instal the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

He has been resurrected in an almost satanic procedure as the artificially galvanised undead Sith lord, wired up to some source of daemonic Sith energy. The situation now is that Emperor Palpatine ( Ian McDiarmid) has returned, after we all thought we’d heard the last of him.

(In this trilogy of trilogies, incidentally, it is the second film in each trio – The Empire Strikes Back, Attack of the Clones and The Last Jedi – that has been the strongest episode, though Clones did not have much competition.) There is, I admit, some excessive MacGuffinism (the use of arbitrary objects to drive the story), especially when everyone conceives a great desire to get hold of a supernaturally potent glass tetrahedron, which is then smashed before someone miraculously comes across another mystically significant glass tetrahedron, murmuring: “Oh, there were two!”Īnd, to some degree, the dying-not-dying motif was forced on Abrams and Terrio by the fact that Carrie Fisher, who plays General Leia Organa died after the last film, and her marginal presence here has been fabricated with a piece of unused footage in which Fisher is making general-purpose observations that have been ingeniously sewn into dialogue scenes. Now, The Rise of Skywalker has been rather coolly received in some quarters, and I certainly think it isn’t quite as strong as The Last Jedi, around which critical consensus has gathered.

When will Darth Vader’s disturbing grandson, Kylo Ren ( Adam Driver), and Rey ( Daisy Ridley) do something about their outrageously obvious telepathic sexual tension and just get a room already? When will they do something about the symbolism of these lightsaber duels of theirs, secure a furtive daytime booking at some intergalactic Premier Inn and give us the most rock’n’roll sex scene – come to think of it, the only sex scene – in Star Wars history? Surely the suits at Disney would be OK with it? Well, oddly, the symbolism of Romeo and Juliet (as well as Dunkirk) might just occur to you in the course of this crazily but very entertainingly grandiloquent adventure. So the ninth and last (we think) movie in the Star Wars saga arrives, and there’s only one thing on our minds.

Instal the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker