Review—Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Bobby’s Rating - 3 out of 10
Currently playing at a theater near you.
I know 3 out of 10 is a terrible rating, so go ahead, let the hating begin. I thought Star Wars, episode 993 (or whatever number we’re on now), sucked a hairy ball sack. On the other hand, the special effects were impressive.
Before you Google my home address and come to my house to defile my dog, let me say this: When I was 16, way back in 1977 (yes, I’m that old), I saw the first Star Wars movie in one of those giant pre-multiplex theaters on a big-ass 200-foot-wide screen—lightsabers, tie fighters, star destroyers—OMG! The special effects were revolutionary, for the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say, at that point in my life, Star Wars was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.
Mind you, at 16, I’d experienced no carnal activity with a woman. That wouldn’t come until a few years later, when a spectacularly beautiful girl seemed to have tumbled out of the pages of a Playboy magazine and onto the fold-down backseat of my Mustang fastback. That night was as wonderful as it was awkward, with lots of nervous fumbling in between, but it ended well. Of course, that event made it directly to the top of my Best Things That Ever Happened to Bobby list, but in the long run, the first Star Wars held onto a respectable ranking, and the loss of my virtue slipped slowly down.
So why do I tell you all this? Because I want to demonstrate how big of a Star Wars fan I was.
I know that puts me in the camp of curmudgeons who say things like, the old movies are better than the new ones, that band’s first album is better than their latest crap, they don’t make <any consumer product> like they used to, and get off my lawn, you whippersnapper!
And I’ll be honest, if the first Star Wars movie came out today, for the first time, I don’t know that I’d be such a devotee.
Because one thing you learn as you age, is that your tastes change through the years. But it’s more than that. Each of us, whether we can see it or not, is a product of our culture, everything we’ve lived through, and everything we’re currently experiencing.
Back when the first Star Wars movie came out, the culture I’d spent my entire life in was in turmoil – the Vietnam war, demonstrations, riots, assassinations, the Arab oil embargo, Watergate, rising inflation and unemployment, not to mention the continual threat of nuclear annihilation. It seems to me, that many of the big movies in the early to mid-1970s were a reflection of us. They were introspective, and at times, brutally dark. I was part of a culture that had lost its understanding of its identity and was trying to figure itself out. In the early ’60s, I think all Americans believed we were the good guys, the cowboys in the white hats. By the mid-’70s, we weren’t sure anymore. We didn’t trust our government, our police, or our parents. In my lifetime, we’d gone from certitude about who we were as a people, to questioning whether we were even good.
And then Star Wars came out.
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I’m not going to claim that it totally changed the direction of our culture, but it did give us a story about a hero we could all believe in who fought against a villain who was 100% evil (at least in the first movie he was.)
Pure good, versus absolute evil, set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was the kind of story all of us were starving for, though we barely knew we had a hunger until we saw it in the theater. And for me, a kid who’d taken to spending most of his spare time reading SciFi books to escape a very ugly world, Star Wars was magical, fantastic, and pure, a reflection of all the crazy stuff I was reading about in those books, and quite literally, the best thing that had ever happened to me.
So maybe, what I’m really saying about the latest Star Wars, is that it didn’t make me feel the same way the first Star Wars made me feel.
In fact, ever since the first trilogy ended, I’ve watched each Star Wars movie with the highest expectations, but until I sat down and attempted to write this review, I don’t think I truly understood what those expectations were—I wanted that 1977 feeling again, what I felt when that screen flashed the giant Star Wars text and the fanfare blasted me out of my seat, and Luke overcame his obstacles and blew up the death star, and they all lived happily ever after—until the Empire Struck Back.
So, I guess what I should have said to start this review, was—my expectations are so colored by my history with these movies, that there’s no way I can give the latest Star Wars any kind of unbiased review. You might like it. My daughter, who watched it with me, fuckin’ loved it. Me, not so much.
But the special effects were pretty fan-fuckin’-tastic.
Bobby Adair
* If you feel like I’ve been unnecessarily harsh on a masterpiece, or too easy on a terrible POS, please read my Disclaimers, Caveats, and Excuses page before you flame me.
Bobby Adair is a former programmer, with a long-lived passion - and only recently fulfilled desire - for writing. He is the author of the Freedom Fire series, the Slow Burn series and the Ebola K series.
One of Bobby's favorite quotes:
“It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us...Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.”
- Peter Gibbons, Office Space
You can follow Bobby on Facebook, Twitter and his website.
I’m with you. However, I did like The Last Jedi. And I was entertained (but not wowed) by The Rise of Disneystock ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h er, Skywalker. I thought the light saber fights were terrible. But what really made it suck was there wasn’t any character development. Luke went from whiney kid to jedi night. Han went from criminal to hero.
And that was the great failing in the first trilogy – Anakin went from innocent kid to Darth Vader, but didn’t! In the end it was “Jedi don’t kill unarmed prisoners” to killing children mercilessly without hitting any point in-between.
And while the Force Awakens introduced a bunch of people that could have grown, they really didn’t. Last Jedi at least had the riddle of Luke and his eventual redemption (when it seemed to hinting on Ben’s redemption – nice misdirection).
But Rise just didn’t have the emotional impact that comes from caring about the characters.
Where’s the rest of the review? You didn’t actually write anything about the movie, except for one juvenile line about hairy ball sacks and your oral fixation, and that the special effects were cool.
I’m with Charlie on this. Where is the review? Accusations do not a review make.