Return Of The Jedi 2: Imperial Boogaloo

Allow me to begin this review by saying, hello everyone, happy new year, welcome back to this shitty, badly designed website on which you can read my unimportant opinions, I hope you enjoy the return and I’ll try and keep it up as much as I can. We’re starting this new era of goose as we mean to go on: with immense disappointment.

I am a lover of all things Star Wars, I love the originals, prequels, sequels, spin-offs, games, comics, TV shows, Ewok movies, everything! However, that doesn’t necessarily mean I truly believe they are all good, in fact, I know for a fact that much of it is mediocre and some of it genuinely bad. What keeps me coming back to them time and time again though is my investment in this galaxy far far away from a very young age and there is something about every part of Star Wars media that awakens that nerdy little boy that lives in my pancreas. So, naturally, no matter what I thought of The Rise Of Skywalker, I knew it would give me that special Star Wars feeling and, of course, it did. But it was by no means good. It is at this point in the review that I would like to present my ranking of the Star Wars movies so that anyone who is here to disregard my opinions based on which Star Wars movies I prefer (as toxic fans are wont to do these days) can rage quit this review now.

1. The Empire Strikes Back

2. A New Hope

3. The Last Jedi

4. Return of the Jedi

5. The Force Awakens

6. Revenge of the Sith

7. The Phantom Menace

8. Attack of the Clones

9. Rogue One

10. The Rise of Skywalker

11. Solo

Now, right off the bat, we’re going into spoiler territory because the problems with this movie cannot be summed up without explaining exactly what happens. The issues in this movie stem from one major problem and that is how they chose to handle the challenges presented to them by The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi was a movie that did exactly what the second part of a trilogy should do, which is to take what happened in the first part and twist what we know on its head in order to set up an interesting third part, however that is not what we got. This trilogy ends in such a disappointing fashion because the writers on the third part decided that the second part was wrong rather than accepting it and using their imaginations to further that story, resulting in confusing retcons and uncomfortable handbrake turns in the narrative.

From the very start, they have the opening crawl tell us that the Emperor himself has returned, no explanation, no reason, just confirmation that he’s back. This completely ruins the direction that The Last Jedi had taken, the big Emperor figure was dead now and we should have been given the chance to see how that would play out, Kylo Ren as the supreme leader of the First Order. But instead they gave us a replacement so that they could just do Return of the Jedi again but bigger, with more ships. That is fundamentally the issue here. JJ Abrams gave us a good return to Star Wars with The Force Awakens, he eased us back in by giving us A New Hope again but bigger. Then Rian Johnson took on the challenge of setting up how this trilogy will be different, the reason for this trilogy to exist, the movie that moved us away from being the original trilogy but bigger. Then Abrams returned and instead of moving forward with this new direction, decided to give us Return of the Jedi 2: Imperial Boogaloo and it really sucks.

Story wise, the retcon that hurts most is making Rey not nobody. This was one of my favourite things about The Last Jedi, this movement away from midichlorian counts and chosen ones and a presentation of the beautiful message that anyone can be a hero, no matter who your family is or isn’t. According to this movie, no, you can’t, you have to be related to one of the most powerful force users the galaxy has ever known. The line “you’re a Palpatine” alone should have been enough to make them rethink this whole idea. Rey being nobody was perfect, it meant that we had a female character that is super powerful of her own accord but we just couldn’t have that could we? There is even a line saying “you don’t just have power, you have HIS power,” which should tell you everything you need to know about what this does for the representation of women in this trilogy. Not to mention, it’s just very silly.

While on the subject of how this movie treats its female characters, we need to talk about Rose Tico. Rose was introduced in The Last Jedi as a second female lead and the worryingly rare asian lead character, Rian Johnson made a statement with this casting: that there would be a woman of asian descent as a main character in this Star Wars trilogy but, whether in response to the ridiculous amount of backlash the actor faced in the wake of The Last Jedi or just because he personally didn’t care for the character, Abrams decided that no, there wouldn’t be. She is all but written out of the movie, which I find to be not only narratively disappointing but also in very poor taste considering what the character represents and what the actor was put through by horrible racists and misogynists on the internet.

Quickly I’d like to list off some things that I liked before laying into the movie even harder with a bullet pointed list of quick fire grievances. I really enjoyed seeing the main three new characters actually going on a mission together, I loved C3PO throughout the movie and, although obviously made to sell more toys, I did like Babu Frik and D-O. Ian McDiarmid always pulls it out of the bag as Palpatine even if I felt the character should not have been there, I also appreciated hearing the voices of some of my favourite Jedi from all corners of Star Wars media, even if I was disappointed we didn’t see any of them but Luke in ghost form. One moment that really struck me was the exchange between Han and his son, I thought that it was a lovely scene if a little silly and Adam Driver’s performance as redeemed Ben Solo radiated some lovely Harrison Ford energy. Obviously seeing Lando back put a smile on my face.

None of this though, outweighs the ridiculousness of this disappointing finale. If I were to air all my grievances in full we would be here all day so here’s the speed round for you:

• The final battle is just a clusterfuck of spaceships that has no emotional weight to it at all.

• Kylo Ren’s redemption is handled in such an awkward and hamfisted way, which makes no sense considering how well it was set up in the previous film.

• Kylo reforging his helmet completely undoes what the destruction of it meant, he destroyed it to move away from being an imitation of Vader and at the beginning just reforges it like it meant nothing.

• The Knights of Ren were boring and pointless.

• They kept trying to make Poe more like Han for some ungodly reason.

• Finn and Poe didn’t end up together and not only that, they give Poe a last minute “look he’s definitely not gay” love interest.

• The resurrection of Carrie Fisher for this film was awkward and uncomfortable.

• The movie is all fan service and yet doesn’t fully commit to any of the fan service that would have genuinely been good, for example force ghosts of Jedi other than Luke.

• Rey buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers on Tatooine, a planet neither of them have particularly fond memories of, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

• Also in the same scene we see ghost Luke and Leia but no Ben Solo and no Anakin, this would have been the best opportunity to see the generations of Skywalker together but they miss it completely.

• It’s so obvious that Hux is the spy and it's also completely ridiculous.

• There is no point to Jannah existing apart from the cool horses.

There we go, that’s my review, the first one in a while but I’ve got more in the tank. In case you hadn’t gathered, this goose has no teeth, and it has less and less the more I think about it.