Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Year 11, Day 354 - 12/20/19 - Movie #3,396

BEFORE: If you've read my blog for any length of time, then you know the "Star Wars" saga is a driving force, no pun intended.  It's what keeps me going - it's what got me interested in filmmaking as a career, and for the last 40 years it's brought me (mostly) joy and sparked countless conversations and debates with fellow fans all over the damn place.  I've collected well over a hundred autographs from the actors in the saga and interacted in person with, well, let's say a couple dozen of them.  So this is big big BIG when the "last" Star Wars film hits the screen, at least until they reboot the franchise or start up another round of sequels about five years down the road.

First off, let's catch up because it's been a while since I last rapped at ya.  My last post was dated November 7, which was over a month ago as I write this intro (on December 9) and by the time December 20 gets here, that will mark 43 days since I last watched a movie.  As I've said before, watching 295 movies in a little over 300 days is fairly easy for me - it's NOT watching any movies for over a month that's the tough part.  But I've tried to keep busy - I made myself a list of things to do, like re-organizing the comic book collection, captioning my vacation photos, and I've got it all done except for sending out Christmas cards with my annual mix CD, and then the Christmas shopping itself.  Yeah, I've got 11 days left before "Star Wars" so I'd better get on that ASAP.  I'm using Episode 9 as the motivator to get the Christmas presents bought, and if I don't do the task, then I don't deserve the prize.

But it's hard to find motivation when I'm not in the mood - we had to say goodbye to our oldest cat, Data, who was at least 15 years old (he was a stray so we count from when we took him indoors) and while we were consoled by reminding each other that he had a darn good life, and probably lived a lot longer than he would have if we hadn't taken him in, that didn't make driving him to the vet that last time any easier.  I'll probably have more to say about Data in my first post of 2020, especially if I dedicate next year's musings to him - he had been watching nearly every movie with me since I started this project.  (I won't say he understood them, but he joined me to watch them, even if he usually fell asleep during them.)

So that's one reason that's it been tough lately, and then there's also this planned break of over a month.  I'm like an addict in desperate need of a fix - so I'm thinking that watching the new "Star Wars" movie is going to be THAT MUCH more impressive when I haven't seen a new film in over a month.  I've been catching up on TV, though - like I watched all 3 seasons (39 episodes) of "Daredevil" on Netflix, while also dramatically reducing the number of shows stored on my DVR devoted to TV.  (The DVR devoted to movies, however, is still about 70% full.)  After "Daredevil" I started up with "The Punisher", but then also caught up on the new HBO "Watchmen" series, which was just darn amazing.  Hard to understand at first, but eventually the pieces fell into place and it became this glorious, elegant, well-put-together thing.  My one nitpick is that it referenced the ending of the comic book, which got changed (I thought for the better) in the conclusion of the Zack Snyder film.  I would have preferred for the TV series to act as a sequel to the film and not the comic book on this point, but I guess I'm in the minority.

But "Watchmen" happens to share something with the recent "Star Wars" films (Episodes 7-9).  In both cases there's an attempt to continue a franchise, build on what has gone before and extrapolate a new narrative, even though the creator(s) of the source material are no longer involved.  George Lucas and Alan Moore have both signed away their rights and privileges, so Disney and DC Comics are free to continue the franchises as they see fit.  Yeah, maybe this is just the way of the world now, and if I tried I could probably come up with many more examples of this phenomenon, in franchises like "Godzilla", "Creed" and "The Terminator", among others.  Today's filmmakers have tough challenges ahead, based around questions like "How do we create a new story that also pays tribute to what has gone before, make a new narrative that feels organically grown from the old one, as if our movie is the logical continuation of that older story, but still feels timeless, or at least new-ish?"  Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one, I guess you just have to keep making movies with the same characters until the audience tells you to stop.

Oh, and then there's "The Mandalorian", of course.  I got a free year of Disney+ when we upgraded our phone to unlimited data (this was necessary when I upgraded my phone in Vegas, and also in one of the hotels we couldn't get the wifi to work) and so that's helped greatly, to have a new episode of a "Star Wars" TV show every week to look forward to.  My other challenge during this drought has been trying to prepare for "The Rise of Skywalker" without learning too much about the storyline.  I made the mistake of buying the paperback novelization of "Return of the Jedi" before the movie came out in 1983, and reading half of it the night before the film's premiere.  And so I went in knowing way too much, and I vowed to never let that happen again.  I've watched a couple of the previews, because the filmmakers apparently WANT me to know whatever's in them, but I've tried to let those go in one ear and out the other.  Come December 20, I want to go in as cold as I can, even though I realize that's probably an impossible goal.  But hey, I once thought that linking 300 films together by actors in a year was an impossible goal, and right now I'm only FIVE films away from making that a reality.

Richard E. Grant carries over from "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" - at least, I sure HOPE he does.  I had several good ways to get here, via Adam Driver or John Boyega - and God knows I watched more than my share of Oscar Isaac movies this year, same goes for Domhnall Gleeson.  I passed on all those opportunities and went all in, counting on Richard E. Grant to carry over.  Was I right?

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" (Movie #2,796)

THE PLOT: The surviving Resistance faces the First Order once more in the final chapter of the Skywalker saga.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm a notable Star Wars early adopter and influencer (I've got the street cred to prove it, I was interviewed in a documentary called "The People vs. George Lucas", plus I've built my lifestyle around an appreciation for this franchise above all others.) so if you're not like me and you didn't go to see Episode IX on opening day, please TURN BACK now!

STILL BEFORE: As I write this second introduction, it's still December 18, 2 days before the final (yeah, right...) episode in the "Star Wars" saga opens, a culmination of 42 years of storytelling.  So thanks for making me feel very old, JJ Abrams...

But I've got a lot of questions right now, and since I haven't been scouring the internet for information, I don't know if this film will be answering those questions or not.  Let's start with the title - "The Rise of Skywalker".  Which Skywalker are we talking about?  Luke? He's probably only in this film as a Force Ghost.  Leia?  She's a Skywalker, though she hasn't tended to use that name - but her presence in today's film is probably reduced because they didn't create a CGI Carrie Fisher, so they were limited to using unused footage from the last two films.  Kylo Ren is technically also a Skywalker, so is he the one rising?  Or is there another Skywalker yet to be revealed?  Jeez, the filmmakers really may have tipped their hat with this one, via the title alone.

As I said above, and in my reviews of "The Force Awakens" and "The Last Jedi", the big trend these days is continuing a franchise's storyline to make new material, in a way that both pays tribute to the past and also feels fresh and new, but with "echoes" of the things that have gone before.  Episodes 7 and 8 were filled with callbacks to the previous "Star Wars" films, like the battle on Crait that felt a lot like the snowspeeder/AT-AT battle from "The Empire Strikes Back", only in salt instead of snow.  And the Starkiller Base seen in "The Force Awakens" was an obvious echo of the Death Star, only on a larger scale and with more power.  So getting ready for "The Rise of Skywalker", I'm expecting to see some callbacks to "Return of the Jedi", the film where teddy bears rose up and took down the Empire.  Baby Yoda is a thing now, so I'm fearing we'll see even cuter creatures taking up arms in Episode IX.

And remember that "Return of the Jedi" was the film that revealed the family connection between Luke and Leia (despite the fact that they'd made out a couple times in the first two films, they were allegedly "always" designed to be brother and sister.  Sure, George, that's your story and you stick to that...)  So perhaps we'll see another callback when we find out who Rey really is, who her parents were and how she came to be abandoned on Jakku.  Or, maybe we won't - Episode 7 teased this, and then Episode 8 really backed away from it.  What's the connection between Kylo Ren and Rey?  Are they brother and sister?  Cousins?  Future lovers?  Some combination of these?  It's been implied that Supreme Leader Snoke created the mental connection between the two, but what if that was a lie?

