your long-awaited film criticism has finally arrived
HELLO sorry for my USELESSNESS it has been SO LONG !!!
i was recently Shamed into writing another instalment by someone asking me if this tinyletter was still going, which it is, i am just very lazy and generally untrustworthy. he also asked if i had seen MONOS and i said i would watch it and try to summon some thoughts - i am sure u will all be Disappointed But Not Surprised to learn that i failed to do that & that this email is, instead, about the new Star War.

[spoilers for The Rise Of Skywalker, predictably, below]
okay to begin with we need to address the fact that i love The Last Jedi with my whole life, and am therefore particularly resentful of a lot of the things that happen in TROS, because they undo so much of what was good about TLJ.
(if you're not one of the many, many people i have cornered while inebriated to yell about TLJ, here's a recap of my feelings, presented in a slightly more coherent form than they tend to be when delivered verbally: https://shakespeareandpunk.com/2018/01/20/balancing-the-past-in-the-last-jedi/)
okay, now that we're all on the same page, let me preface what follows with the caveat that the subject of this email is a lie and this is not "film criticism" so much as me complaining about things, comme d'habitude.
(okay hopefully this is the last meme of this email but this might be my favourite star wars joke of all time; darth vader walks into a bakery and the baker says "3 breads and 2 tartes tatin, as usual?" and vader says "good memory" and the baker says "it's easy, monsieur vader: bread, bread, bread, tarte tatin, tarte tatin" except in french "pain pain pain tarte tatin tarte tatin" sounds like the imperial march okay i think i've over-explained this)

OKAY that's the fourth time i've started a paragraph with okay and then gone off track but i promise we're getting to it now. okay. so.
as i said, what follows is not gonna be a proper review, just whining, but i will say that the pacing of this film just feels very off and that the arc of this trilogy is completely messed up by it (imagine acquiring a multimillion dollar franchise and dividing the work between different artists but not bothering to sit down and plan what you were all going to do, i mean come on). that's the extent of the film criticism you're gonna get in this email: the pacing is odd. thanks for reading.
The Last Jedi is all about looking to the future: as well as the narrative, the film's position in relation to the rest of the Star Wars canon enacts a movement away from the past, towards a new and (somewhat) more radical future. The Rise of Skywalker, meanwhile, borrows its plot and characters wholesale from the original trilogy, and is the worse for it.
At the beginning of any Star Wars film, the iconic yellow text crawl appears to give us a nice info bite about where we're at (a long time ago, a galaxy far far away, etc). At the beginning of TROS, we are informed that "the dead speak" (very cool & dramatic opening, I'll admit, but also very out of the blue); Emperor Palpatine is back from the dead, somehow, and everything is going to hell. While I do actually quite like this as a twist, it could have been seeded Literally At All in the previous two films, instead of the utterly random - and therefore tensionless - reveal it ended up being here.
The problem with Palpatine being back from the dead, though, is that it goes against basically everything that TLJ stood for. Where TLJ actively dispenses with as much of the past as it can get away with, TROS excavates the canon to bring back old characters and plot devices. TLJ was all about Rey and Kylo having their own journeys, and not getting stuck in the same paths their predecessors did ("We are what they grow beyond", Yoda tells Luke); TROS just drags them both back into their old narratives, as Rey's parentage suddenly becomes important again, Rey herself continues Luke's search for Exegor (the key to this search being on Endor in the ruins of the Death Star, as this movie takes the idea of excavating the past very literally), and Kylo reforges his Vader-esque mask.
Before watching TROS, I saw a tweet, which I now can't find so I feel very guilty about not being able to cite it (but it's a relatively common criticism in reviews so I don't feel tooooo bad) - the gist of it was that nothing in the film has any weight, because everything is reversible. To give some examples: we think Chewie's dead, but he's not; C3PO's memory is wiped, then restored; Kylo dies, then he doesn't, as does Rey. TLJ is all about striking out and starting a new chapter, but TROS reverses this, by removing the consequences from (almost) any action.
I was delighted that Chewie turned out to not be dead, because he's a legend and I love him, but I did think that Rey killing Chewie because her feelings overtook her and she hasn't yet figured out how to use the Force properly was a fantastic, and genuinely shocking, development. It would have done so much for Rey's character arc, and I think it's a shame that this wasn't explored more. War, as we know, is bad, and people get hurt and killed, both accidentally and on purpose. Actions have consequences! I know it's a dumb space opera but it's also Important, and it is possible to do interesting and new and subversive things within the format, because TLJ did and Rogue One did. TROS, on the other hand, treats these things so lightly so as to completely remove the weight from them: Chewie's supposed death takes us by surprise at first, but I think it should be allowed to - not to labour this weight metaphor I've found myself employing, but - weigh on us more; and I personally was expecting C3PO's memory to come back the whole time, but even if you weren't, the fact that it does really undermines the sacrifice he's making by allowing it to be erased.
