomers here, for all that Ridley and Driver pour into their stand-offs, the Emperor's presence shows a disturbing lack of faith at the heart of Rise Of Skywalker . The fan backlash last time has been taken on-board too well; the storytelling here sputters whenever it approaches any similar chance to turn away from narrative convention and do something truly unexpected. You wish that this galaxy didn't feel so small and scared of stepping away from George Lucas ' shadow.

Maybe it won’t matter to fans. There are effective emotional punches before the end, as we say a final goodbye to Carrie Fisher and her generation of stars and as Kylo and Rey face their demons. Arguably the story more or less ends up in the right place, despite the threads left hanging. When it focuses on Rey and Kylo, this film usually works. Whatever the Dark Side says, we can make our own destiny, and we change the universe when we do.

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Review: The Rise of Skywalker —and the Fall of Fun

My therapist has forbidden me, for good reason, from wading too far into the whole debate about 2017’s The Last Jedi —the second film in the new Star Wars trilogy that continues the Skywalker saga—but it is my cursory understanding that some Star Wars fans do not like that movie. If those gripes were made loudly enough for me to hear, they probably made their way to Disney, too. Which could explain why the final film in this trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker (out December 20), feels like such a desperate scramble to win back fans’ affection, to re-create that probably uncapturable sense of awe conjured up by the original series. The movie never rests, relentlessly ardent in its grasping for mythos.

The movie is directed by J.J. Abrams, who kicked off this latest set of films with 2015’s zippily winning The Force Awakens , a retailoring of the Luke Skywalker story that had a pretty well-laid track to follow. Not so for Rise of Skywalker , which tasks itself with an exhausting double duty: tying up the strands of a scattered series in some satisfying fashion while also attending to fussier fans’ Last Jedi tantrums, an atoning for supposed sins. Abrams is a talent, but he’s no match for a corporate mandate that heavy—his sleek, Spielbergian whimsy isn’t enough to cut through all the tortured brand maintenance. But he thrashes away anyway, filling Rise of Skywalker with a million moving parts. It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

It’s technically illegal for me to tell you anything about the plot of Rise of Skywalker , I think, but I’ll risk censure by giving you the vaguest outline. When the movie opens, Rey ( Daisy Ridley ) is continuing her Jedi training while her friends Finn ( John Boyega ) and Poe ( Oscar Isaac ) are gallivanting around the galaxy getting information about the dreaded First Order from a mole within that fascist organization. Elsewhere, conflicted emo prince Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver , entirely checked-out) is in search of something rather serious, something that’s the key to unlocking both the past and the future of this whole dynastic melodrama. I am definitely not supposed to tell you what that something is. I will say, though, that its reveal—and a subsequent, related reveal—would be genuinely frustrating were they not so obvious, and so silly.

I found it hard to care much either way about Rise of Skywalker , neither betrayed nor sated. The movie is too determinedly on its sweaty course, heedless of actual audience interest in its tunnel-visioned quest to be broadly loved or, at least, Internet approved-of. The action set-pieces—a desert chase during an alien version of Burning Man, a rescue mission in a starship brig (unfavorably reminiscent of the one in the first film), an airborne melee full of radio squawk and explosions—all hurry along with perfunctory plainness. There’s a passion lacking in the movie’s big scenes (and, really, in the little ones too), as if Abrams was woken up in the middle of the night and told to rush down to the studio to put out a fire started by some intern named Rian.

In that way, the film is an interesting study in how mega studios react to fan feedback, a whole movie crafted out of Sonic the Hedgehog’s retextured fur. There doesn’t seem to be any real organic idea animating Rise of Skywalker ; instead it feels cobbled together from notes stuffed in the suggestion boxes of Reddit and Twitter. Which is awfully cynical. (The way this film handles the unfairly maligned Last Jedi character played by Kelly Marie Tran —which is to say, by completely sidelining her for this last outing—feels like a bad concession to bad people.)

It’s sad, too, all this lifeless bombast made to appease some vague idea of a pure Star Wars fan. I don’t think Rise of Skywalker is ill-intentioned, exactly—it’s not malevolent like some joyless tentpole films are. But it takes no pleasure in its own existence, weakly adding some cutesiness here and there to liven things up (mostly in the form of a new droid whose existence feels redundant at best) but otherwise shuffling around morosely as it does what it thinks it needs to, piteously unaware that it didn’t have to be like this.

Or, I dunno, maybe it did. Maybe there was no way Disney was going to allow a final (for now) chapter that takes any lively risks, that doesn’t tightly bind the latest IP to the original IP, a snug package of content that can self-reinforce as it appreciates in value, sitting and fermenting in the newly ajar Disney vault. Maybe Rise of Skywalker is mere fait accompli, the inevitably boring end to all the fun. (There was some fun along the way!) In that, the movie could be a valuable life lesson for its younger viewers: get your kicks out in your first couple acts, kids, because the final one is gonna be about settling accounts and trying to graft some canned sense of profundity on to it all before you’re done.

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Oof. I don’t want to end this review on too much of a down note. So, here are some things I did like about Rise of Skywalker . In one sequence we see the hulking wreck of the Death Star from Return of the Jedi , looming in the distance as a potent, and poignant, reminder of all the stars and all the wars that have come before. There’s a deliciously hammy turn from a particular actor whose name I won’t mention, but you’ll know who I’m talking about when you see them. And, it must be said, there is a sweet new lil’ alien guy that we meet in the movie, a wee tinkerer named Babu Frik who has a funny voice (done by the great Shirley Henderson ) and is very small and has a frown. With his grumpy old man moue, he could be the miniature Mr. Wilson to Baby Yoda’s Dennis the Menace, maybe.

Which, hey, reminds me: if you want some of the real good times of Star Wars , all that scrappy space marauding and oddball pluck that made the original films so endearing, you could just watch The Mandalorian on Disney+. Your subscription fee will be less than the cost of a ticket, and you won’t have to worry about parking. Which is exactly the kind of mundane thing you worry about when you get older, once life’s giddy wonder has dimmed and begins to, all too often, give way to the wan disappointments of responsibility.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker review

The best of the new trilogy is its final act.

TechRadar Verdict

Given the unenviable task of wrapping up forty years of Star Wars theatrical releases, Episode 9 succeeds on a number of levels - especially in the way it both embraces and subverts Star Wars lore. Characters who felt strange and unfamiliar a few years ago now have satisfying story arcs that expand the Star Wars universe in ways that were hard to predict at the outset. Purists will say that the movie bends and breaks fundamental rules of the SWU, but the film’s reasoning for doing so is understandable and, frankly, commendable in its own way.

Subverts Star Wars dogma

Embraces nostalgia

Stakes are quickly and firmly established

D-O is the Forky of Star Wars

Nearly non-stop crescendo

More CGI faces

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Some mild spoilers for Star Wars : The Rise of Skywalker follow.

In retrospect, Star Wars Episode VII - director JJ Abrams’ first venture into the Star Wars universe - played it too safe. From the opening crawl all the way to the destruction of Starkiller Base, it felt like the audience was watching a high-budget successor to A New Hope. The similarities between the films could be seen everywhere, and they became almost too hard to ignore by the time the cantina scene rolled around.

Thankfully, Episode IX, Abrams’ final installment in the Star Wars franchise, is a different breed. It celebrates series lore - both Episode VI from which it clearly draws inspiration in its overarching plot, and the new trilogy that Abrams helped to build - but it’s willing to subvert series dogma for something new and different.