I know these stories aren't considered canonical any more, but there was an entire book series written where Han and Leia had twin children, Jacen and Jaina, and they studied as Junior Jedi Knights at Luke's training academy on Yavin IV.  As a teenager, Jacen fell under some bad influences while fighting the Yuuzhan Vong and determined that there was no light side or dark side to the Force, there was just the Force.  But he eventually took up the identity of a Sith Lord named Darth Caedus, and Jaina had to study Mandalorian combat techniques under Boba Fett in order to take him down.  Again, these stories no longer exist as part of the "Star Wars" story, but as we saw from the film "Solo: A Star Wars Story", today's filmmakers were able to read all the (many) interpretations of Han's infamous "Kessel Run" tale, and cherry-pick the pieces and parts that they wanted to use when they made the "official" film version.  The story of Jacen and Jaina Solo could have been tweaked and adjusted to fit the tale of Ben and Rey Solo, except then you'd expect that Ben should probably remember that he had a sister, and therefore not be surprised when he meets Rey years later.

Similarly, the whole "what went wrong at Luke's Jedi Academy" story has yet to be fully explained.  We saw a few glimpses of it in "The Last Jedi", but it wasn't enough.  Whatever sent Luke into exile for 20 years may be fully detailed in a future TV series or film, or comic book, in the future.  But the fact remains that Luke WAS in exile for 20 years, his whereabouts were unknown, and it's not too far of a stretch to think that he might have had a relationship or fathered a child somewhere along the line.  The Jedi of the Republic were instructed to not have any "attachments", but it's possible that Luke never got that memo, or was in the process creating a new kind of Jedi Order, without all the arcane rules.  So perhaps the two big force-users are cousins?  Anything is possible at the moment, but I'm counting on Episode IX to PICK A GOD-DAMNED LANE already!

The cast list alone (and this is public information, thanks to IMDB) reveals that two important characters are coming back to the "Star Wars" saga, Lando Calrissian and it seems Emperor Palpatine as well.  How Palpatine survived the fall down the reactor core of Death Star II, and the subsequent explosion, also has yet to be revealed.  But looking at another book tie-in, which I think also has been removed from the official canon, we could get another idea about this.  "Dark Empire" was a 1991 Dark Horse comic book that was also made at a time when it was believed there would be no more movies with Luke, Han and Leia, so they were free to continue their story in any direction, and this has since been retconned out of the SW Universe - but the comic introduced Grand Admiral Thrawn, who over the last few years has been re-added to the canon via the "Star Wars: Rebels" TV show and a couple of new books, also.  In that comic, Luke battled against a clone of the Emperor - his mind, spirit and memories that had found their way into a young, fit clone body.  Clones are not a new storytelling tool in the Star Wars universe, and it's even possible that Baby Yoda could be a clone of the original.  The timeline could allow for Jedi Sifo Dyas and the Kamino cloners to have done more work besides cloning Jango Fett, and in "Revenge of the Sith" Palpatine discussed (very cryptically with Anakin) that there might be ways for Jedi or Sith to conquer death itself.

So there you go, now I'm ready.  Whatever "The Rise of Skywalker" wants to bring my way, whether it's lost twins, secret cousins, clones or something else entirely, let's get it over with!

AFTER: Right after watching the film (2 pm showing, AMC Empire on 42nd St. in Manhattan) with my friend Adam, who bought the ticket for me months ago, I went back to the snack counter to start buying up the collectables - an AMC R2D2-shaped popcorn and drink holder for my friend Charles in Hawaii (by special request) and two metal popcorn tins (clean, unused) - one blue one for the "light side" and a red one for the "dark side" of the Force.  The concession stand had run out of the red ones, so I decided to try the snack counter upstairs.  Yep, there they were - and as the man behind the counter sold me the red (clean, unused) popcorn tin, he saw me holding the giant plastic R2D2 and asked if I had just seen the movie.  (No, I often just hang out randomly in movie theater lobbies, holding large plastic R2D2-shaped popcorn holders...). OK, so it was a valid question, because maybe I was on my way IN to see the movie, I mean, what kind of a person goes BACK to the snack counter after the movie?  (Just me, apparently.). When I said that yes, I'd just seen the film, he asked, "Is it any good?"