This is all especially disappointing in the light of other Star Wars films like Rogue One, which is nothing but consequences and is therefore bleak as fuck (I love it). Similarly, the fact that Kylo can just Stop Being Evil Because His Dad Said So undoes all of his character development to date; rather than going on to follow his own journey, he regresses into his original mask-wearing baddie persona, and then goes even further back to become Ben Solo again. I'm not saying I wanted him to stay evil - I didn't, and I (mostly) really liked how his story ended in this film. I just wanted him to feel like a character who had grown, who was in control of his own story, rather than choosing between one of two predetermined pathways.
The relationship between Rey and Kylo is one of the most interesting things about this film, and the whole trilogy for me, and I Did Not like the way it went down at the end of TROS. Up until their last scene, I was loving their complex, knotty relationship: the fact that Rey, as Palpatine's granddaughter, comes from the Sith but wants to be a Jedi, while Kylo is the opposite. I loved the idea that the two of them need to work together to balance the Force - not as Jedi vs. Sith, but as two nuanced characters who contain both light and dark, who have to help keep one another in check. Even before they consciously team up, when they're fighting and destroy the Vader plinth, there's a sense that their relationship has the potential to change everything (and then this is, in my opinion, wholly undermined by them making out and Kylo INSTANTLY DYING which makes no sense, thanks i hate it).
I like that Rey inherits both Luke and Leia's lightsabers - and then leaves them behind on Tatooine, and sets out with her own lightsaber at the end, choosing her own surname from the "thousand generations" that live in her. Honestly, if Kylo hadn't weirdly died, I would have really liked the ending of TROS, but as it is it just doesn't quite connect for me. If it weren't for TLJ, then this film would probably come off much better, but as it is it contradicts itself and the whole trilogy is now very patchy and inconsistent.
It's like Abrams wants Rey / Kylo / Poe / Finn to parallel previous generations of characters, but they fundamentally don't match up. Which is a good thing! They can be similar without being the same; Poe doesn't need to beat himself up for not being Leia, because he shouldn't need to be Leia - he should be coming into his own as a General. This trilogy introduced us to a bunch of new and exciting things about the Star Wars universe, and it's a shame that these weren't explored as much as they could have been: the fact that we met more rebel Stormtroopers in TROS, who didn't get enough screentime for us to actually start caring about them or learning about them, is disappointing (and the """"reveal""""" that Jannah, the leader of these renegade ex-Stormtroopers, is Lando's daughter is COMPLETELY POINTLESS IF IT'S NOT IN THE GODDAMN FILM). Rather than trying to give everyone an origin in the original films, we need to be looking forward and finding new stories to tell.
Some more good things about TROS that I wish had got more screentime / exploration:
-- Rey's fear of the unknown parts of herself was very interesting to me, a person with OCD, and i wish we had got more of this!! Also, related, the idea that "confronting fear is the destiny of the Jedi" - it's not about being completely unafraid, to quote Taylor Swift.
-- The sentiment that "they win by making you think you're alone" crops up more than once, but this is never really investigated and I wish it could be!! It's very appropriate to our current political moment, the idea of strength in collectivity - not to mention lowkey reminding me of Harry Potter - and I think Abrams wanted this to be a bigger theme in the film than it is. The First / Final Order marshal a huge army against the rest of the galaxy, and disempower everyone by convincing them that they're alone and don't have the strength to fight back, but, twist, they're the ones who are really alone - people like Palpatine and Kylo inspire fear, not loyalty, and are vulnerable to betrayals as a result. The moment towards the end of the film when Poe turns a corner and sees all the ships arrayed against the backdrop of the stars? Inject it into my veins!!!!!! "It's not a navy, sir, it's just .... people."
-- Y'all know I love STORIES and TLJ really delivered on the related themes of lineages, endings, beginnings, all that good stuff. I wanted more of this!! "Let your death be the final word in the story of rebellion" is a cool line, but otherwise these themes are pretty thin on the ground in TROS.
Also, Kelly Marie Tran was robbed.