The 2010s were an amazing decade for movies. Paddington 2, Beyond the Lights, Mad Max: Fury Road, Ida — I could spend paragraphs listing and discussing the best movies of the decade. I likely will in the near future. But that’s not why we’re here today. Today, I want to discuss the opposite. Not celebrating the best of the decade, but discussing what the worst of the decade means. Specifically: Is J.J. Abrams’ recently released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker the worst movie of the 2010s?
First, let me get something out of the way. “Worst” movie claims tend to be… judgmental. They’re an attack on the taste of the reader. If a ‘best of’ list is demonstrating my taste, a ‘worst of’ often feels like it is denigrating people who like a particular movie. This is not meant to be that. The reason I’m naming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker as my worst movie of the decade is deeply tied to the trends in storytelling and marketing that I despised. This is not meant to be a judgment on nor insult to people who enjoyed the movie.
That said: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Here’s why.
“They sold you to protect you.”
At some point in the last decade, the way we thought about adapting and continuing properties like Star Wars began to… change. A great adaptation is not slavishly loyal to the source material’s every detail and device. Instead, great adaptations tend to find what the material was really about, what spoke to its fans, and then find a way to keep that spirit alive while changing it to fit the new medium. Greta Gerwig’s recent Little Women did this well. Gerwig remixed Alcott’s beloved novel, keeping what spoke to fans – the bond between the sisters, the gentle, everyday kindness of the March family – while adding in her own textual criticism and jumping back and forth in time to draw visual and thematic parallels throughout the story. It’s a phenomenal adaptation.
But social media drove an uglier kind of adaptation. ‘Fan service’ is a toxic trend, and it drove a lot of bad storytelling in the 2010s. Fan service is not about adapting the spirit of the material. Instead, it is about giving the most vocal fans a copy of a memory and nothing more.
The Rise of Skywalker does this in spades. After the rancid, misogynistic reaction of the online right to The Last Jedi, Disney and director J.J. Abrams made a choice. Rather than continue their story, they sought to quell a reactionary revolt. Consequently, Rise of Skywalker is bursting with moments in which they expressly reject or overwrite things from the previous film, while piling on callbacks to the older films and cartoons.
As an example: After Leia dies from having a tough nap, she finally gives Chewbacca the medal he was denied in A New Hope. It’s meant to be a sweet callback answering a popular fan complaint. Except… what this means is, Leia realized, at some point in the last 40 years, that she made a mistake… and opted to wait until after she died to rectify it. To one of her closest friends. JJ Abrams just wanted to reference a thing he thought you’d like, but he gave no consideration about what doing so would mean for the characters. He serviced the fans, not the story. The Rise of Skywalker is full of moments like this. Make the fans feel good at all costs. Even if it breaks everything else.
“You don’t have power. You have his power.”
The 2010s saw a huge rise in the reactionary far right on social media. Often egged on by malicious political actors, the reactionary right are vicious towards any movie that has too many women, too many people of color, too progressive a veneer. This didn’t infect movies much in the decade, but it did destroy the discourse surrounding movies.
But, as I discussed above, The Rise of Skywalker in general and J.J. Abrams in particular was obsessed with fan service. What happens when you combine a loud, ultra-right wing band of misogynists and racists with a director hellbent on pleasing everyone?
You get characters introduced just to make its two male leads seem straight, because the queer pairings of them were awkward to Disney. You get Kelly Marie Tran, an Asian American actress bullied off social media, essentially written out of the film completely.
And, of course, you get Rey’s story. Rey’s story here is straight-up gibberish, but it’s one in which her power and autonomy are routinely stripped from her. After two films of reactionaries furious that she was strong without needing the help of the white men they grew up loving, The Rise of Skywalker seeks to ‘fix’ that problem. But, in doing so, the movie blows itself up. The entire movie tilts on its axis to become about Rey’s parentage, specifically, the relationships with the men who ‘gave’ her power. None of these revelations make sense or add any depth to the character, but it is very important to a certain kind of man that she have a ‘reason’ for being so strong, that she ‘earn’ her story because she has the right patriarch.
“In sixteen hours, the Final Order will begin its assault.”
