Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker: Rousing finish to the Star Wars saga - Sydney Morning Herald

There are some cheerful echoes of the jaunty tone of the original Star Wars movies in the ninth and final film in the Luke Skywalker saga.

The director, J.J. Abrams, has some old-fashioned fun with the galaxy’s many tribes and with those durable favourites, Chewbacca and the droids. But he doesn’t leave much time for jokes or for romance in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.

Star Wars fans in costume as the last movie in the franchise is released.Credit:Eddie Jim

Despite some clunky chunks of exposition, the action rockets along, powered both by its need to be more spectacular than ever before and the script’s desire to tie up the saga’s many loose ends. It’s a film driven by a weighty sense of its own history. It’s also full of ghosts. That of Carrie Fisher is only the most poignant.

Abrams has claimed that he didn’t have to resort to digital sleight of hand to resolve Princess Leia’s part in the storyline. There was enough unused footage from the seventh film in the series, The Force Awakens, to fill out her role and supply the emotional charge he needed.

And he’s pretty right. There is an eerie sense of reality to a role enhanced by memories of the young Leia with her snail-bun hairstyle and her gift for the smart remark. But it’s an understandably one-note appearance, limited to supplying soothing words of encouragement to the film’s young stars.

The script works very hard at connecting them and their adventures with seminal events from the past to bring the story full circle. Ghostly visions abound and their voices are continually coming up with advice, portents and warnings.

The conflicted relationship between Daisy Ridley’s Rey, the inheritor of the Jedi warrior tradition, and her nemesis, Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, Leia’s sinister son, is one of the most sophisticated twists in the saga’s convoluted genealogy and it takes some satisfyingly ingenious turns, although its final moments may leave you wondering.

Daisy Ridley as Rey in The Rise of Skywalker.Credit:

You might also argue that a franchise that has outlived one of its stars should have said goodbye long ago but the saga’s box-office figures say otherwise. They have already shown that fans have bonded with the new generation of characters and that they’re depending on this, the finale, to solve all the remaining mysteries.

As to whether it does, only the most pedantic should complain. It’s a rousing finish to a series that has accompanied so many people throughout their childhood.