I got
extremely bored at work this past week while doing a largely menial and passive task. Typing on my phone was one of the few potential distractions, so I decided to praise a dead horse, and came up with the following. If you don't like it, or find it tiresome and unnecessary just remember that I was doubtless even more bored
writing it than you are reading it!
Anyhow, onto the...
Top 5 reasons TRoS is the best Sequel Trilogy episode
Bonus: Driver gives his best performance
Many were unimpressed with the plotting behind Ben Solo's absurdly predictable redemption and equally inevitable self-sacrifice. Indeed, it seems most online commentators wanted him to remain and die a toxic cishet white male - and, sure, given who was the American president for most of the trilogy, that's fair. But
TRoS provided Driver with what was objectively his biggest ST character progression, and his performance matched the challenge.
5. Luke is Luke / the heroes are celebrated
Using stray bits of Carrie Fisher footage to cobble together a creepy and artificial performance was a mistake, but at least it was done in service of what Rian Johnson's Luke said couldn't be done - bringing Ben Solo back to the light. In other words, after two movies in which our OT heroes were broken down and degraded,
TRoS is the only one to portray them in a respecting, even celebratory way. Ghost Luke feels like Luke again, and Lando gets to survive. Hell, it's the
only ST film in which Luke, Leia, and Han speak!
4. It's got a halfway decent baddie in Palps
Granted, resurrecting Palpatine out of nowhere was as dumb as the lightspeed skipping sequence, but MacDiarmid nonetheless gave the trilogy its only satisfying villain. Snoke was a one-dimensional nothing, and Kylo was always too poorly developed to be an adequate saga-closing enemy on his own.
3. It explained why Ben Solo went bad... sort of
Why did Ben Solo become a school shooter? His fall to the Dark Side is the precipitating event of the ST, and the question of whether he can be redeemed is the central dramatic fulcrum of all three flicks. (The prospect of redeeming Anakin Skywalker, on the other hand, isn't even on the table until halfway through the OT's third entry.) Therefore, if the audience is going to have as any understanding of the character, they require some explanation for why Leia's only child went bad - and only
TRoS offers one: turns out it was Palpatine "whispering in his ear" all along.
Hacky, reductive, and dramatically unsatisfying? Sure, but at least it's
something, whereas
TFA and
TLJ gave us nothing, in "he had too much Vader in him" and "Luke sensed he was almost gone, and then an ill-considered confrontation pushed him over the edge," respectively. Given Ben Solo's parentage, a redemption arc was pretty much preordained from the start, but only
TRoS bothered to provide any reason for why said redemption was necessary in the first place.
2. It's the only ST flick to unite its trio
The best aspects of the ST are surface level: the beautiful imagery, lavish and tactile production design, and the charismatic cast. Not only does
TLJ make the colossal blunder of keeping its main trio of Ridley, Isaac and Boyega almost entirely separate, Rey and Poe don't even meet for the first time until over
four hours of screen time have elapsed! The trio's adventures in
TRoS may be convoluted and nonsensical, but they're the only ones we got, which make them the best by default. What's more, the three charismatic actors have unsurprisingly great chemistry, and watching them play off of each other is a blast.
1. It's the end of the ST
The ST was a chaotically produced mess that recycled the structure and countless plot points of the OT to shortsighted, money-printing ends. Walking out of
TFA and
TLJ, I dreaded having to revisit this debacle of a story, but after seeing
TRoS, I experienced a pleasant sensation of relief. Even if some or all of these characters return someday, this volume of the saga is mercifully, definitely over. And surely
that's worthy of playing John Williams' legendary fanfare over the end credits for!
