The Fall of Skywalker

There is a perverse kick in digging something that everyone else has panned. Movies that have been given a complete critical battering, and utterly fail to find an audience, can often turn out to have unexpected delights.

But sometimes a shit movie is just a shit movie, and we're now at a stage that it can be authoritatively stated that Star Wars Episode XI: The Rise of Skywalker is complete bantha shit.

The final movie in the interminable Skywalker saga (so far) has lots of great parts to it. Even the worst Star Wars still has those incredible sound effects, there is lots of fun light sabre action and the cast of actors remain as charming and watchable as ever. Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver actually do some great work in this film.

But it's also such a cowardly movie, seemingly written by focus group and corporate synergy. Rolling back the origins of Rey to make her part of an inevitable dynasty reeks of screenwriters who put way too much faith in Joseph Campbell.

It's also guilty of half arsing Palpatine himself, and desperately clumsy in its attempts to make you think they've killed Chewbacca almost off screen, before immediately taking it back. The part where they give Chewie his long-awaited medal is hopelessly cringe (especially when the issue of the medal has been dug over so many times in related media), and the macabre use of the late Carrie Fisher's image just does not work at all.

I'm generally an advocate foe the Star Wars sequels - The Last Jedi has an equal amount of duff crap and amazing wonder, and The Force Awakens is unceasingly entertaining (its greatest sin is not making more use of the Raid crew). But there are just too many obviously bad choices in the final part of this trilogy.

The corporate overlords who own the Star Wars franchise have been more focused on TV in recent years, which has resulted in some good stuff - Andor really did go for the throat and was thematically meaty in a way most Star Wars fiction actively runs away from; and some truly awful stuff - there were scenes in Ahsoka and that Boba Fett thing that were so badly staged they are actively off-putting to the entire concept of Star Wars..

And maybe that's for the best for a while, and it's good that future films seem to be staying right away from the Skywalker side of things, because the weight of expectation can prove too heavy for some, and a film dripping in flop sweat is not better than no film at all.