by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s movie “feature” was what’s being billed as the
final film in the basic nine-movie Star Wars cycle, which began in 1977 with the release of what was then just
called Star Wars but is now
officially Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Auteur
George Lucas made the first film at 20th Century-Fox (whose
then-studio head, Alan Ladd, Jr., green-lighted it after just about everyone
else in the movie business had turned it down) and as all the world knows, it
was a smash hit and once and for all established science-fiction as a viable
movie genre that could make tons
of money and therefore it behooved the studios to greenlight sci-fi projects
and throw “A”-list talents at them. My friend Chris Schneider once told me he
lamented the success of Star Wars
because, just nine years after the success of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001:
A Space Odyssey had shown that a
science-fiction movie could have the same depth, complexity and dramatic and
philosophical richness of the best published science-fiction writing, George
Lucas and Star Wars had brought
it all back to the simplest sort of space opera. I saw the first Star
Wars three times but lost track of the
immediate sequelae, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, mainly because when they came out I was living with
a woman who’d hated the first Star
Wars (at least partly because she was a
militant atheist and strongly disliked the quasi-religious connotations of “The
Force”) and I don’t think liked science-fiction much in general. (She’d hated 2001, too, and I thought — and still think — that’s one of
the greatest movies ever made.) Charles made it through the first cycle but
lost interest in Star Wars after
that, and neither of us had any great desire to go to the prequelae that
started coming out in the 1990’s. But I retained enough interest in Star
Wars the cultural phenomenon — by now it’s
built and sustained a fan base who conduct elaborate online arguments over
points in and out of the canon that remind me of the
how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-end-of-a-pin debates of medieval theologians —
that when Rogue One: A Star Wars Story came out on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2017 I picked up
the disc on a sort of “What the hell, why not?” attitude. It helped that Rogue
One was a side project in the Star
Wars universe and not part of the official nine-film cycle.
Later on I
grabbed the chance to see Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi at the San Diego Public Library (remember library
film screenings? Remember
libraries?) and quite liked it. It wasn’t that difficult to follow even for someone whose only
previous experience with Star Wars
was the original way back when and the Rogue One one-off (though I ducked the next Star
Wars side project, a prequel called Solo, largely because the New Yorker reviewer ridiculed the casting of the title role,
saying the actor playing the young Han Solo seemed to have got the part because
he looked, sounded and acted nothing
like Harrison Ford), and it had a seemingly moving ending in which Luke
Skywalker — still played by Mark Hamill, over four decades older than he’d been
in the original and looking every bit like it — said on balance it was a bad
thing for the Jedi Knights to have existed because they just called into
existence their mortal enemies, the evil Sith (The New Yorker ridiculed the Star Wars movies for the sheer ugliness and unmemorability of
the character names, noting that when you create an entire universe you have to
name everyone and everything in it, and as a linguistics professor in his day
job J. R. R. Tolkien was a lot better at that than George Lucas). So he was
going to burn all the Jedi scrolls that accumulated the sect’s knowledge base
and then die himself on a remote planet. Well, in a story like this just
because we’re told that a character has died doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t
see them again — indeed, we can even see a character die and still have them resurrected later (as with the
increasing preposterousness with which the writers of the various Alien movies brought back Sigourney Weaver after she had —
at least in my reading of the ending of the first one — nobly sacrificed her
own life to make sure the nasty aliens didn’t get to Earth aboard her
spaceship; eventually they were reduced to having her play her own clone!) —
and The Rise of Skywalker marked
some kind of ultimate in resurrecting both the characters and at least one of
the actors playing them.
The problem was that Carrie Fisher, who’d played
Princess Leia Organa throughout the cycle, died right after shooting The
Last Jedi (indeed, there was some confusion
as to just how much footage she had shot for that episode before she passed,
and I was a bit surprised to see the movie and learn she had at least lived
long enough to finish that film),
and the people behind the current Star Wars cycle, producer-director J. J. Abrams (who for some
reason has had entrusted to him both
the Star Wars and Star
Trek cycles, which explains why the most
recent Star Trek feature films
have been awfully Star Warry,
complete with starships not only landing on planets — verboten in Gene Roddenberry’s original prospectus — but
doing Fast and Furious-style
antics on them) and Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow and Chris Terrio, the other
credited writers, had planned Princess Leia to play a major role in the final
installment. They tried writing her out of the script altogether (it never
seems to have occurred to them to replace the deceased Carrie Fisher with
another actress the way the makers of the Harry Potter films got other actors to play Dumbledore once
Richard Harris died after the second film) and then decided that wouldn’t work.
So they pieced together a sort of bionic performance from her outtakes from the
two immediately previous movies in the cycle, filtering out her original
backgrounds and placing her digitally wherever the character was supposed to
appear, and when they absolutely had
to using her real-life daughter, Billie Lourd (who also appears in the film in
the minor role of Lt. Connix), to double her.
This isn’t that different from
what the makers of the 2006 film Superman Returns did in using leftover footage of Marlon Brando as
Superman’s father Jor-El nagging him from beyond the grave — an actor who had
been dead for two years got to play a character who was also supposed to be
dead — but Abrams and his crew went the makers of Superman Returns one better by giving Carrie Fisher top billing. So
after an early scene in which Leia tells her protégée Rey (Daisy Ridley, who’s
the real lead in this film even though she’s only billed fourth) that “Nothing is impossible,” I couldn’t help but joke, “I’m
starring in this movie even though I’ve been dead for two years! Nothing is impossible!” The plot of Star Wars,
Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker consists
of a lot of action scenes in which the good guys — Rey, Finn (John Boyega — one
welcome aspect of the film is the sheer number of African-descended actors in
the dramatis personae: unlike the
science-fiction movies of the 1950’s, this one does not make it look like the science-fiction future is
going to be all-white, though Charles couldn’t help but joke about how weird it
was that so many white people were descended from James Earl Jones, who
provided the voice of Darth Vader even though it was someone else inside the
suit), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and our old friends from the original,
Chewbacca the Wookie (Joonas Suotamo) and “droids” C-3PO (Anthony Daniels, who
apparently is the only actor who appeared — albeit encased in a tin can — in
all nine films in the cycle) and R2-D2 (Hassan Tai) — have to take on the bad
guys against seemingly impossible odds.
I was amused when I saw Chewbacca’s
face and realized how phony it looked — sort of like going back to the original
Planet of the Apes films after
seeing Andy Serkis’s motion-capture performances in the rebooted cycle — it
convinced us in 1977 but today it looks like something you’d see from the human
performers at Disneyland. (Ya remember Disneyland?) If I can remember it all, it has something to do
with locating a whole fleet of new Star Destroyers the Sith (the bad guys,
remember) have built on their secret home planet, Exegol — which, we’re told,
doesn’t appear on any star charts (a throwback to the convention of 19th
century fiction that posited the existence of islands in mid-ocean that weren’t
on any sea charts), and the good guys have to destroy the Star Destroyers so
they can be used to annihilate any inconveniently resisting planets. To do this
they have to find the Sith Wayfinder, a pyramid-shaped device of which only two
were ever made; and to do that
they have to translate the inscription on a captured Sith dagger, only no one
in our motley crew of goodies can read Sith except C-3PO, and he’s been
programmed so that’s a forbidden language so he can translate it but can’t read
the translation back to anyone else. Still, it’s stored within his memory, but
the only way the good guys can get it out is to deprogram him completely and
wipe out all the contradictory programming, including all his memories of
anyone or anything else, from his hard drive. (In the real world, people upload
the contents of hard drives to external drives so computers can be repaired,
and restore them after they’re done — so why couldn’t the people in the Star
Wars universe do that?)
