An editorial investigation on The Rise of Skywalker
This week, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is being uploaded to Disney+; with the current closure of movie theatres, such an upload may bring the film into the spotlight once again. With the discussion of this film reopening, even for a short time, I want to propose a little hope for this movie going forward. It’s not as if anything that anyone says can raise its box-office scores, but it may be too soon to relegate this movie to failure status. Afterall, this is a mistake Star Wars fans have made before.
Bringing a conclusive ending to a story which has been generations in the making would be a monumental undertaking for any storyteller; the immense fanbase and cultural value associated with the Star Wars franchise only intensifies the pressure and scrutiny. However, despite an initially polarized response and somewhat underwhelming box office performance, it is a cautious belief of mine that The Rise of Skywalker may yet grow to be understood as a satisfying ending for the Skywalker saga.
Star Wars films tend to grow more generally accepted over time. For many years, George Lucas’s prequel trilogy was ridiculed for many of its writing, acting, and storytelling elements. However, over recent years, general approval ratings of the turn-of-the-century trilogy have skyrocketed.
One key reason, as noted by Screenrant writer, Alex Leadbeater, is that when making the prequel trilogy, “Lucas was returning Star Wars to children — not the children who grew up with the films in the 1980s, but the next generation — [and eventually] those 1990s kids would grow up with a strong appreciation of Episodes I-III.” This point is a compelling one; over the past several years, those who grew up watching the prequels as an existing part of the Star Wars universe have reached the age where their voices are a valid and even dominant force in the broad cultural discussion of Star Wars.
In 2020, the university and early workforce-aged members of society, members who often determine cultural trends, are the same members of society who grew up buying Lego associated with the once-infamous prequel trilogy. As they have aged, these prequel fans have made their voices heard, and progressively caused the Star Wars community as a whole to accept the prequels as an important portion of Star Wars storytelling. It is easily conceivable that over time the sequel trilogy, featuring characters designed for today’s children, will undergo a similar rise from the ashes of Star Wars approval. Disney has effectively returned Star Wars to whom it belongs — the children — once again.
And once again, as with the prequels, the older generations of Star Wars fans have failed to realize that they do not compose the target audience as they once did. Older Star Wars loyalists are welcome to appreciate the veiled references and general Star Wars atmosphere present in the new films (FThe Rise of Skywalker in particular delivers much on these two fronts) but are not truthfully the fans for whom these movies were produced. Star Wars is as it has always been and does what visionary George Lucas always stated he wanted it to do, “to give young people some sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run around in.”
Bearing this in mind, it seems likely that the eventual judgement of The Rise of Skywalker will not be conducted by today’s squabbling nerds on Reddit. Instead, it is today’s children who will have the final word. These are children who will grow into tomorrow’s thinkers after experiencing the film with the same child-like wonder many of us felt when enjoying the exotic environments featured in the original Star Wars movies and its prequels. If this is so, Disney’s conclusion to the Skywalker saga, the final steps of a story many of us have invested in for years, may very well go on to reside safely in Star Wars lore as a conclusion that helped its young viewers to experience the world Lucas created just the way he intended — whether or not the world of 2019 was ready to accept it.
