What I’m Watching: ‘The Rise of Skywalker’

Date: 12/30/2019

What I’m watching: the finale of the “Star Wars” saga.

As I write this, social media and the Internet are being flooded with opinions about “The Rise of Skywalker.”

Some of them are positive, while many are not.

The franchise has certainly had its ups and downs. The success of the 1977 film was a fluke. At the time it was not expected that this oddball synthesis of a pseudo-religion and “Flash Gordon” styled science fiction heroics would find an audience.

It did.

The genius of that film is director George Lucas and his crew was able to update the narrative conventions of classic space opera and the serials and present them in a way that seemed fresh and new to 1977 audiences.

The first three films produced were well made that told a satisfying old-fashioned good guy/underdog versus bad guy story with a beginning, middle and end. As we all know, though, Lucas produced three more movies to explain the origin of Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi. While they were successful at the box office, they were not universally embraced by fans.

These last three films were designed to tell a conclusion to the story presented in the first three films. The theme was simple: evil does not die easily and an evil idea is more difficult to kill than simply a villain.

The new film gives fans, in my humble opinion as someone who saw the first film when it was released in 1977, the closure they would need for this nine-part story.

No spoilers from me, other than to say this film does exactly what it needs to do and is a love letter to the fans who have supported the franchise.

Technically, this film is supposed to be the end of the story and characters people have grown to love. I’m sure the Disney juggernaut, which now owns the franchise, will want to come up with additional properties and it will be interesting to see what they do.

I imagine, though, it will be difficult to top this story and these characters.

Best and worst of 2019

• The Blu-ray that personally set my heart a-twitter: The restoration and release of “The Adventures of Captain Marvel,” the world’s best serial.
• The superhero movie I expected not to like but did: The new version of the Captain Marvel character, now called “Shazam” in the family friendly movie of the same name.
• The biopic that actually kept fairly close to the facts: Eddie Murphy in “My Name is Dolemite.” I’m betting the late Rudy Ray Moore would have been proud.
• The biopic that didn’t get the facts right but was still sweetly nostalgic: “Stan & Ollie.”
• The franchise reboot that got it all wrong: the new version of “Hellboy.”
• The most difficult to classify movie of the year: “The Man who Shot Hitler and then Shot the Bigfoot:” an intriguing movie that is part character study, part revisionist history and part science fiction.
• The best suspense film: The alligator peril thriller “Crawl.”
• The biggest disappointment from Quentin Tarantino since “The Hateful Eight”: the meandering and ultimately pointless “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
• The most welcomed re-releases on Blu-ray: The classic Buster Keaton films, “The Navigator,” “Sherlock Junior,” “Seven Chances” and “Battling Butler.”