The result is a film that includes elements of the original trilogy but importantly expounds upon them and morphs them into something new. There’s fan service, as many will surely point out, but there’s more exploration and character development here, too.

The film’s cultural significance and potential impact on the larger universe is a lot to digest in a single sitting, but taken on its own it’s one of the best new films and a fitting conclusion for the myriad characters you’ve come to know and love over the last four decades.

The legacy of the force

For fear of ruining the plot it will have to suffice to say that The Rise of Skywalker follows a similar trajectory as The Return of the Jedi - the First Order have procured a second more powerful weapon than Starkiller Base that threatens the newly established republic.

This plot line, introduced within a few minutes of the film, helps establish the stakes firmly and immediately, and puts the film’s heroes on a pressing mission that puts them at ends with Kylo Ren and the Knights of Ren who acquire a device required to reach Palpatine at the fringes of space.

Like previous Star Wars tales, the film doesn’t take the shortest path to get to the First Order’s new base - oftentimes sending heroes to one location to the next to find the one missing piece of the puzzle - but by no means does The Rise of Skywalker’s plot meander along in the way that The Last Jedi did. In fact, we’d say it has the exact opposite problem.

To reach the conclusion of the franchise’s plot, Abrams puts the audience on a forced march, shepherding us from battle to battle, one explosion to the next with limited explanation of the thoughts and feelings of the increasingly conflicted characters.

There are moments here that very easily could’ve fit in The Last Jedi had it not spent so much time on a casino planet or in an awkward, OJ Simpson-style starship chase - something fans have rightly called out about the film.

Thankfully, besides a few non-sequiturs that could be filled in with the deleted scenes, the plot of The Rise of Skywalker flows in a logical, cohesive way that ultimately feels fulfilling... if a bit rushed.

The expanding and contracting universe

The biggest driving force behind the film’s success is its willingness to introduce new situations to the wider Star Wars world while retaining the sanctity of the characters that have come before. For example, Rey and Kylo Ren are given room to explore their pasts in relation to their parents, but with the important caveat that each of them are their own person.

It’s the interplay between the Sins of Our Father trope for which the series has become known for and the characters’ newfound agency that give this entry believability and depth that were absent in the previous film. Both sets of progeny carry burdens of guilt over the actions of their families in the same way Luke did in Episode VI, but Rey and Kylo have more baggage than Luke thanks to their lineage that gives this plot line even more heft.

That semi-familiar feeling extends to other characters like Princess Leia, Emperor Palpatine and Lando Calrissian, each of whom return to the fold similar but different than before. Lando, now older than he was in Return of the Jedi, makes a number of references to the old adventures like a wistful old timer - which can come off either corny or endearing - while Palpatine has somehow become even more evil than before.

As for the series’ newer characters - Rey, Finn, Poe and Kylo Ren - The Rise of Skywalker finally makes them feel wholly realized and a vital part of the expanding universe. Once you know their entire background and origins (or in Poe and Finn’s case, a significant majority) the four main characters finally begin to carry equal weight and importance. It becomes less of a chore seeing Poe struggle with his new role in the Resistance when you learn who his love interest was and what his previous career path was, and the same goes for Finn when he finds camaraderie in other First Order defectors.

Secondary characters - C-3P0, Chewbacca, Lando, R2 and General Hux - aren’t so lucky as to get rounded out story arcs, but they’re each given a moment to shine which feel appropriate to their characters.

The only disappointing character is the new droid D-O, a deus ex machina plot device with the personality and demeanor of Forky from Toy Story 4. Another misfire comes in the eerie CGI faces of original trilogy actors, which we thought we'd seen the last of with Rogue One. Hopefully they age better than the effects in the prequels.

Let the past live

Kylo Ren famously advocated for killing the past, its teachings and its dogma, but The Rise of Skywalker isn’t quick to toss out everything from the originals for something fresh and new. Relics from the Galactic Empire are revered on both sides of the battlefield (Vader’s helmet, for example, as is Luke’s old X-wing) and serve as more than just fan service, playing key roles in the plot.

Similarly themes are recycled from the originals - characters battling human duality is as prevalent in this film as it was in both Episode III and Episode V - take new shape in the re-established Republic. If you’re willing to dig deep into them and their implications, you’ll only appreciate this final entry more.

The dark side to Abrams’ liberal borrowing of the source material is that fundamental rules (like the Sith’s Rule of Two or previously established hyperdrive limitations) need to be broken for it all to make sense. The good news is that breaking those rules allows the series to try new things in its final installment that might not have been as feasible if The Rise of Skywalker stringently stuck to the bylaws established by past films.

There was always hope that the new Star Wars trilogy would take ideas from Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy - and while not all of the ideas are lifted from the series, a few key ideas are actually used as a plot in The Rise of Skywalker with a JJ Abrams-style twist. Those ideas are thoughtfully executed and, while not exactly the way fans have imagined them on forums, feel like they loosely fit in with George Lucas’ original plot… which is amazing for a franchise that introduced midichlorians in its prequels to explain something that didn’t need a scientific explanation.

There will be those who dislike, disapprove or generally disavow The Rise of Skywalker on the grounds that it doesn’t do x, y or z like the original trilogy. But we’d caution you against dismissing the movie altogether - even it doesn’t do that one Star Wars thing you were expecting. We think Abrams’ final entry in the Skywalker saga is the best simply because it’s willing to tread new ground while carrying the relics of the prequels and the original trilogy on its back. It falters under its own weight at times, yes, but it tries to add to a rich, diverse universe by subverting the very expectations one might have about a place as well-established as the SWU.

The result is a film that stands on its own, as timely as ever in its message of good versus evil, expunging the sins of our fathers and the sheer grit and good nature that’s within each and every one of us. And, to be honest, that’s why we still love Star Wars.

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Nick Pino is Managing Editor, TV and AV for TechRadar's sister site, Tom's Guide. Previously, he was the Senior Editor of Home Entertainment at TechRadar, covering TVs, headphones, speakers, video games, VR and streaming devices. He's also written for GamesRadar+, Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer and other outlets over the last decade, and he has a degree in computer science he's not using if anyone wants it.

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‘Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’ Reviews: What the Critics Are Saying

By Rebecca Rubin

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Senior Film and Media Reporter

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It might come as little surprise that “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” a culmination to the nine-chapter Skywalker saga, has garnered polarizing reviews.

The now four-decade-old franchise, as Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang puts it, “launched to paradigm-shattering popularity.” “Star Wars” is a brand that has a fan-base with few equals, and ardent enthusiasts have been nothing if not vocal about the unwieldy direction of the sequel trilogy.

Critics chided director J.J. Abrams for playing it safe in landing a series that’s been 40 years in the making. Others noted the epic finale makes a concerted effort to service the fans.

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” serves as the third entry in the sequel trilogy behind 2015’s “The Force Awakens” and 2017’s “The Last Jedi.” The cast includes the late Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac.

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Variety’s Owen Gleiberman offered one of the more positive reviews, saying, “No ‘Star Wars’ film can fully recapture the thrill of 40 years ago, but as directed by J.J. Abrams, the ninth and final chapter in the saga that George Lucas created may come closer than any “Star Wars” movie since.”

“ Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker ” debuts in theaters Dec. 20. Here’s what critics have to say about the epic conclusion:

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman:

“‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ might just brush the bad-faith squabbling away. It’s the ninth and final chapter of the saga that Lucas started, and though it’s likely to be a record-shattering hit, I can’t predict for sure if ‘the fans’ will embrace it. (The very notion that ‘Star Wars’ fans are a definable demographic is, in a way, outmoded.) What I can say is that ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying ‘Star Wars’ adventure since the glory days of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ (I mean that, but given the last eight films, the bar isn’t that high.)”

