Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker recently released and brought Disney’s divisive soft reboot of the classic franchise to an equally divisive end. The reception from reviewers and fans alike seems entirely split down the middle, with the film’s Metacritic scores averaging 54% from critics and 50% from audience members at the time of writing.
It’s an all-time low for Star Wars, but an all too familiar story for writer Chris Terrio, who also penned 2016’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and 2017’s Justice League, which sit at a critical Metascore of 44% and 45% on the site respectively. These pictures did slightly better with audiences though, but only by a small margin, with Dawn of Justice earning a Metacritic user score of 70% while Justice League only achieved a 64% average.
The controversial writer recently spoke to IndieWire about Rise though and admitted that there could probably have been an entire movie between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the recent finale, saying:
“We probably could have written a whole movie that was just a lead up to Kylo Ren going to get the wayfinders, Kylo Ren trying to take on a Henry the Fifth story, right?,” Terrio said. “Where he now is the king, and he had to sort of earn the throne. And now, how will he perform as Supreme Leader? … At the beginning of the film, yes, he’s out to destroy any threat to his power. He’s searching for this legendary world that might be the source of the voice, but quite literally, the galaxy hears a broadcast, which is the voice of Palpatine, and then in the course of the first scene, we learn that Kylo Ren literally has heard in his head the same thing. If you look back at the scenes in ‘Episode 7,’ where Kylo Ren is sort of fetishizing the [Darth Vader] mask and stuff, you think slightly differently about those on re-watch after learning that Palpatine has been every voice Kylo Ren has ever heard.”
This belief that the recently concluded trilogy could have used an extra movie is certainly not unfounded, as many perceived the amount of information presented in Episode IX to give the pic a cramped feeling. “[The movie] tries to fit in so much it threatens to tear apart at the seams,” writes Jamie Graham of Total Film, in what was one of the sequel’s most positive reviews, awarding it with an 80%. Less positive reviews were also quick to make similar observations, such as Molly Freeman of ScreenRant, who said that the exposition of off-screen events made the film feel “bogged down,” or our very own Matt Donato, who wrote that he was “just left trying to connect all the conflicting subplots in [his] head like an old-timey switchboard operator.”
Whatever effects time will have on its public perception, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker seems poised to remain another controversial installment in the beloved sci-fi series.
