This post was originally posted as a review for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on my Letterboxd film-watching diary. It turned into a little history lesson about the entire saga.
All right, let’s put this all into perspective.
The underbelly of STAR WARS and the conversations that arise from it: the love and the hate, the this vs. that, the fan service vs. risk-taking, etc. it seems to me this is partly based on an expectation that Star Wars, as a story, is like a sprawling and perfect saga that its creators always knew everything about from the very beginning: well defined and coherent, with all of its rules firmly in place.
But it’s not. It never has been. It started as an experimental film by imperfect people that became a phenomenon by accident.
STAR WARS. 1977. Before it was “New Hope”, special edition, whatever. One movie. It takes two hours to watch it. It took several years to make. George Lucas came up with the idea to make this movie. I don’t know George Lucas. I only know him as well as his biographers do, or from what he has shared with others in interviews I've watched. From what I can tell, the young George Lucas was a weird guy, interested in experimental films that were like self-described “tone poems.” It’s a kind of filmmaking intended to create emotional responses in its audience by how the visuals work together, how it’s edited, and how it sounds. Have you ever seen his first feature,
THX 1138? It’s a REALLY weird movie. I saw it once a couple years ago and it took me by surprise. I need to watch it again to see what I really think of it, but it’s not what I expected. It’s very abstract, and has something to do with technology replacing human emotions & experience.
These are supposedly the kinds of films George Lucas wanted to make his whole life, along with documentaries about the human experience. He was more of an anthropologist than a traditional linear storyteller. He wanted to use the medium of cinema: sound, visuals and editing, to ask questions about human behavior, our relationships with others, and with technology. He didn’t really care what people thought about his films, he made them because he wanted to make them, and if people liked them and found them meaningful, that was a bonus. It may mean that his experiment worked, or at least he could see the results of this experiment. The language of cinema, particularly in editing, were his strengths. Writing is not. Keep this in mind.
Experiment (noun): a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact (verb): perform a scientific procedure, especially in a laboratory, to determine something, or try out new concepts or ways of doing things.
THX’s results as an experiment were not successful financially or in terms of reaching an audience due to its bleakness (plus it’s a REALLY weird movie), so Francis Ford Coppola dared George Lucas to make a comedy. George, needing another gig, said “sure, I’ll take that bet.” So he made
AMERICAN GRAFFITI, a great movie with great characters based on people he knew while growing up. It was an anthropological study to document the 1950s/60s cruising culture. Being semi-autobiographical, it was easy for him to write, and he had help with the screenplay from others to make it better. These elements helped to make it a linear story that was easy to follow, but it’s also a tone poem. The whole film is strung together in the background by a playlist of popular songs that Lucas grew up with, and the lyrics serve to tell the story and provide subtext for what’s happening on screen. There is music behind the whole movie, an experiment in sound and music underscoring visuals based on real characters living their lives. The film was a success, and rightly so. It’s great fun, and well made.
For Lucas’ next experiment, he decided to make a space opera and see if it was possible to tell a B-movie serial story of good vs. evil with A-movie technology and skillful filmmaking. Since he didn’t get the rights to Flash Gordon, he decided to write his own story, drawing on different myths and religions, etc...again, like an anthropologist, trying to distill all of these elements into a cohesive tale. Production moved ahead based on a screenplay that was, in essence, a rough draft from start to finish. Remember, Lucas is an idea guy, but he’s not necessarily a good writer. Because so many of the effects done on the film, technically speaking, had never been done before, the entire production was being made and compromised as it went along, guided by Lucas, but by hundreds of people who didn’t share that vision. Everybody thought it would be a flop.
The first rough cut of the film, based on the singular vision of Lucas, was a disaster. Scenes went on too long, and there was very little rhyme or reason to the flow of information. The special effects were not complete, and although they would eventually look awesome, had the story remained as it was, Star Wars might possibly have been a sleeper hit. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s safe to say that two major things saved Star Wars: editing and music.
