“Star Wars has never been known for its perfect plotting. It’s hard to believe now, but when George Lucas was filming the first episode of his saga in 1975, he didn’t plan for Darth Vader to be Luke’s father. That’s why in A New Hope we are told that a thief killed Skywalker Sr. During the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, no one knew that Luke and Leia were brother and sister. That’s why they kissed in 1980 and turned out to be related in 1983. Han Solo was not going to be frozen in the finale of the second part of the story, but Harrison Ford could have left the set, so they decided to put his character in a “suspended” state, so that if necessary, he could simply be declared dead.
To be honest, Star Wars is not about plot twists at all. The first part of the saga is practically a space remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. The ending of the prequel trilogy (obviously) was known 22 years before the first movie was released. In fact, the most important thing about George Lucas’s world is the world itself. When we hear Star Wars, we imagine Jedi and Sith, lightsabers and blasters, spaceships and distant planets. The originality of this universe and the unbridled imagination of its creator made the original Star Wars films perhaps the biggest blockbuster in the history of cinema. And in many ways, they contributed to the failure of Lucas’ prequels. The films of the noughties were not much like their predecessors: space policy, advanced technology, a biological explanation of the mysterious “force,” an absurd amount of computer graphics (not a single real stormtrooper helmet!), and numerous rewrites of history scared off fans. But they once again emphasized the essence of “Wars” as the original author saw it: a melodrama set against the backdrop of a rich, diverse, distant Galaxy.
But Disney, after buying the rights to film the sequels from Lucas, decided otherwise for some reason. The company seems to have confused technical limitations with the creator’s vision. Someone decided that the spirit of Star Wars is centered in the same deserts of the 80s, not the diverse worlds of the noughties. That there can be only three types of spaces in the Galaxy: bars, spaceships, and bunkers. That retrofuturism means a complete lack of changes in technical, political, religious, cultural, and social life. That humans are much more interesting than aliens, and that Chewbacca should remain the only representative of extraterrestrial races that has been revealed. In general, the new owners of Star Wars refused to develop the Far Galaxy in breadth and depth, but in 2015 you could at least still convince yourself that Disney wanted to tell a story. Well, as it turned out, the new trilogy did without that.
“Star Wars. Skywalker. Ascension” (for the love of God, localizers!) is a huge exclamation point at the end of the question “Did these nuts really make a Star Wars trilogy without any plan?” Yes. To use a well-known analogy, J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens carefully hung guns on the walls. “Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi threw them in the trash without replacing them with anything at all. So, before the trilogy’s finale, it turned out that we didn’t have a single “question” to answer. The heroes don’t have to carry the ring to the Fatal Mountain, they don’t have to search for the Infinity Stones, they don’t have to solve the riddles of deadly relics. So instead of continuing the previously established lines, Skywalker. Ascension” just took and out of the blue (in the final of the trilogy!) invented new problems, mcguffins, and even the main villain. Also, since J.J. Abrams returned to the helm, he rummaged through the trash and found questions that had been thrown away after the first movie. Apparently, they were looking for answers in the same place.
All of the above is the main reason for the creative failure of Skywalker. Ascension”. Instead of finally believing in themselves and creating something new, Star Wars decided to do a large-scale work on their mistakes, constantly looking back in the rearview mirror and at fan forums. And, predictably, hitting every possible pothole along the way.
For example, in the third installment of Star Wars, they finally decided to add interesting alien worlds. But for some reason, all of them at once. So the characters teleport across the galaxy, like in Game of Thrones, and the locations change more often than you can remember. Also, in “Skywalker. Rise finally added cool, beautiful lightsaber battles. Which inevitably raises the question: why didn’t Kylo Ren do this before? Actually, we know why: J.J. Abrams in the first movie wanted to abandon the unrealistic acrobatics of the prequels in favor of fencing. But now the threequel has corrected this “mistake” as well. Also, in the final part of the saga, they finally showed a battle of space fleets. But it was so stupid and poorly filmed that the stakes were impossible to take seriously. They also brought back the Knights of Ren (without a single line), showed the industrial use of new powers (it’s painful to even think about the canon), and in the best traditions of 007: Spectre, connected all the events of the previous films.
In general, the first half of Skywalker. Ascension is like trying to clean your apartment ten minutes before your parents arrive. The pace and final organization are about the same. Then Star Wars remembers that it has always been centered on family drama and turns into The Crimes of Grindelwald. Do you remember all those double substitutions of babies, Dumbledore’s secret brothers? The situation here is similar, only in Fantastic Beasts, the audience was outraged during the grand reveal, and in Star Wars, it was nervous laughter. This expression about the Disney trilogy is already turning into a cliché, but Skywalker. Ascension” really resembles a fanfiction based on the movie, not a movie for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It also doesn’t feel like a pond at all. We won’t spoil it, but it seems that all the characters in the threequel are simply hung with four-leaf clovers, rabbit’s feet, and ship-class plot armor. The local thieves have a similar problem: everything about them is devoid of any logic. As a result, you don’t believe in such idiots playing the roles of galactic evil at all, and thus the heroes’ fight against them becomes uninteresting. Don’t get me wrong: plot conventions in fantasy are normal. Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, for example, did not guard the only place where he could be destroyed. But at least we were told why. But the villains of The Ascension give you a chance to defeat yourself simply based on the timing. In The Guardians, the antagonists come up with seemingly too complicated and unreliable plans. But then everything falls into place. In The Ascent, the antagonists come up with a plan thirty years in advance, and none (absolutely none) of it makes sense. What’s more, the movie even imperceptibly brings the villains’ plans to life. Only they still don’t work.
As well as a huge number of other things that don’t work. For example, nostalgia, which has already worn off in the fifth movie in five years. Brief returns of old characters who do nothing important and are no more pleasing than the occasional visit of your long-forgotten godfather. The role of Carrie Fisher, who died before the filming of the final part, so the studio assembled her dialogues from the lines filmed on other films, looks like Princess Leia quotes random predictions from Silpo from time to time. The storyline of Rey and Kylo Ren, which for the third time boils down to “go over – no, you go over.” The storyline of Rey herself, who suddenly forgot all the lessons of Luke Skywalker and became interested in eugenics. The storyline of Finn, which ended back in 2015. The storyline of the rebellion, which did nothing for three movies and then just got together and won. And even the overall level of direction, cinematography and visual symbolism fell below The Force Awakens and well below The Last Jedi.
And yet, the most difficult challenge for Star Wars was the ending. It so happened that J.J. Abrams has filmed many things, but has never released the final parts of the stories. And it should be remembered that the Disney trilogy did not have a coherent story to complete at all. The only thing that mattered was the status quo in which the characters would remain. We’ll avoid any spoilers here, but we’ll just note that no trilogy ending can be deserved if you invent it an hour before the end of the last movie.
