Another year has gone by, and once again it’s the best and most internationally well-recognized holiday of the year: Star Wars Day. This one might feel a little different, though, since for the first time since 2005 (and similar to 1983), this Star Wars Day is being held at the edge of a great unknown…the main series (retroactively dubbed “The Skywalker Sagaâ€) is over.
I say this with a grain of salt. I don’t believe that it’s over forever. Disney pulling a Sequel Trilogy: The Return in 25 years seems like a certainty given the franchise’s history. Although this lane might be a bit empty for the foreseeable future, many still find themselves inundated with Star Warsâ„¢. spinoff film series, TV series, video games, web series, theme parks, lunch boxes. Soon every food product ever shown in a piece of Star Wars media will be available for consumption, and you’ll even be able to draft into Star Wars-themed armed militias where you can dress up as Poe Dameron to overthrow governments.
Though the absence of the main series is significant, I don’t know if a great volume of peripheral content will be able to fill its void, at least immediately. The “Saga”is, after all, what this now-ubiquitous series stemmed from, and has branched across decades and generations. Now that it’s “overâ€, the question of whether Star Wars is really relevant anymore seems a little more open to analysis. Has it even been since its return in 2015?
Throwing away hindsight, it definitely seemed so back then. The buildup to The Force Awakens was one of the most effective hype machines I’ve ever taken part in. Despite the absence of major film releases in the series when I was growing up, I was still as scarily familiar with Star Wars as I’m sure many pre-teens were, and are today. The prospect of a new film finally happening was very exciting, a feeling which every piece of promotional material, which I obviously followed very closely, only reinforced. The main trailer, with the chill-inducing slow, orchestral renditions of original themes, was euphoric. I don’t know if The Force Awakens started that trend, but it has certainly caught on. Every big series finale or 30-years-later sequel does it now, and it’s so effective that it almost feels like cheating. When I first watched the Top Gun: Maverick trailer I got chills at the music even though I’d never seen the movie.
To its credit, The Force Awakens mostly delivered. I’ve soured on it a little since it came out, but I still enjoy it. The new characters are great and the story it was setting up was interesting; it felt like a perfect jumping-off point. It’s also kind of shocking how derivative it is of the original 1977 Star Wars. A view of the complete trilogy shows a struggle between taking the story in new directions and safer accordance to the formula burned into the minds and TV sets of people who grew up with the original films in the 80s. This first instalment leaned much more into safety.
The Last Jedi has been much praised as it has been maligned. I fall into the former camp. While it’s pretty baffling that it seems to ignore a plan for the trilogy’s overarching plot, I loved the direction Rian Johnson took it. It felt refreshing and new, like he’d done irreversible things to prevent the new films from becoming simply nostalgic retreads. I was left excited to see how it would all end, although The Last Jedi’s finale is strangely satisfying on its own. Watching with my friends in December, we also realized that it’s the only one of these three movies where characters consistently have actual conversations instead of mostly quipping trailer-worthy lines at each other. It’s the most interesting and most genuine-feeling film to come out of this new series.
By the time I saw The Rise of Skywalker, I was braced for it not to blow my mind, and it very much did not. I don’t think it’s a crime to hate Last Jedi, but the constant and intense backlash that followed it is very frustrating, and definitely had a part to play in making Episode IX what is it. They had the choice between leaning into the Johnson-ified changes and severely course-correcting, and somehow they did the latter. It’s the first Star Wars movie I find very little to appreciate in.
Instead of building excitement to a grand finale, each of these movies made less in the box office than the last. It might not be down to their quality; the world of franchise filmmaking has evolved since even the 2000s. It’s been exhaustively observed that in a way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is today what the Star Wars trilogy was when it was originally released. Next to the MCU’s grand design and huge output, the sequel trilogy seems a bit quaint. It’s certainly less popular. Even though I really enjoy a lot of the Marvel movies, their crushing dominance over just about everything else released in theatres is a little concerning.
The best stories end. The Star Wars sequel trilogy was certainly not one of the best stories ever told (arguably not even really one of the stories ever told), but it certainly ended. The seemingly infinite flow of Star Wars content that seems to be upon us might be entertaining and even high quality, but I doubt it’ll be as fulfilling as putting a cap on it and leaving it to rest, at least for a while.
It’s kind of unproductive to pit two extremely successful franchises against each other, especially when they’re owned by the same company. At this point I’m talking more about the style of storytelling, laying out a big story which still has a distinct beginning and ending. Regardless of its success or failure in crafting three well-flowing and quality films, the Star Wars sequel trilogy might be the last major instance of a series that consciously ends itself for a while, and there’s something to respect in that.
Happy Star Wars Day!
Follow me on Twitter and check out my Letterboxd.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram and like us on Facebook. Also subscribe to our YouTube channel.