I know, I pretty much rate movies around the clock, but I found his question difficult to answer.  I'm well aware that everyone's mileage varies, and different people can have vastly different opinions about the same movie.  To properly answer his question, I'd need to know more about him as a person.  I wanted to say, "That depends, do you have a long, enduring relationship with this film franchise?  One that stretches back, say, 40 or so years?  Did you grow up watching the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy?  Did you get exposed to the "Star Wars" films in the proper order (4, 5, 6, then 1, 2, 3) or did you (shudder) watch the prequels first?  Do you like the "Special Editions" or do you long for the classic versions?  Who do you believe shot first, Han or Greedo?"

Had he watched 295 films this year in preparation for THIS one?  (No, that's probably just me...). Had he avoided watching films for the last month so that he'd really, really appreciate the next one that he saw?  (Again, probably just me...)  Had he had a particularly challenging time in the last 30 days, what with his cat dying and his boss riding his ass and was he using the promise of seeing the new "Star Wars" film as his sole motivation for getting his Christmas cards sent out and his holiday shopping done?  Did he, like me, really really NEED this film to be good?  Because that's all important stuff to know about him if I was going to properly answer his question.

Instead, I sort of punted and said, "Well, a lot of stuff happens in it, so there's that."  What a terrible non-answer, and now I regret it, of course - but what if I said the movie was really, really great, and then he went on break or stayed late to catch the midnight show and he didn't like it, would that then be my fault?  Better to undersell it, right?  So there you go, there's my review, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" is a film where a lot of stuff happens.  And hey, that's spoiler-free as a bonus!  It's nearly two-and-a-half hours of "Star Wars" stuff, in fact, so they crammed more Star Wars into a Star Wars film than ever before, I think.  Our heroes go to several different planets, looking for stuff, going on personal quests of various natures in order to find a way to defeat the evil power.

Jesus, what more do you people WANT from me?  If you want to know the whole plot, you can look elsewhere, go read it on Wikipedia, it's all there.  There were droids, there were lightsaber battles, there was John Williams music, space battles, and the good guys win and the bad guys lose, but you knew all that already, right?  It's "Star Wars" so it has all the characters and all the things that you'd expect from a movie in this franchise - and then probably a bit more, too.

I don't even feel bad about mentioning above that the Emperor is back, because literally that's the FIRST thing you learn in "The Rise of Skywalker", like it's the first line in the opening crawl - see?  That's followed by about 2 1/2 hours of stuff that I'm not even going to mention.  (And the few cameos that COULD make any difference to your enjoyment are withheld below, for safety's sake.)

This is the big question, however - did J.J. Abrams get the trilogy back on track, after Rian Johnson decided to fill the slower parts of "The Last Jedi" with a bunch of human rights and animal rights activism issues that really just clouded the main character arcs for Rey, Finn and Poe? "Come on, we have to get back to the fleet, the First Order's been inching closer to them for the last hour of this story!"  "Hang on, I'll be right with you, but first I have to free these horse-like creatures from their servitude, because animals are people too."  WHAT?  Then Chewbacca went vegetarian and I'm screaming "HOW IS THIS A PLOT POINT?"

Then we got to the relationship stuff, and this was the OTHER maddening thing about "The Last Jedi".  In "The Force Awakens", it looked like they were setting up Rey and Finn as romantic partners, but then in the next film, it seemed more like Rian Johnson wanted to explore the bond between Rey and Kylo (or "Reylo" if you ship) and OK, that's a bold new direction, let's bring in Rose as a new potential love interest for Finn, and everyone's happy, right?  WRONG, because here comes J.J. Abrams again, and he wants to explore both Rey/Finn AND Rey/Kylo in Episode IX.  Wait, I thought it was suggested that Snoke made the mental connection between Rey and Kylo, but now it seems they've got real relationship potential?  Only she's a Jedi and he's a Sith, how's that going to work out?  Is she going to turn him good or is he going to lure her to the Dark Side?  Ah, now maybe we're getting somewhere meaty, right?

