When a galaxy just isn’t big enough

(Spoiler Alert for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker and other movies in the Star Wars universe (and Marvel))

I’m about a month late, but I finally saw “Rise of Skywalker.” I hadn’t been all that interested in seeing it, to be honest. “The Last Jedi” left such a bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t think they could recover after that. Long story short? They didn’t.

What they did do was wrap up in a reasonably good way the inferior story they chose to tell instead of what might have been. I know, a lot of people thought it was great. I won’t call them wrong. They enjoyed what they got, and that’s fine for them. I suspect my gripe is as much about Hollywood itself these days as anything specific to any one movie. And perhaps what’s really wrong is me. I think I just want something different from movies these days; something Hollywood, for whatever reason, no longer delivers. Ultimately I think my criticism of the latest three Star Wars movies is this:

They went way too big.

Let’s look at the original trilogy a moment, shall we? This is the Star Wars I grew up with, the movies that defined what Star Wars is for me. What were the key points of the first three movies?

• The Empire develops a superweapon, blows up a planet with it, and threatens to blow up more planets. Luke makes single awesome shot to save the day.
• The Empire kicks the rebellion out of their new base, and Luke’s friends get captured in an attempt to capture and turn him to the Dark Side. Luke trains to be able to fight really well and lift objects, plus gets prescient visions.
• The Empire sets a trap to destroy the rebellion’s main battlefleet and again capture Luke and turn him to the Dark Side. Luke fights really well, influences weak-minded.

And what do we get in the latest three movies?

• The Empire develops a superweapon that blows up LOTS of planets in a single shot and threatens to wipe out the rebellion, which has somehow gotten smaller. Rey becomes instant awesome fighter.
• The Empire kicks the rebellion out of their new base and slowly chips away at their main battle force while the Jedi debate on whether or not the Jedi should exist. Rey and Kylo develop cosmic bond that allows physical contact across space. Leia survives hard vacuum and moves herself through space. Luke projects telepresence of himself across the galaxy. Force ghost Yoda calls lightning.
• The Emperor comes back with a mind-boggling-ly large fleet of star destroyers able to destroy planets in one shot. Destroys one planet, threatens the entire galaxy. Rey is now really good at levitation, healing, telekinesis of starships, and fighting really, really well. Her bond with Kylo now includes instant teleportation of materials across space. In the final showdown we learn that Palpatine is able to channel all Sith Lords through all time. The rebels summon an mind-boggling-ly large fleet. Rey is able to channel all Jedi Masters. Palpatine’s force lightning is able to bring down an entire fleet (and yet can’t kill a single person), and he can suck the life force out of people to restore himself. Force ghost Luke is able to levitate an X-wing. Kylo is able to heal.

I hope that makes my point clear. In the original trilogy the threat actually got smaller as time went on, more personal. Yes, we knew that the destruction of the rebel fleet meant the Empire would reign unchecked, but what mattered was that our friends were in danger. In this latest trilogy they tried for a single movie to go small (largely, I think, because they were trying to imitate the original trilogy’s arc), but even then they were trying to re-frame the entire concept of Light/Dark, Jedi/Sith, Good/Evil while introducing Force powers previously unknown (maybe they show up in the video games or The Clone Wars series? I’ve not experienced either) and considerably more epic in scale. And in this last movie we put the entire galaxy in peril, reveal even more epic-scale Force powers, and turn the showdown into The epic showdown to end epic showdowns while simultaneously proving the rules mean nothing and anyone can come back at any time.

Meanwhile, what do we really know about the characters after three movies? Have they changed at all? Kylo Ren is the only one with much of a character arc, and we knew that would have to happen from the beginning.

Hollywood seems to have the idea that “better” means “bigger.” Bigger battles, bigger stakes, bigger powers, bigger spectacle. This is somewhat understandable. George Lucas began to fall into that trap in the prequel trilogy when technology finally caught up with his imagination, and yet he managed to keep the story mostly about the characters. He had to, because on the epic scale we already knew what was supposed to happen. There was no tension around whether or not the Empire would rise, only curiosity as to how.

This last trilogy simply went too big. The cast was large, the plots were large, the battles were large, the powers were large, and we lost the people along the way. They suffered some from changes (ie. clashes) of directorial vision, to be sure, but they also bought into the Hollywood formula of blowing something up every ten minutes. I think they tried to “Marvel-ize” Star Wars. They tried to make Rise of Skywalker the “End Game” of the series, not realizing that End Game worked because of all the preparatory movies that came before. It worked because by the time Captain America is standing alone facing down Thanos’ army we know Captain America. We know he’s going to keep fighting regardless. We know who his friends and allies are, and we care about them. The battle may be huge, but we care about our heroes first and foremost.

End Game worked because there had been a coherent plan played out carefully over 20+ movies so that when they went really big we already knew who was involved and what was at stake, and we could just sit back and enjoy the conflict. We didn’t have that with Rise of Skywalker.

And yet, if I had to pick one, I’d probably have to call that one the best of the three. The Force Awakens was a simpler movie, but it lacked originality. We essentially got an A New Hope remake with new characters. For all its overreach, Rise of Skywalker was at least unique. It didn’t force the characters to be intentionally stupid to move the plot along. We got some nice moments, and our questions answered (largely). At the same time, I had more of an emotional reaction to seeing Wedge Antilles for five seconds than I did from much of what the main characters went through.

That’s a sure sign of doing too much.