10 Movies That Explained Way Too Much
8. The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)
It would be easy to talk about the Star Wars prequels here, which over explained everything from the force to the origins of C3P0. However, the newest Star Wars film makes some similar mistakes, but in reverse. It makes a lot of the mistakes prequels make, but in a sequel. Much as the prequels took semi-spiritual concept of the force and famously said that actually, it’s about organisms in your blood, The Rise of Skywalker takes a few interesting concepts and ideas, such as Rey’s parentage, and goes full prequel with them – explaining them to death in thematically uninteresting ways.
The previous film, The Last Jedi seemed to acknowledge that its story was happening in a big universe. You aren’t going to get all the answers you want. Moreover, it made some of the most interesting thematic strides any Star Wars work has made in a while. It interrogated the cyclical nature of the Star Wars films. It stepped a bit away from the idea of Star Wars just being a story about a couple important lineages being heroic and/or villainous with the fate of the galaxy in their hands.
The Rise of Skywalker undoes this. With its explanation that, actually, Rey does belong to one of these lineages, that she’s not just a heroic person who must find her own way, but part of a force dyad, it undoes all of that interesting work of the previous film, putting us squarely back in a kind of Star Wars autopilot, where the same stories, same themes, same tropes get repeated ad nauseum.
Like elements of the prequels did, it removes some of the mystery and wonder from Star Wars, replacing uncharted narrative and thematic territory (for Star Wars, at least) with pathways that we’ve long since worn down. In its drive to explain exactly why the events of this film and its central character fit into the standard operating procedure of Star Wars films, it retroactively robs this new trilogy of its own possibility to be something new and interesting.