New York Times’ A.O. Scott:

At least since “The Return of the Jedi” (1983), the point of each chapter has been consolidation rather than distinction. For a single film to risk being too interesting would be to imperil the long-term strategy of cultivating a multigenerational, multinational fandom. “The Rise of Skywalker” — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. (It opens Friday.) Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.”

Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang:

“I suspect that more than a few fans who were incensed by ‘The Last Jedi’ and its refusal to pander to their every expectation will be grateful to see Abrams re-ensconced in the director’s chair. Even if you simply watch the movie and ignore some of the controversy-stirring pre-release chatter, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a ‘Last Jedi’ corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly 2½-hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with ‘Star Wars’ in the first place.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson:

“The final film in this trilogy, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ (out December 20), feels like such a desperate scramble to win back fans’ affection, to re-create that probably uncapturable sense of awe conjured up by the original series. The movie never rests, relentlessly ardent in its grasping for mythos.”

NPR’s Glen Weldon:

“He nails that 42-year-old recipe dutifully — effortfully, it must be said — but the flavoring’s off. The story doesn’t require him to toss in as many ingredients from earlier films in the saga as he does here, but he dumps them all (callbacks, references, echoes, events, characters) into the mix anyway. The result leaves you feeling not so much bloated — the film moves too quickly, and is too much fun for that — but certainly overstuffed.”

Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson:

“It’s both glutted with plot points and embarrassingly cautious, precisely calculated to not to poke the hornet’s nest of detractors who popped up to voice their displeasure with ‘The Last Jedi,’ with some complaining about how hallowed characters developed while others voiced more overtly racist and sexist concerns. I can’t read minds, but I think this movie is likely to please those fans.

For everyone else, though, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If ‘The Force Awakens’ kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.”

A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd:

“The movie, the last in a new trilogy of Star Wars sequels produced without George Lucas’ involvement (or, it must be said, his acid-trip imagination), is so freighted with obligation that it almost groans under the weight, flashing a weak smile as it vaguely approximates the appearance of a zippy good time. Of course, most concluding chapters of a saga with a capital S carry burdens their predecessors don’t: They often end up feeling like the last act of a movie stretched to feature length—all falling action, no remaining mystery. But in the case of this ninth official episode, the batting-cleanup responsibilities are compounded by the expectations of a fanbase on the cusp of mutiny. ‘Skywalker ‘wants desperately to please them, a potentially impossible task it tackles with transparently ingratiating caution. This is a space opera animated not by joy but insecurity—the anxiety, evident in almost every moment, that if it’s not very careful, someone might feel letdown.”

Slate’s Sam Adams:

“‘The Rise of Skywalker’ gives people what they go to Star Wars for, but that’s all it does—and worse, all it sets out to do. It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal. The movie feels like it’s part of the post–Last Jedi retrenchment, when Disney jerked the leash on Solo and killed plans for future spinoffs by insisting that filmmakers stick to the established playbook. It’s of a piece with the pointedly unambitious The Mandalorian, just good enough to get people’s attention but fundamentally terrified of rocking the boat. Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don’t feel much of anything at all.”

The Atlantic’s David Sims:

“‘The Rise of Skywalker’ is, for want of a better word, completely manic: It leaps from plot point to plot point, from location to location, with little regard for logic or mood. The script, credited to Abrams and Chris Terrio, tries to tie up every dangling thread from The Force Awakens, delving into the origins of the villainous First Order, Rey’s mysterious background as an orphan on the planet Jakku, and even Poe’s occupation before signing up for the noble Resistance. The answer to a lot of these questions involves the ultra-villainous Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), the cackling, robed wizard-fascist behind the nefariousness of the first six films.

I wish I could tell you every answer is satisfying, and that Abrams weaves the competing story interests of nine very different movies into one grand narrative, but he doesn’t even come close.”

People’s Kara Warner:

“‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ is a jam-packed tribute to George Lucas’ legacy and the millions of dedicated fans who’ve kept the franchise alive and well for decades. And while it lacks the more cohesive, streamlined storylines of its predecessors ‘The Force Awakens’ (2015) and ‘The Last Jedi’ (2017), ‘Skywalker’ is buoyed by always-dazzling visuals, satisfying emotional beats and solid performances.”

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Review: ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ is here to remind you just how good ‘The Last Jedi’ was

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(Editor’s note: While every attempt has been made to avoid spoilers, this article does commit the unpardonable sin of discussing the plot of the movie being reviewed.)

“The dead speak!” Those three words, crawling up the screen in familiar yellow letters, are the first thing we see in “The Rise of Skywalker,” the frenzied big-bang finish of the latest and likely not last “Star Wars” trilogy. There are ominous signs that Emperor Palpatine, the vile Sith lord vanquished at the end of 1983’s “Return of the Jedi,” may be staging a comeback from beyond the grave. But if the dead can speak, they can also give us cause for tentative optimism and maybe, yes, a new hope: With any luck, perhaps the deep, transporting pleasure of vintage “Star Wars” might somehow be resurrected.

It’s a promise that director J.J. Abrams, who wrote the “Skywalker” script with Chris Terrio (“Argo”), desperately tries to fulfill with every weapon in his crowd-pleasing arsenal. I’ll be as vague as possible, but let’s just say that death here is never quite a permanent condition. Beloved characters laid to rest in earlier installments return as phantom projections. In the movie’s most poignant trick, the late Carrie Fisher gives her final performance as Leia Organa — one of the foundational figures, along with Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, of a saga that launched to paradigm-shattering popularity 42 years ago.

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Abrams originally filmed Fisher’s scenes for 2015’s “The Force Awakens,” which established this trilogy’s central conflict between the evil First Order and the scrappy, heroic Resistance. That movie also introduced three appealing leads — Rey (Daisy Ridley), a desert scavenger with Jedi potential; Finn (John Boyega), an ex-Stormtrooper who joined the Resistance; and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a dashing Resistance pilot — and threw them into a familiar rebel narrative that consciously if not always imaginatively evoked the 1977 “Star Wars.”

“The Force Awakens” made a nice warm-up for Rian Johnson’s “The Last Jedi” (2017), which distinguished itself as the most thrilling and audacious new “Star Wars” picture since “The Empire Strikes Back,” if also, tellingly, the most divisive. What some of us regarded as clear storytelling virtues — a tough-minded view of heroism; a fresh, irreverent approach to an overworked fantasy mythology; probably the greatest performance of Mark Hamill’s career — were rejected as heresy by a noisy faction of the “Star Wars” faithful.

I suspect that more than a few fans who were incensed by “The Last Jedi” and its refusal to pander to their every expectation will be grateful to see Abrams re-ensconced in the director’s chair. Even if you simply watch the movie and ignore some of the controversy-stirring pre-release chatter , “The Rise of Skywalker” nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a “Last Jedi” corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly 2½-hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with “Star Wars” in the first place.

The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve. This “Rise” feels more like a retreat, a return to a zone of emotional and thematic safety from a filmmaker with a gift for packaging nostalgia as subversion. Still, let’s acknowledge Abrams for the proficient craftsman and genre-savvy showman he is. Like some of his other major pop-cultural contributions (two enjoyable “Star Trek” movies and the twisty TV series “Lost” among them), “The Rise of Skywalker” is a swift and vigorous entertainment, with a sense of forward momentum that keeps you watching despite several dubious plot turns and cheap narrative fakeouts.