How much time would you guess passes in The Rise of Skywalker? During the film, the characters:
- visit six different planets in four different ships
- have six different action set pieces
- die repeatedly then come back (there are, if I remember right, five different ‘Disney deaths‘)
- complete a decades-long treasure hunt
If you guessed sixteen hours, congratulations, you paid more attention to the script than anyone working on the movie did. Did these characters eat? Sleep? Get tired? Have human emotions or conversations? Grieve the apparent deaths of their friends? Say or do anything unrelated to the McGuffin? Apparently not.
With the domination of CGI-driven mayhem, studios often have to start working on big, effects-driven set-pieces before a script is even complete. While I don’t know if that’s the case here, it certainly seems that way. The Rise of Skywalker had a troubled production history, changing writer and director shortly before filming began. Because of the long lead time and high cost of computer effects, set pieces often have to be started early, even as the scripts undergo considerable change. And there are a lot of set pieces in this movie. A surprising number of them are straight-up meaningless to the narrative.
In addition to action that doesn’t make sense, the movie often completely undercuts its own stakes. Typically, this will involve someone doing something, only to be told that it’s impossible that they have done that, often while we see the thing happening. Take the first set-piece, in which Poe ‘lightspeed skips’ the Millennium Falcon. Other characters tell him it’s impossible, ridiculous, they can’t believe it — but, like, he’s doing it. We’re watching it. It’s not like ‘lightspeed skipping’ is a real thing that gives us some actual baseline as to whether it is possible. You can’t make something imaginary impressive without some sort of ground rules. Without seeing failure, or at least struggle.
Because CGI can do anything, bad action movies in the 2010s have had a hard time justifying that wild excess. The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t even try. Completely devoid of stakes, utterly lacking in aesthetic or excitement, and meaningless in the context of the movie, The Rise of Skywalker commits the same sins that tanked so many bad action movies in the decade, but on a much grander scale. When your Star Wars movie lacks the visual grandeur of even something like Jupiter Ascending, mistakes have been made.
“No one’s ever really gone.”
This is less a trend and more the start of something very ugly. Star Wars has already dabbled in bringing back the dead — and not in the stories. In one of the most tasteless storytelling decisions in recent memory, Rogue One brought back fan-favorite character Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing… by digitally recreating deceased actor Peter Cushing. It was a weird nightmare to see on the screen, and future implications are genuinely chilling. Earlier in the decade, Audrey Hepburn was digitally recreated to sell chocolates, in one of the grossest displays of capitalism of 2014. And just recently, a film announced they would digitally recreate James Dean for a brand new film. This will only get worse in the coming years.
Carrie Fisher died before The Rise of Skywalker started filming. Thankfully, they didn’t try to do a full digital recreation of Fisher, but what they did felt nearly as bad. Repurposing old footage shot for The Force Awakens, they write around her old, already-recorded lines to have her ‘train’ Rey. The end result, a stiff, nonsensical series of half-conversations followed by her just laying down and dying, was profoundly uncomfortable to watch. Fisher has always been a remarkable performer; that this stiff test footage automaton was our final memory of her is truly, profoundly tragic. They could have written around Fisher’s death more fully, but, well, set pieces were already underway. So instead, we get… this.
In 2013, Ari Folman released The Congress, a movie about an actress wrestling with selling her digital likeness to a studio for all future use. The movie has its issues, but it noticed a trend before most others did. Star Wars – and Disney more broadly – will likely play a huge part in bringing that nightmarish reality to life.
Okay…
Look, there were a lot of bad blockbusters that came out this year, and a lot of bad movies. Is The Rise of Skywalker worse than Suicide Squad? X-Men: Apocalypse? Fantasic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald (the closest one, for me)? Than any of the dozens of shitty Christian half-movies that come out, or propaganda ‘documentaries’ made by folks like Dinesh D’Souza?
Those are all genuinely abysmal. But The Rise of Skywalker, for me, managed to combine the things I despised about all of those into one, neat package. My issue with Rise isn’t any single decision it made, but rather that every individual element was bad. This was a bad story, badly told for bad reasons. It was made to please the worst people in the world. They threw it together knowing that if you brand some shit on a stick Star Wars, butts will fill seats. The obsession with canon and continuity, with branding and intellectual property, with treating filmmaking like a fucking rollercoaster rather than an art — these are all the definitive cinema sins in the 2010s for me. No movie I can think of did them all, and did them all quite as badly, as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is out now in theaters everywhere. Directed by J.J. Abrams, The Rise of Skywalker stars Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega.