The Last of Star Wars

For the first time in most of my adult lifetime, I don’t have another Star Wars movie in my future.

That doesn’t bother me. I’m glad the story is finished. I just hope Disney doesn’t decide to do a fourth trilogy; which they’ll probably do just for the money.

I have seen every Star Wars movie soon after it opened, always in a really good, big-screen theater. I’m talking about the main, nine-movie series (a trilogy of trilogies). I’ve never even wanted to see any of the so-called Standalone films.

Monday night, my wife and I saw the new, and hopefully the last, Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker. We saw it at the Grand Lake Theatre‘s main auditorium – the best place to see that kind of movie in the East Bay.

I was not quite 23 when I saw the original Star Wars (now renamed Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) at Hollywood’s Chinese Theater. It blew my mind.

I loved the original trilogy. I saw all three films multiple times in 70mm. I bought the very expensive Laserdisc set. I was livid at George Lucas for altering the films…I still am. That’s why I never bought the films on DVD or Blu-ray – they weren’t the movies I loved. I did, however, get my hands on the Despecialized Edition.

Last September, I revisited the original trilogy, and enjoyed it immensely.

Like almost everyone else, I hated most of the Prequel Trilogy. The first one, The Phantom Menace, is easily the worst Star Wars movie made. I haven’t seen it since 1999, so I won’t go into detail, but I remember hating it.

Nevertheless, I felt I had to go through the whole story. Attack of the Clones (2002) was slightly better.

Revenge of the Sith (2005) was a delightful surprise – almost as good as The Empire Strikes Back. I was only a few months into Bayflicks, and it was one of the first films I wrote about.

The final trilogy started with The Force Awakens (2015), just as the New Mission theater opened. That’s where my wife and I saw it. I wrote about the movie and the theater. Its follow-up, The Last Jedi (2017) is one of the best of the series. And yes, I wrote about that one too.

So what did I think about the newest and final Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker?

At first, I thought that the closing film of the Star Wars saga was going to be a bomb. An early battle scene was so badly done that I couldn’t follow the action. For the first half and more, it was just one action scene after another, with only a few lines of dialog to get us from one battle to the next. But in the last hour or so, you get everything you want in a Star Wars flick. You get training about the force, heroes facing difficult moral dilemmas, and enough time to get comfortable with the characters. And yes, there’s a lot of well-designed action.

I give The Rise of Skywalker a B+.

Of course, telling you if you should see it is pointless. If you have been waiting for the end of the story for 42 years, you must see it. And if you never saw a Star Wars flick, this isn’t where you want to start.