The unpretentious zippiness of Abrams’ direction infuses this chapter with what my screening companion described as “that ‘Star Wars’ flavor”: a breezy mix of jaunty comedy and bloodless action, high-spirited banter and high-flying peril. There are momentous aerial chases and lightsaber battles, the best of which is staged against beautifully cascading walls of water. There are lovely new landscapes and widescreen vistas (the cinematography is by Dan Mindel, the production design by Rick Carter and Kevin Jenkins).

The soundtrack is the usual diverting mix of fighter-pilot jargon, beep-beep droid chatter, Darth Vader exhalations and John Williams orchestrations. There are hastily introduced new Resistance allies — one played by Naomi Ackie, another by Abrams’ “Felicity” star, Keri Russell — and obligatory appearances by old ones like Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o, sort of). Best of all, there is Adam Driver, as Kylo Ren, once more the darkly brooding yin to Rey’s righteous yang.

In a prologue as shadowy and sinister as a horror movie, Kylo Ren tracks down the renascent Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who orders him to embrace his villainous destiny by killing Rey once and for all. Easier said than done, and not just because Rey has become a Jedi superstar under the tutelage of Gen. Leia. I would gladly watch a whole movie devoted solely to Rey’s workout regimen, which involves a lot of meditative rock levitating and, presumably, some heavy-duty cardio using BB-8 as a medicine ball. Alas, the plot must kick in, and soon Rey flies off with Finn and Poe in the Millennium Falcon (plus Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2) on a convoluted quest to retrieve a long-lost Sith tchotchke that will lead them to the Emperor.

Their journey is peppered with familiar faces (Billy Dee Williams!) and dazzling set pieces, including an interlude with a tribe of desert nomads whose brilliantly hued costumes are nearly as arresting as their mollusk-like faces. Along the way, the leads engage in some tiresome bickering — for all their individual charisma, Rey, Finn and Poe never develop any real, compelling interplay — which makes you all the more grateful when Kylo Ren arrives to shake things up. He and Rey duly wow us with the first of many showdowns; their quieter exchanges, in which each tries to persuade the other to defect, are even more impressive. Ridley and Driver work overtime to keep the human factor at the fore of their conflict, even when their back-and-forth starts to feel like a long, violent game of intergalactic tennis.

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Rey sees the latent potential for redemption in Kylo Ren; he sees within her the early stirrings of the Dark Side of the Force. His parents, Leia and Han, are Rebel Alliance royalty; hers were nobodies who abandoned her in the desert. The “Star Wars” universe has of course long been obsessed with Oedipal struggles and other parental mysteries, not always to its benefit: One of the reasons “The Last Jedi” felt so mature by comparison was its suggestion that we might, in fact, be more than the sum of our daddy issues.

“The Rise of Skywalker” flirts coyly with this possibility, even as it pretty much lays its cards on the table by reinstating Palpatine as the ultimate big bad daddy, a figure of smirking paternal evil who has now figured prominently in all three “Star Wars” trilogies. As much as one never tires of listening to McDiarmid’s insinuating cackle or marveling at Palpatine’s ability to singlehandedly power the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, his villainy ultimately offers a too-tidy moral and narrative escape hatch. The battles may be unpredictable, but the endgame is never really in doubt.

Look, I get it. Blockbuster moviemaking is invariably a tug-of-war between art and commerce, radical reinvention and old-school nostalgia. Rabid fans, snooty detractors and in-between agnostics like myself would be wise not to harbor any inflexible expectations about what these pictures will or should be. The problem with “The Rise of Skywalker” isn’t any single omission or misstep. It isn’t the succession of cheap “gotcha!” twists that briefly threaten to alter how we look at these characters, only to abruptly pull us back to rose-tinted reality.

Speaking of rose: It isn’t the strategic sidelining of Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), an engaging character from “The Last Jedi” whose minimal screen time here will surely delight some of her more racist detractors. It isn’t the blink-and-you-miss-it shot of two women kissing — a craven sop to the many fans who have wondered if Finn and Poe’s intense chemistry might turn out to be more than strictly bromantic.

The problem is what all these choices tell us about the conflicting sensibilities that shaped this movie and may shape the next “Star Wars” adventures to appear on Hollywood’s endless event-movie horizon. If “The Rise of Skywalker” serves any purpose, it’s as a snapshot of what Disney, a First Order unto itself in the quest for global entertainment domination, thinks of the audience’s intelligence. It isn’t a flattering picture.

The central issue underlying the identity of this series isn’t parentage, but authorship.

George Lucas may have a lot to answer for, including his mostly dreadful 1999-2005 prequel cycle, but it’s hard not to admire his stubborn adherence to his own bizarre vision, rather than to some fan-tested, committee-approved notion of what a “Star Wars” movie should be. More than anything — more even than the billions in box office dollars that surely await it — this series needs artists willing to flood its mythology with new life, rather than turning it into another endless replay of “The Skywalking Dead.”

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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’

Rating: PG-13, for sci-fi violence and action Running time: 2 hours, 22 minutes Playing: Opens Dec. 20 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: A Perfectly Imperfect Last Chapter

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Whether you were around in 1977 when creator George Lucas first unleashed his cultural behemoth in theaters, or you just started binge-watching the whole thing yesterday on your phone, Star Wars is undeniable — just as skipping the ninth (and, so they claim, the last) is unthinkable. All that’s left is the rush to judgment on whether director and co-writer J.J. Abrams made sure Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is everything you want and need it to be. Short answer: Of course it isn’t. The impossible job of being all things to all Star -gazers leaves Abrams, who kicked off the third trilogy with The Force Awakens in 2015, straining to cram in everything. The result is often chaos, but it’s also a euphoric blast of pulse-quickening adventure, laced with humor and heart. Sure, you’ll nitpick the thing to death with your friends. But that’s the point. When it comes to Stars Wars fandom, the infighting is as crucial as the love.

Of course you have questions about the plot: Who lives, who dies, who tells their story? Will Rey (Daisy Ridley) join Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver ) on the Dark Side? Is Reylo a thing? Will there be an epic kiss? Who are Rey’s parents? How does Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016, manage to turn up one last time as Princess Leia? Will the ghosts of Han (Harrison Ford) and Luke (Mark Hamill) — now one with the Force — make appearances? And will Episode IX really be the end? The answers: It doesn’t feel like the end to me. And if I say anything more, the spoiler police will pounce.

Know this: There is no Baby Yoda (we have The Mandalorian for that). Rise of Skywalker comes in hot on a battle between Rey and Kylo. They use lightsabers (now and forever the coolest). Kylo, still fetishizing the headgear of his granddaddy Darth Vader, is pissed that Rey sides with the Resistance, and won’t take his hand (he uses that ardent phrase) and join him as Supreme Leader of the villainous First Order. “I killed Snoke,” snarls Kylo, “and I’ll kill you.” He doesn’t mean it. Or does he? He’s still taking orders from the hooded, ghastly-pale Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who is determined to get Rey in his clutches before she can complete her Jedi training and Kylo can get too close to her. Driver is terrific at bringing danger and depth to the conflicted Kylo, born Ben Solo to his parents Han and Leia. His haunted presence makes the movie.

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Bloodlines are a huge deal in the Star Wars canon. Rey still doesn’t know her parents (she’ll soon find out), but she’s loyal to Leia, now a general. Thanks to unused footage from 2017’s The Last Jedi‚ director Rian Johnson’s much-debated middle chapter in this final trilogy, Fisher is back in action, and the warmth of her presence raises the bar (and not a few tears). It’s deeply moving to watch Leia pass the mantle of power to Rey, whose rise the film documents. And Ridley comes into her own here as a soul-searching Jedi fighter who learns that nothing in the Jedi handbook can beat following her own gut.