As laid out brilliantly in the YouTube video “
How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit,” decisions by Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew, and Paul Hirsch helped Lucas craft his dull, convoluted storyline into something that clicked. They used every scrap of footage they could, down to the last frame, and through the faithfulness of Alan Ladd Jr (who also saved the film), got more money to shoot enough footage to fill in the gaps. Lucas used his own editing skills (which he saw as his best “ace in the hole” skill) to cobble together patterns of movement from World War II dogfights to give his effects artists a template to work from. The screen direction of the space battles was where Lucas’ directing skills could shine and make up for what defects he had in writing effective dialogue or guiding actors’ performances. The combination of suggestions by his actors and editors cut out the worst lines of dialogue and extraneous sequences (i.e. Luke’s friends on Tatooine) and managed to turn it into tone poetry.
John Williams was one of the few people who understood what Lucas was trying to do, as did Spielberg, who liked
Star Wars and recommended Williams to begin with. The recording of the musical score was one of the only processes in making the film that exceeded Lucas’ expectations. Like the pop songs in
American Graffiti, music played through almost the entire movie, and the use of leitmotifs for specific characters gave them resonance that served as the emotional subtext for who they were: characters who were archetypes, but somehow or other were also real characters. Given little direction from Lucas on set, these actors gave their own ideas and presence with wonderful chemistry, due to the time and care taken to properly cast the film (nearly a year of casting overall).
The combination of re-structuring the story, skillful editing, a great cast, and music by the right composer made Star Wars what it is: a movie, but also a tone poem. In the first 15 minutes or so, we are presented with spaceships, masked soldiers, droids, aliens, and very few humans. We are thrust into the middle of a story and have to discover it and figure things out as we go along. R2-D2 and the Jawas speak a weird, rhythmic language without subtitles. Droids walk slowly through sand dunes and caves. We watch a montage of strange, battered-down droids in a garbage truck. We haven’t even met Luke Skywalker yet. He doesn’t show up until about 17 minutes in. More exposition scenes follow, but they have a rhythm to them, underscored by an organic soundtrack which gives balance to an unfamiliar world. Think back to what this would have been like for its first audiences. This one movie was all there was. This was STAR WARS, where it all started. A tone poem, a frickin’ weird, alien fever dream of a movie by a weird guy, but not just by a weird guy working alone. It was lifted up by the right collaborators who came together to make it something unique. There is an idio-syncracy within this one movie that is difficult to fathom. Somehow it happened to bring together elements of mythology, history, post-Vietnam anxiety and everything that worked about movies and re-mix it into something familiar but fresh at the same time. It was a remix of westerns, serials, and Japanese cinema, but one done beautifully well. Nobody thought it would be a phenomenon while they were working on it, but it became one. It had a spell cast under it.
Lucas, however, was so burned out by the whole process of making it, I don’t get the sense he ever appreciated his own masterwork or saw it beyond the flaws that kept him from viewing it objectively. The rest of the story is that he now had the ability to make more films on his own terms, and accounts differ all over the place as to whether he had 12 films in mind, 9 films in mind, sequels, prequels, whatever, from the very beginning. He spent the next 6 years battling with his own success, his own trusted collaborators, his own ego, his ever-changing ideas, his failed marriage, and the part of him that simply wanted to finish his story and move on. With
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, his team were now at the top of their game, invigorated by the success and wonder of the first film and inspired to make one even better. This time, they all knew what they were working on, and everyone was on board. The results were a richer experience that took what started as a tone poem into a real story, thanks mainly to the right people supporting the vision with strong screenwriting, direction, and invention.
By the time
RETURN OF THE JEDI rolled around, the rest of the industry was beginning to jump on board and catch up with the inspiration that Star Wars gave them. Movies like
Raiders and
E.T. divided the attention of Lucas and respectively Spielberg, and the greed and politics of Hollywood dis-spirited both of them into angry, young men for awhile afterwards. (They vented their anger by making
TEMPLE OF DOOM.) The quirkiness of Lucas’ weird ideas and decision-making begin to make their way into Jedi, and alongside the serious, beautiful drama of Luke and Vader’s story arc with the Emperor, you can feel the focus beginning to drain. The dark side of the studio politics and worldly success was beginning to creep in, break things down, and take its toll.