Meanwhile, the
principal bad guy, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), is confronted by the spirit, the
reincarnation, the clone or whatever of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), whom
we learn is actually the grandfather of Rey (ya remember Rey?), who’s been tasked by Leia to lead the mission
that will kill the Star Destroyers and ultimately put the Sith out of business
forever (or at least until the mavens at Disney decide the grosses on the Star
Wars movies are too big to let die and they
greenlight an Episode X).
Palpatine wants Kylo and/or Rey to take over the throne of the Empire and he
plans to do this by getting Rey to kill him so his spirit can discorporate and
enter her body, taking her over and getting a new lease on life — though the
entire concept of “life” and “death” is so confused in this cycle it’s hard to
keep track of who’s alive, who’s dead and what states there may be in between.
Apparently this was because at earlier stages in the Star Wars mythos either George Lucas or the subsequent writers
decided that you could live forever if you died at peace with the Force,
because then the Force would simply incorporate you and allow you to return to
normal life either in a replica of what you looked like when you died or in a
new incarnation altogether. It’s occurred to me that in developing and using
plot devices like that the Star Wars
cycle moved away from science-fiction and towards fantasy (the opposite of H.
P. Lovecraft’s evolution; in the 1930’s he moved away from fantasy and more
towards science-fiction, and many writers since have copied his central conceit
that super-powerful aliens could have come to earth and been taken for, and
worshiped as, gods: as Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp put it, this
sort of “mechanistic supernatural” approach is the sort of thing an atheist
writing fantasy would come up
with).
For some reason the writers barely even attempt to explain, we learn not only that Rey is the
granddaughter of Palpatine but Kylo Ren, the villain who killed Han Solo two
episodes previously (Adam Driver said that after Episode VII came out people would actually recognize him on the
street, approach him and say, “You killed Han Solo! How dare
you!”), was actually Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia, and under the
tutelage of his dead father — who emerges from the Force (or wherever) and
comes back to life just for this purpose, reclaims him from the side of good
just before his body disintegrates and he dies. “How Production Code!” I said,
noting that in this respect The Rise of Skywalker is like a 1930’s movie in which the villain
abandoned his villainy but still had to die to atone for the bad things he’d
done before. The Rise of Skywalker
is a big (142 minutes) lumbering beast of a movie, and apparently it
disappointed a lot of long-time Star Wars fans who regarded it as somewhat less than a fitting end to the cycle,
but for someone who’s never obsessed about Star Wars I found it quite enjoyable even though the
pretensions did get more than a
bit thick sometimes. Let’s face it: you don’t go see a movie like this (or
watch it at home, the only way we can watch movies now — Disney actually pushed up the home-video release of
this film by two months so they could catch the people in stay-at-home
isolation and make a lot of money selling this entertainment option to them
before the SARS-CoV-2 crisis ends) for deep philosophical or spiritual insights
into the human condition. You go to see a lot of nice-looking people blowing
things up — and that promise The
Rise of Skywalker delivers on in spades.
The
Rise of Skywalker also seems to have at
least a veiled bit of anti-Trump political commentary; I remember the fooforaw
in Right-wing media circles when Rogue One was about to be released that it had been intended as an anti-Trump
film — indeed, there were rumors that after it was shot it was pulled from
release and the director and writers created additional scenes to make it even
more anti-Trump. That was ridiculous even before I saw Rogue One — which if anything was a pro-Trump movie in that one of the two women characters
was a vicious caricature of Hillary Clinton — but there’s certainly an element
of anti-Trump resistance in The Rise of Skywalker, not only in the attempt of an aging authoritarian
leader to keep his power going forever by reincarnating himself into younger
members of his family but also in the bits of dialogue about how the whole
purpose of the Sith’s terror campaign is to intimidate people into not resisting and how everyone else in the universe has
to come together to defeat them — a point eloquently made in the big conflict
at the end between the Sith’s ships, all perfectly designed and identical, and
the motley crew of spacecraft from various planets who respond to Our Heroes’
distress calls and annihilate the baddies (presumably) once and for all.