The plot that Abrams cooks up with co-screenwriter Chris Terrio hinges on the fact that Rey and her Resistance team need to get their hands on a crystal that will show them the way to Exogol, the hidden land of the Siths, where Palpatine intends to establish himself as the leader of the Final Order. Got that? Doesn’t matter. It’s just an excuse to get the old gang together: Chewie, R2-D2, C-3PO, and BB-8. John Boyega doesn’t have much to do as Finn, the ex-stormtrooper who turned against the Dark Side. Oscar Isaac zips and quips dashingly as the pilot Poe Dameron, but his character is too closely modeled on Han Solo, and Poe’s flirtation with the armored and masked Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell) seems extraneous. Things pick up when Billy Dee Williams, now 83, returns as Lando Calrissian, the smack-talking general we haven’t seen since 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

Comparisons to the past history of Star Wars (let’s not dwell on the excruciatingly dull prequel trilogy that Lucas foisted on us starting in 1999) don’t really serve its final chapter. But there is a provocative theme at play: the attempt of the Emperor to make the Jedi feel alone in the galaxy and incapable of resistance (even a Wookie would get that Trump reference). There is also no disputing the fanboy reverence Abrams feels for what came before — the X-wing dogfights, the lightsaber duels, the camaraderie. Lucas recently expressed his disappointment that The Force Awakens was basically a remake of 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope . And others will never forgive Johnson for turning Luke into a mad nihilist out of Apocalypse Now in The Last Jedi. But there we go squabbling again. Flaws and all, The Rise of Skywalker is part of our film history and, when Rey and Kylo seize the screen, an indelible part of our hearts.

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Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker review – a fitting end to the Skywalker saga?

JJ Abrams is back in the director's chair for this flawed but spectacle-laden finale to the nine-film Skywalker saga

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The end of a nine-film, three-arc saga that’s been around for more than 40 years, for some people, Star Wars – and specifically the Skywalker story – has been with them their whole lives. So it’s perhaps not surprising there’s a lot of emotion riding on JJ Abrams’ The Rise Of Skywalker . Even more so, perhaps, after some of the discourse surrounding The Last Jedi .

Abrams has obviously taken that knowledge to heart, creating a film that – for better or worse – should play better with some fans than Rian Johnson’s divisive predecessor. And there’s the rub…

“This is not going to go the way you think,” Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) infamously growled in The Last Jedi , a thinly veiled mission statement of sorts for Johnson’s riskier approach, which sent the series in a bold new direction. By contrast, The Rise Of Skywalker plays out more or less exactly how you’d think, give or take a few surprises. If The Force Awakens was Abrams’ take on original trilogy opener A New Hope , this new trilogy capper is his Return Of The Jedi reprise – and not just because it features a returning big bad.

To try and sum up the plot is to wade too far into spoiler territory, given the fact that the ins and outs of the story have been kept tightly under wraps – and rightly so, packed as it is with fan-pleasing moments. The set-up, though, is laid out in a three-pronged opening that quickly reintroduces our heroes and villains: Rey (Daisy Ridley) continues her Jedi training under Leia’s (Carrie Fisher) tutelage; Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) are on a dangerous mission to steal secrets about the First Order’s next moves; and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is seeking out a new (old) phantom menace that could snuff out the Resistance for good.

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It’s that opening act that proves to be the film’s biggest weakness, with Abrams and his writing partner Chris Terrio ( Argo , Batman V Superman ) chucking so many new ideas and developments at you in such a short space of time that it essentially serves as a sort-of exposition-laden asteroid field. The frenetic editing between the three story strands and the swirling camerawork don’t help, either – it’s a pacey start, sure, but it doesn’t leave much time to take it all in.

Luckily, the film settles into its groove once our heroes are reunited and sent off on a quest to find an ancient artefact that will set them on another collision course with Ren and the First Order. Even if many of the film’s new characters (including Naomi Ackie’s Jannah, Keri Russell’s Zorri Bliss and new mini-droid D-0) fail to make much of a mark, it’s great to spend more time with Rey, Finn and Poe as a trio, while Ridley and Driver truly spark whenever they’re on screen together.

Most notably, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) has a greatly expanded role here, providing much of the film’s humour and, ironically for a robotic sidekick, some of its more tender moments. Elsewhere, original trilogy hero Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) gets a pleasingly triumphant homecoming, while Leia’s story – made up of existing footage and stand-ins after Fisher’s tragic passing in 2016 – is handled sensitively.

As with the previous two films, The Rise Of Skywalker looks absolutely stunning, seamlessly merging cutting-edge CG with grounded, practical visual effects (keep an eye out for a veritable menagerie of scene-stealing puppeteered alien critters). And Abrams once again proves himself skilled in the art of set-pieces, too – from a storm-lashed lightsaber duel atop the wreckage of the second Death Star, to a thrilling “ground assault” on the wing of a Star Destroyer, the film is stuffed full of exhilarating action and even a couple of punch-the-air moments, too.

Trying to neatly tie up 40 years worth of storytelling while aiming to please everyone is an impossible task, it seems – and one that Abrams tackles admirably, if not wholly successfully. If you’re a Last Jedi fan, you might feel short-changed at how some of that film’s risk-taking has been scaled back, especially in the overly familiar third act. If you’re not, you might appreciate some of the more traditional elements but, even so, there are still several developments that will likely provoke just as much fierce debate (make no mistake, there’s a lot to unpick here if you want to).

As a huge, sci-fi blockbuster, then, The Rise Of Skywalker is a mostly satisfying spectacle – it’s fun, entertaining, visually dazzling and, yes, emotional in parts, too. But as the grand finale of the Skywalker Saga, it falls somewhat short of the mark.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is in UK cinemas from 19 December

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'The Rise Of Skywalker' Makes For An Exciting, Exhaustive, Effortful Ending

Glen Weldon

Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Poe (Oscar Isaac), Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega) take on the enemy one last time in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Lucasfilms hide caption

Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Poe (Oscar Isaac), Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega) take on the enemy one last time in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker .

The thing about the act of plate-spinning is: It's not about the plates. Not really.

We sit there in the audience, watching those various dishes spin atop their dowels. While it's aesthetically pleasing, in the abstract, to see so many pieces of Wedgwood china twirling away contentedly, what matters — the compelling drama of the whole affair — comes not from watching them, but from watching the poor schmuck running back-and-forth behind them. If we happen to notice one plate starting to wobble, after all, the first thing we do is look away from it, to see if the plate-spinner sees it, too.

We want them to succeed. The whole cheesy novelty act is predicated on this. The sheer skill it takes to keep the plates from falling — the eye, the timing, the light touch — that's what we're drawn to, really. The work of the thing.

J.J. Abrams is spinning a great many plates in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker , the final chapter in the third and final trilogy of what we are now apparently supposed to call "The Skywalker Saga." He's not simply called upon to end the trilogy he began in 2015 with The Force Awakens , but the whole space-operatic, science-fiction-with-generous-helpings-of-fantasy, embrace-your-destiny, Joseph-Campbell, daddy-issues megillah. He has to land a Corellian light freighter that has been loaded down with everything that got kicked off in 1977 — when the saga's first film (but fourth chapter — long story, literally), A New Hope, debuted — establishing the Star Wars formula:

1/3 epic space battles
1/3 high-adventure narrow escapes for our doughty heroes
1/3 characters intoning blissfully hokey dialogue about the Force and the Dark Side

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He nails that 42-year-old recipe dutifully — effortfully, it must be said — but the flavoring's off. The story doesn't require him to toss in as many ingredients from earlier films in the saga as he does here, but he dumps them all (callbacks, references, echoes, events, characters) into the mix anyway. The result leaves you feeling not so much bloated — the film moves too quickly and is too much fun for that — but certainly overstuffed.

The Rise of Skywalker is ostensibly positioned as a culmination, but it seems less momentous, less inevitable than the term would suggest. Instead, it's an accretion — a buildup of plotlines and characters that rolls toward its conclusion by dint of momentum lent to it by all that's come before.

That lack of clear focus is largely a result of this most recent trilogy's peculiar provenance. In The Force Awakens , Abrams created its main characters and teased some intriguing mysteries for future films to explore before handing the reins to Rian Johnson, whose The Last Jedi in 2017 proceeded to explore some and (justifiably, in my opinion) abandon others, in an effort to shake things up. Now that Abrams is back at the helm, several plot threads that Johnson had summarily sealed away in boxes — including the parentage of Rey (Daisy Ridley) — get hauled back down from narrative deep storage and unpacked for fresh inspection.

It's the directorial equivalent of a particularly petty game of Exquisite Corpse, wherein one partygoer writes the first sentence of a story, then hands it to a second partygoer who writes a sentence undercutting the first sentence, then the first partygoer takes the paper back and doubles down on what they had written in the first place.

But then, that first sentence — The Force Awakens , in this case — was powered by the easy chemistry among its leads: Rey's steely resolve, Finn's (John Boyega's) comic timing and Poe's (Oscar Isaac's) preternatural charm. Johnson's The Last Jedi , for understandable story reasons, split them up — and for all the good and worthy risks that film took, the sundering of our trio was the one that didn't pay off. In Skywalker , Abrams reunites our heroes and pointedly keeps them that way, allowing their interpersonal energy and humor to ground us through an extended series of planet-hopping fetch quests that can't help but blur together.

The mysterious connection between Rey and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is allowed to become less so, as is only fitting in the final chapter of their story. Abrams shows an admirable willingness to maintain the shades of gray that Johnson introduced into Star Wars ' black-and-white cookie of a moral universe. Here again, characters make choices that do not always strictly accord with their wardrobe's color scheme.

Less successful are the return appearances of various characters from previous trilogies, most of whom have been forcefully (heh) inserted into events. (Abrams wields a shoehorn with the same determination that Rey wields her lightsaber.) Some viewers will cry "fan service!" Many more will consider themselves fans and be grateful for being so rigorously and exhaustively serviced.

The blockbuster conclusion to an era-defining film franchise is a spectacular feat of plate-spinning — with one vital difference. With The Rise of Skywalker , the spinner — Abrams — wants us to focus on the plates alone. And there are certainly moments when we do: tender scenes featuring previously unused footage of the late Carrie Fisher (and her back-of-the-head stand-in), a chase through the desert, a lightsaber battle on some familiar wreckage amid a roiling ocean.

But there are many more moments — especially toward the film's conclusion, when a sequence showing just how hopelessly dire things get for our heroes just goes on and on and on -- when the spinning plates disappear, and all we can see is poor J.J. Abrams darting back and forth and back again, frantically struggling to keep them going.

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'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' Review: Epic Conclusion That's Strongest in the Smaller Moments

Although it lacks the more cohesive, streamlined storylines of its predecessors, Episode IX is buoyed by always-dazzling visuals, satisfying emotional beats and solid performances

SPOILER WARNING: This review contains very mild spoilers for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a jam-packed tribute to George Lucas’ legacy and the millions of dedicated fans who’ve kept the franchise alive and well for decades. And while it lacks the more cohesive, streamlined storylines of its predecessors The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017), Skywalker is buoyed by always-dazzling visuals, satisfying emotional beats and solid performances.

The Rise of Skywalker, aka Episode IX, takes place not long after the action in The Last Jedi . When audiences last saw General Leia Organa ( Carrie Fisher ), Rey ( Daisy Ridley ), Finn ( John Boyega ), Poe ( Oscar Isaac ), Rose ( Kelly Marie Tran ) and Droid friends BB-8, R2-D2 and C-3PO, the rebel forces fighting for good (the Resistance) were decimated by the evil First Order. Rey was trying to master her power, while also managing a powerful Force bond with presumed rival Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver ).

Episode IX opens with a look at the opposite forces that fuel the universe — the light and the dark. New First Order Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is furiously trying to find the mysterious Emperor and squash the remaining members of the Resistance, while Rey is continuing her Jedi training under close watch by General Organa. When both sides receive separate intel about how to potentially destroy the other, this sets off a complicated series of action, space travel, and treasure hunting, ahead of the eventual epic end-all battle of the light vs. the dark, good vs. evil.

Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), BB-8 and C-3P0 set out to find and destroy the source of the First Order’s power. Meanwhile Kylo Ren, who happens upon damaging information about Rey’s past, is hot on their trail and seeking to convince Rey to embrace the dark side before he’s forced to destroy her altogether.

Directed by J.J. Abrams ( The Force Awakens ), Skywalker is a love letter to Star Wars itself, though a crowded one. In addition to a lot of story told over the course of the film’s nearly two and a half-hour run time, there are Easter eggs upon Easter eggs, and major set pieces that have become touchstones of the franchise. While thrilling to see, there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it feel to all the action, because of all the ground the film covers.

One major highlight is the touching sendoff to Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia. Using extra footage from the beloved actress’ final performance before her death in 2016, Skywalker gives the star and her character several key shining moments — including one with her daughter, actress Billie Lourd . The return of Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian also makes for a fun addition, along with several other cameos to look out for.

Newcomers to the Star Wars universe include Jannah, (Naomi Ackie), Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell), a figure from Poe’s past and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant), a First Order officer, each of whom have memorable character moments that make a difference in the story. However, it’s Ridley’s Rey and Driver’s Kylo Ren that anchor it all and deliver the most emotionally-charged performances.

Episode IX provides definitive conclusions to several plot points laid out in both Force Awakens and The Last Jedi , but also raises several surprising questions as it does so. And although the franchise is built upon crowd-pleasing action sequences and space travel and the legacy of The Force, etc., this film is strongest in the smaller moments and emotional connections between beloved characters, which can always use further exploration and attention.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker opens in theaters Dec. 20.

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Confirmed as the First Star Wars Story Set After Rise of Skywalker

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy , the four-piece animation set to hit Disney+ on September 13, is confirmed to be the first Star Wars story set after the events of Rise of Skywalker .

2019’s conclusion to the Skywalker Saga ends with the Resistance celebrating their victory, and Rey taking on the Skywalker name having defeated the evil Emperor (hopefully!) for good.

While Disney has announced a new movie that will follow Rey’s attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order , with Daisy Ridley set to reprise her role, we now know that Rebuild the Galaxy moves Star Wars past Rise of Skywalker itself on the Star Wars timeline.

Rebuild the Galaxy is a sort of Star Wars What If? in which iconic characters assume very different roles. It sees Jar Jar become a Sith and a bemused alternate universe Luke Skywalker (voiced by Mark Hamill) learn of his fate in the original universe, for example. Its protagonist, ordinary nerf-herder Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo), is well aware of all the events of Star Wars up to this point, which explains why Rebuild the Galaxy is set after Rise of Skywalker.

In an interview with IGN, showrunners Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit confirmed Rebuild the Galaxy’s place on the Star Wars timeline. Here’s the exchange with IGN’s Tom Jorgensen:

IGN: Is this the first time we've ever gone past Rise of Skywalker on the timeline?

Dan Hernandez: I believe that it is the first time -

Benji Samit: Yes.

IGN: That's pretty wild.

DH: It is wild, and it wass something that we -

BS: There were discussions!

DH: There were some discussions!

BS: It's removed from a lot of the core worlds and core timeline that's happening. We didn't want to step on anything that could happen in the future, but it was important to us that our protagonist knew about everything that has come before. So it had to take place afterwards.

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DH: Sig, who's our main character, who's played by Gaten Matarazzo, who's the nicest person in the world and a huge Star Wars fan - he brought the energy of a real fan who had really studied everything. I've often made the joke that I can't rollerskate, I can't ride a bike, I can't really do any of those things that kids learned at a formative age, but what I did do with my time during my youth was I studied the Star Wars Encyclopedia.

In many ways, this character of Sig is a surrogate for people who know this stuff, who really know it. And then for that person to suddenly find themselves in a rebuilt galaxy where everything is different, it felt more shocking, it felt more dramatic, but it was also a little bit of a invitation to people like us who know all this stuff to say "it's different and we're all gonna be taking this adventure together as Sig is taking this adventure."

I think that was something we felt really was exceptionally important and thankfully Lucasfilm was completely on board with it. So yeah, it's the first piece of content post-Rise of Skywalker, which is pretty amazing.

What's your favorite live-action Star Wars Disney+ show?

The future of Star Wars includes Star Wars Skeleton Crew , the Jon Favreau-directed The Mandalorian & Grogu movie , Ahsoka Season 2 , Andor Season 2 , and the aforementioned Rey movie. It does not, however, include The Acolyte Season 2 after the High Republic era show was canceled after just one season.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].

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'LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy' Review: The Best New Star Wars Series Is Here

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Nearly five years after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrived in theaters, the franchise is still trying to rebuild the momentum that was lost by the divisive end to the Skywalker Saga. Between lackluster live-action series , and cancelling their most exciting High Republic era series , this era of Star Wars storytelling needs something to reignite the spark — and it has found that spark in the most unlikely of places .

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest Star Wars stories (namely, LEGO Star Wars Summer Vacation , LEGO Star Wars Terrifying Tales , and LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special ), bringing new life to fan-favorite characters from all eras, past and present, and poking fun at some of the goofiest aspects of the canon without demeaning anyone in the process. The four-episode miniseries is a breath of fresh air that gives wing to nonsensical plotlines like Darth Jar Jar Binks ( Ahmed Best ) and Greedo ( Jake Green ) shooting his shot first to win Princess Leia’s ( Shelby Young ) hand in marriage, where the previous movies mostly reckoned with the end of the Skywalker Saga through more humorous means.

Written by the creative duo Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit , who recently brought the world Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu , and directed by Chris Buckley , who has a long and storied career with both LEGO and Star Wars, LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is a welcome balm for Star Wars fans both new and old.

What Is ‘LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy’ About?

Set in a remote corner of the galaxy, Rebuild the Galaxy focuses on Sig Greebling ( Gaten Matarazzo ) and his older brother Dev ( Tony Revolori ), a pair of ordinary nerf-herders who have their entire world, nay galaxy, turned upside down when Sig unearths the “cornerstone,” a powerful artifact hidden within a long-forgotten Jedi temple. While everything is out of sorts in the new galaxy that Sig finds himself in, he at least takes comfort in the fact that his friend (and crush) Yesi Scala ( Marsai Martin ) exists to help him conquer the bad guys and try to save not only his galaxy but every other version of the Star Wars universe out there.

As is the norm within the LEGO Star Wars universe, Sig knows all about everything that has ever taken place within the Star Wars canon, from Rey bringing a shirtless Ben Solo back into the light, to Darth Vader’s true identity, to Nubs being the cutest pint-sized Jedi in the galaxy. Before he finds himself thrust into a do-or-die adventure of his own, Sig relies upon these epic stories and grand myths to escape from his mundane existence, much to the chagrin of those around him. His storied knowledge of the Star Wars universe comes in handy when he falls into a twisted version of his world, in which Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are two of the surviving “good guys” in the Jedi Order, and Rey and Rose Tico ( Kelly Marie Tran ) are living their best lives as Sith baddies.

New ‘LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy’ Images Bring Back Hippie Luke Skywalker and Darth Jar Jar

See who else is joining the multiversal adventure!

Rebuild the Galaxy embraces the most iconic elements of Star Wars storytelling as Sig finds himself under the sage tutelage of Jedi Bob ( Bobby Moynihan ), a staple of the early days of LEGO Star Wars minifigs, in a struggle against the dark side of the Force that has already claimed his brother, now known as Darth Devastator. It’s impressive that LEGO Star Wars has managed to tell some of the most Star Wars-y stories, and yet, time and time again, this corner of the franchise proves that it knows exactly how to take broken hearts and turn them into art. We don’t need a Star Wars version of What If…? , we simply need LEGO Star Wars to keep spinning twisted tales in brick form.

‘Rebuild the Galaxy’ Brings Back Beloved Star Wars Characters With a Twist

With the cancellation of The Acolyte last month, Star Wars fans have been reminiscing about how poorly the franchise treated many of its Sequel (and Prequel) era characters and cast members, including Ahmed Best’s Jar Jar Binks and Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico. Both return for Rebuild the Galaxy as Sith versions of their characters, and it feels like a sweet homage to both actors . Best had previously returned to the franchise for a small, but pivotal, role in The Mandalorian , while Tran has reprised Rose Tico in the LEGO-verse before, but here, it’s great to see their characters embrace the dark side and cause a little mayhem.

There are other extremely fun riffs on beloved characters , like “The Landolorian,” voiced by the one and only Billy Dee Williams ; a beach bum chilled-out version of Luke Skywalker, voiced by Mark Hamill ; a goody-two-shoes version of Darth Maul, voiced by Sam Witwer , opposite Ross Marquand returning as a bad boy version of Han Solo. In addition to creating a seemingly evil Grogu and turning sweet baby Nubs into a red-eyed menace, Rebuild the Galaxy also pays homage to recent live-action plotlines by outfitting all the imprisoned rebels in Narkina 5 uniforms ; tragically, there was no “one way out” joke to be found.

On the surface, LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy looks like pure comedic nonsense packaged into four twenty-five-minute episodes, but with each new episode, it’s clear that this series has the ethos of Star Wars storytelling built into every brick-sized piece . The stakes are impossibly high for Sig as he has to overcome his personal shortcomings and embrace his Force-given abilities, and just like every classic tale that has come before, this is a story about self-discovery, community, and finding the sun on the horizon after the darkest night. Don’t be deceived by the packaging this story comes in; the best things often come in unexpected designs.

All four episodes of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy are streaming now on Disney+.

LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy

A thrilling and endearing addition to the LEGO Star Wars universe.

The voice cast is excellent and reunites fans with beloved performers, while introducing brand-new cast members to the universe.
The series is fast-paced, hilarious, and delightfully endearing.
A true homage to Star Wars and LEGO's history together and apart.
The four-episode miniseries could have easily been a movie, rather than a series.

Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy follows a group of heroes and villains from across the Star Wars universe who must work together to restore the galaxy after a mysterious force causes widespread destruction. With iconic characters, witty humor, and epic adventures, the team embarks on a quest to rebuild, one brick at a time.

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Genius star wars theory pays off rise of skywalker's most exciting idea in the best possible way.

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Who Was The First Jedi? Prime Jedi Explained

5 years after the mandalorian premiered, i finally think that star wars feels like star wars again, i worked at the galactic starcruiser, & i can tell you what everyone's getting wrong about the "star wars hotel".

This genius Star Wars theory can give Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ’s most exciting piece of lore the attention it deserves. Though audiences understandably felt let down by the conclusion of the Star Wars sequel trilogy , Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker nevertheless presented some intriguing and lore-altering concepts. Some, like the idea of creating a Force-sensitive clone , have since been explored in shows like The Mandalorian , Ahsoka , and Star Wars: The Bad Batch . Other ideas and storylines have yet to make a wider impact on the franchise, though one such idea may soon get the chance.

The Rise of Skywalker capitalized on the popularity of Rey and Kylo Ren’s relationship by introducing an entirely new Force power: the Force Dyad . In essence, the Force Dyad is a natural bond created by the Force between two people, balanced between light and dark . This bond was originally set up in Star Wars: The Last Jedi , as Rey and Kylo Ren were able to speak to and see each other through the Force, but Rise of Skywalker gave this phenomenon an official name. Little else has been revealed about the Force Dyad, however, and that needs to change.

Rise Of Skywalker Wasted Its Force Dyad

Star Wars The Rise of Sywalker Rey and Kylo Ren Force Dyad

Though The Rise of Skywalker , like The Last Jedi before it, centered on Rey and Kylo Ren’s dynamic as a cornerstone of the sequel trilogy’s storytelling, the Force Dyad as a concept felt like a surprisingly last-minute addition despite the massive implications it had for the franchise’s understanding of the Force. Palpatine briefly mentions it to Kylo, and we see Rey and Kylo interact through it a bit more; then Kylo Ren returns to the light and becomes Ben Solo once more, and suddenly, he dies, sacrificing himself to save Rey’s life. Rey and Kylo didn’t understand their bond, and the audience didn’t, either.

The Force Dyad felt like a surprisingly last-minute addition to The Rise of Skywalker despite the massive implications it had for the franchise’s understanding of the Force.

What was explored in The Rise of Skywalker as far as the Dyad was concerned felt very superficial – a tease of what that power could be rather than actually explaining what it meant for the Force and the Jedi and Sith religions. Given the story beats The Rise of Skywalker did extensively decide to focus on – the Sith assassin, Palpatine’s sudden resurrection, and more – it’s a shame the film neglected its most interesting idea. There is hope, however.

While it seemed like The Acolyte was going to explore the concept of a Force Dyad in more detail with twins Osha and Mae, the show’s unfortunate cancelation put a stop to that. However, it did provide a quote that perfectly describes a Force Dyad: “Always one but born as two.” Osha and Mae may have been twins, but a Force Dyad essentially means that two Force-sensitive beings operate as one within the Force – that’s also why Rey and Ben were able to heal each other.

We need to know more. Thankfully, The Last Jedi has provided Star Wars another opportunity to rectify The Rise of Skywalker ’s oversight and teach us more about the Force Dyad. If The Acolyte can’t do it, the franchise’s most exciting upcoming movie could change everything instead.

Was The Prime Jedi Another Force Dyad?

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi , Rey and Luke train together on Ahch-To, a remote planet that is said to be the site of the first Jedi Temple. One of the island’s caves contains a mural depicting a figure bathed equally in light and dark. Further Star Wars reference books have identified this figure as the “Prime Jedi,” the first known Jedi and the founder of what would later become the Jedi Order.

The new Dawn of the Jedi era Star Wars film will explore the origins of the Jedi Order itself and is likely to follow the first Prime Jedi.

Given the yin and yang imagery associated with the Prime Jedi, it’s possible the Prime Jedi was a figure who balanced the light and the dark, much like the non-canon concept of a “gray Jedi” is often said to do. However, after what we’ve learned in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker , it’s equally possible and perhaps even more plausible that the Prime Jedi wasn’t just one figure but two: two Force-users who together made up a Force Dyad. One embraced the light side of the Force, and the other embraced the dark side.

It's possible the Prime Jedi wasn’t just one figure but two: two Force-users who together made up a Force Dyad. One embraced the light side of the Force, and the other embraced the dark side.

Rey and Kylo Ren were drawn to each other because of their bond in the Force. How did the first Force-users even discover they had that power? Logically speaking, it would make sense for the first Force-users to have unlocked their power because of their link to another being who was also sensitive to the Force. They would have been drawn to one another, able to speak to one another despite being apart, and that would have been what compelled them to study the Force and understand its meaning, even if they were loyal to opposite sides of the Force.

Dawn Of The Jedi Can Show The First Force Dyad

Cover art from Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi 0 Issue with the Force Gods of Mortis mural from Star Wars Rebels

Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi is Star Wars ’ most exciting upcoming film . Pitched as a Ten Commandments movie about the Jedi and the Force, James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi will explore the mystical side of Star Wars like never before. As it’s set 25,000 years before the Skywalker saga, it won’t be bound by previously established canon. Anything goes, including further exploration of the Force Dyad and the Prime Jedi.

Dawn of the Jedi can be an interesting study of the origins of the Jedi and the Force itself. What does it mean to bring balance to the Force? How did the Prime Jedi (plural) work together to establish their powers, create a lightsaber, and lay down the ground rules that would eventually govern the Jedi Order even millennia later?

Dawn of the Jedi is one of four currently confirmed upcoming Star Wars movies. The others are The Mandalorian & Grogu , Rey Skywalker's solo film, and another as-yet-untitled Mandalorian era culmination movie.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Jedi Order’s downfall in the Star Wars prequel trilogy is the Jedi’s refusal to see the darkness as a natural part of the Force. What changed in all that time? How did the original rules and findings get twisted by future generations? There’s so much to explore when it comes to the Force, and if Dawn of the Jedi does examine the idea of the Prime Jedi and the Force Dyad, other pieces of lore can become more crucial as well, like the Mortis gods introduced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and referenced in Ahsoka.

Dawn of the Jedi proves that Star Wars is willing to look beyond the Skywalker saga and The Mandalorian to further the franchise’s storytelling, and it could change how we view the Jedi and the Sith religions. Which side was right? Is the darkness something to be afraid of or something to embrace? Can it ever truly be kept at bay? There’s so much we don’t know, but by combining the concepts of the Prime Jedi and the Force Dyad from The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker , we may learn more about the Star Wars galaxy than we ever dreamed of.

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi

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In the second installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, General Leia Organa leads the Resistance forces against the First Order. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker struggles to come to terms with his past failures, while Rey urges him to train her in the Force and join the resistance. Culminating in a massive battle between the two armies, The Last Jedi raises the stakes of this intergalactic war, and sees the final fight of one beloved character.

Star Wars: Episode IX- The Rise of Skywalker

This is the third installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and serves as the culmination of the Skywalker saga. The film sees Rey (Daisy Ridley), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and Finn (John Boyega) team up to put an end to the First Order after Palpatine mysteriously returns. Jurassic World helmsman Colin Trevorrow was originally named director back in 2015 when the film first entered development, but he parted ways with Lucasfilm due to creative differences over the script. In September 2017, Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams signed on to finish what he started.

Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi

Announced at Star Wars Celebration in 2023, Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi is a prequel focusing on the first-ever Jedi. Taking place 25,000 before Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, Dawn of the Jedi will explore the events set prior to the Old Republic and the Disney+ series, The Acolyte.

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Darth Vader in 'Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back'

James Earl Jones ‘ iconic voice was among his many gifts as a performer. With the actor having died this week at 93 , it remains to be seen whether that voice could appear in new projects, particularly from the Star Wars franchise.

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