Upon returning to direct the prequels, we were presented with Lucas as a writer/director, but without the sense of collaboration and experimentation that graced his earlier work. Surrounding himself by yes-men rather than those who could fill in his own deficiencies, the results were less like experimental tone poems and more of his Lucas weirdness: bad writing, a messy bombardment of special effects, strange but ugly creatures, and a story that is simply not exciting because we all know where it’s heading. Rather than an unveiling sense of discovery, it’s more like “these three movies are here to show us how the Jedi became extinct and how Anakin turned into Darth Vader” - but with a lot of filler. To its credit, the prequels are not good films, but at the very least they occasionally expand the Star Wars universe and show us new worlds and characters. The trouble is, they’re just not as memorable, for whatever reason. The disappointment they cause as poorly-made films, however, is coupled by the fact they don’t capture the same sense of wonder given to us by the film that started it all. For whatever reason, the stars were literally aligned to bring something special into the world, and we were forever changed by that one movie, that really strange one from 1977.
Which brings us to
THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. The film itself is a mess, for all the reasons many others have cited. It’s weighed down by too much plot, too many ideas stuffed into its running time, flat pacing, overdone this, underdone that, etc. I can agree with all of this. It’s all over the place. (Plus, like
Force Awakens, it’s
Harry Potter in space, because Rey has a connection with a snake and Palpatine dissolves like Voldemort.) I’m also one of those Star Wars fans who enjoyed
THE LAST JEDI for its integrity and balance, and will agree it’s the best chapter to be made since
Empire, due to its fresh vision and integrity. But I also enjoyed
Rise of Skywalker - not as much as Last Jedi but more than
Force Awakens - simply for what it is, and how it brings elements of the spirit of Star Wars into a fitting conclusion. (Notice I said the “spirit” of Star Wars, not necessarily Star Wars as a whole.)
I enjoyed it mainly for the following reason: it reminded me of what it was like to play Star Wars at recess when I was a kid. We made up the story as we went along. It moved quickly, from scene to scene, at a break-neck pace. It was not logical, but it was fun. People would get killed, then come back to life. People would be rescued, only to be captured again. Someone would shout something like “Let’s say I have an ion cannon” and we would either roll with it, or get into an argument. Rolling with it was always better, as it opened up new possibilities. It was learning how to get along. It was messy. And we had to fit in as much mess as we could before the bell rang. The next day, we would pick up where we left off. Or we would forget it all and make up a new scene. But the reason we did it to begin with was because of that one movie. That weird tone poem with a mysterious spell underneath it. That weird movie that was lightning in a bottle, which we’ve been trying to re-capture ever since.
This personal reaction doesn’t make up for
Rise of Skywalker being a hot mess. It's still a mess, but it carried me through well enough to give me some joy even while the plot meandered all over the place. And it did have some great moments, snappy clever gags and dialogue, a few surprises, real drama, and fun scenes. I loved Babu Frick, the slummy, wintery streets of Kjimi, and the exiled former Stormtroopers who ride those elephant-horse things. Whenever the film slowed down enough to show us new worlds and characters, it became more fascinating, and it all came together, in my view, to a satisfying conclusion. It captured the spirit of what it’s like to play make-believe in that universe, and by distilling the story down into the character of Rey, made it personal for people like me, who always saw myself as a Skywalker. (True story: I went to pre-school at the age of 4 telling everyone my name was Luke Skywalker, but they could just call me Luke.) Call it fan service if you must, but it served this fan enough to bring a smile to my face. Its heart was in the right place.
That being said, the direction and vision behind
The Last Jedi and the even more recent
Mandalorian series shows us that fan service, nostalgia, original ideas and good storytelling can actually work well together.
The Mandalorian starts out slow, but as the series progresses, especially by the last three episodes, it’s full of surprises and excitement. Somehow or another, the myriad of directors for each episode (some of them female, even) were able to bring a freshness and humanity that is worlds beyond what most of the feature-length films have been able to accomplish. It seems like episodic series are providing the freshest ground these days for the best examples of dense, character-driven, experimental storytelling. Feature-length films, unless in the hands of a poet with the gift of restraint, may be a harder vessel for some stories to be told. Perhaps this is where Star Wars should go: into the smaller corners of the universe and fates of others on the fringes, those who are not Skywalkers but still have stories to tell. And maybe someone somewhere will make another tone poem.
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