J.J. Abrams closes the saga at a sprint, undoing most of what the previous film dared and replacing it with a treasure hunt. It looks superb, Driver and Ridley are better than the script, and at the end we found we had felt almost nothing.
The poster says the saga concludes and the opening crawl says the dead speak. J.J. Abrams, who restarted the series with The Force Awakens (2015) and handed the middle film to Rian Johnson, comes back to finish it, and finishing turns out to mean two things: bring back the Emperor, and undo as much of The Last Jedi (2017) as 142 minutes allow. It is superbly made and well acted and it is frightened of its audience. We were entertained for most of it and moved by little of it.
The plot is a fetch quest. Emperor Palpatine is alive somewhere in the unmapped dark with a fleet; to find him Rey (Daisy Ridley) needs a relic that charts the way; to find that she needs a dagger; to read the dagger she needs a droid wiped and rewired. The screenplay is by Abrams and Chris Terrio, from a story they share with Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, and it reads like four writers agreeing on a list. Nobody in it wants anything for longer than a scene except Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who wants Rey.
What Abrams can still do is put a picture on a screen. Dan Mindel shoots a desert festival in hard yellow light with coloured streamers snapping across it, and the wreck of the old Death Star as black ribs in a grey sea, waves breaking over the two leads as they fight. Rick Carter and Kevin Jenkins build the Emperor’s hiding place as a cavern of black stone lit only by lightning, with a fleet parked below the throne in rows to the horizon. Michael Kaplan gives Kylo Ren his shattered helmet back, welded with seams of red, and it says more about the man than most of his lines.
Maryann Brandon and Stefan Grube cut it at a run. Few scenes last two minutes, conversations happen on the move, and when the film stops it is usually so someone can say what the plot needs said. The exception is the link between Rey and Ren, who can see and touch each other across the galaxy; these scenes, played almost in silence with objects passing from one room to the other, are the best written and best cut in the film. John Williams, scoring his ninth of these, brings back every theme he has, and twice we were moved by a cue that arrived before the picture had earned it. He is doing the work the script left undone.
Driver is the reason to watch. He plays Ren as a man who has won everything he set out to win and has no idea what to do with his mornings, and the tantrums look like symptoms rather than costume. Ridley is steady and less well served; the film keeps asking her to be frightened of herself and cutting away before she can be. John Boyega and Oscar Isaac spend most of the running time running and bickering, and Finn is given something to tell Rey that he never gets to say. Naomi Ackie’s Jannah and Keri Russell’s Zorii Bliss arrive with a history each and are left holding it. Richard E. Grant is a pleasure as Allegiant General Pryde, cold and pleased with himself.
Carrie Fisher died before this film was shot, and her Leia is assembled from footage made for the earlier ones. The seams show. She is filmed slightly apart from everyone, her lines are short and general, and people react to things she has not quite said. We expected to find it ghoulish and instead found it sad, which the film did not plan, and it is the one sadness in it we trusted.
The previous film’s boldest decisions, about who Rey is and what the Force is for, are reversed or quietly forgotten, and we will not say how. Abrams treats the film before his as a fault to be repaired, and the repairs take up so much room that his own story never gets a middle. Return of the Jedi (1983) also ended with an emperor and a large gun in space, and it gave its emperor an hour in a chair to be frightening. This one gives him a broadcast.
See it if you have seen the other eight, and see it on the biggest screen you have. Do not expect to be surprised. It runs 142 minutes and carries a 12A.
