By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
With Kathleen Kennedy finally stepping down at Lucasfilm, I found myself looking back at The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise known as the worst film in the Sequel Trilogy. Fans love to give The Last Jedi crap, but that film might as well have been Citizen Kane compared to TROS, a movie that offers nothing more than lazy nostalgia wrapped around an even lazier plot. However, while The Rise of Skywalker is the worst Star Wars movie, it is a secret triumph in how it centers its narrative around Rey’s quest for identity.
The Rise Of Skywalker Does One Thing Right
The original Star Wars films were famously written with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces in mind, which is why the characters are broad and recognizable archetypes (Luke Skywalker is a young man of destiny like King Arthur, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Merlin-esque wizard who gives our hero an Excalibur-like magic sword, etc.). This helped make those films a success, but the later prequels and sequels ended up feeling like a lame retread because creators were once again creating broadly archetypal characters. By contrast, The Rise of Skywalker, even at its worst, was a narrative triumph making Rey three-dimensional in her quest for self-identity.
Obviously, Disney muddled the sequels on almost every level, which is why Rey went from having a possible connection to Obi-Wan in The Force Awakens (a little digital wizardry had Sir Alec Guinness calling out Rey’s name after she got Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber) to being the nobody daughter of nobody parents in The Last Jedi. The Rise of Skywalker infamously made her the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, and while this is the worst storytelling decision they could have made, it became an accidental triumph thanks to Rey’s realization that self-identity is a social construct.Â
In practical terms, this means that Rey the character finally realized something that had eluded countless fans and Disney’s own topic executives: that the debate over Rey’s identity is completely meaningless. Everyone wanted to pore over who she might be connected to in the Star Wars universe and how those connections define who she really is. The Rise of Skywalker, however, turned its worst story beat (Rey’s connection to Emperor Palpatine) into a triumph by having our new Jedi realize what almost everyone in the audience eventually realizes: one’s identity does not have to be determined by one’s family.
That may sound like a fairly basic idea, but it’s a concept Star Wars never really embraced before. Most of all three trilogies revolved around how the Skywalkers alternated between dooming and saving the galaxy, making it easy to think the almighty Force only really cares about one family. The Rise of Skywalker, for all its flaws, drives home that our heroes can define themselves and live full lives outside the shadow of their predecessors.
Now, before you say it, I’ll be the first to admit that this doesn’t magically make The Rise of Skywalker a good movie. Everything from the hokey return of Emperor Palpatine to the fetch quest plot to the inexplicable remnants of the Death Star is stupid enough to make you wonder why you fell in love with this franchise in the first place. And even Rey’s revelation that she identifies as a Skywalker made for a goofy stinger of an ending, but that goofiness hides a fairly important message about choosing your own identity.
Once more for the cheap seats: The Rise of Skywalker is the worst Star Wars film ever made, but it’s also a secret triumph because it recontextualizes the entire franchise. After eight films insisting otherwise, the franchise obsessed about cosmic destiny finally admitted that our heroes are free to choose their own paths and their own identities. Hopefully, Star Wars itself can follow suit and its connection to Disney won’t keep it from identifying as a decent franchise ever again.