But still, "The Rise of Skywalker" storyline seems determined to fire in every direction possible, all at once.  All this romantic potential, and in the end, nobody's getting any action!  Everybody just seems like they're co-workers in the Resistance now and they're afraid of getting in trouble with H.R. so everybody's cool with being friends, and that's boring as hell.  And then after the racists started hating on having a prominent Asian character in "The Last Jedi", it seems like THIS movie is afraid now to explore Finn/Rose or even Finn/Rey, so they bring in BRAND NEW love interests for Finn, and even Poe, and poor Rose is now left out in the cold.  Is that fair?  Do we let the racists win?  In the old days, the big love triangle was between Han, Leia and Luke (umm, we didn't know at the time about the brother-sister thing) but we knew in the end Leia was going to choose SOMEBODY.  Now we've got love quadrangles and pentangles and I'd settle for a Finn/Poe romance if it meant that something would finally get resolved.  The good news here is that no matter which two characters you see romantic potential in, there's something in this movie for you.  AND that's also the bad news, if you think about it.

However, when you consider how Abrams had to bend the storyline over backwards (and sideways, and sort of pretzel-shaped) to undo some of the directions that "The Last Jedi" took, I think the effort that it took to right this ship was something close to super-human.  My friend Andy used to say about the "Star Wars" films directed by Lucas, whenever something weird came in to the mix, "It's OK, Daddy's driving..."  By which he meant that someone responsible was behind the wheel, and if you want to feel like a kid in the back-seat it's OK to relax or take a little nap even, because your father's going to make sure that you get home OK.  (Still, even with that there's the possibility of another careless driver on the road, or an unwanted appearance of Jar Jar Binks...). Where Abrams excels is his ability to examine the films Lucas made, and then continue the story in a new direction, while still paying tribute to what has gone before, so that the end result FEELS like maybe it was made by the original creator.  He did this with "Star Trek" in 2009 - it was a new movie, new timeline, but it had to also FEEL like the old TV series in some way, and that's a difficult row to hoe.

So to do this, there are a lot of callbacks in the sequel trilogy.  I mentioned several of them already, like the Battle of Crait resembling the Battle of Hoth in some ways, but it also had to be a new thing at the same time.  And as I correctly predicted, there are many callbacks here to "Return of the Jedi" - not just the presence of Palpatine being alive and Lando Calrissian flying the Falcon, but there are sets designed to look like old locations, just in a new way.  And some scenes are direct visual references to ROTJ, like a conversation between Rey and her old mentor that neatly mirrors one that Luke had with his.

In fact there are a lot of "ghosts" in this film - some literal force-ghosts and other symbolic ones.  At one point a character was searching through the wreckage of a familiar "Star Wars" set for a useful object, and I thought, "Wow, there's a metaphor.  This film is searching through the wreckage of the previous trilogy to find something that could propel THIS story forward."  And that's what writers do now, they go through the old stories in a franchise and they look for gaps, or story possibilities between the scenes we know, and they try to make something new that fits between the other things or is a logical extension of them.  Comic-book writers do this all the time, the new writer on "Spider-Man" is eventually going to consider the older stories and maybe say, "Well, it's now time for Spider-Man to fight the Green Goblin again..." but the better writers will also say, "What can I do differently this time he fights the Green Goblin, so it's not like every OTHER time they fought before?"

Stan Lee created Spider-Man, and also most of the other major Marvel super-heroes, but after a couple of decades he let other writers pick up most of the workload.  I don't think he wrote a decent comic-book story himself after the late 1970's, but I could be wrong.  In the same way, George Lucas created this universe, but when he sold out to Disney, it became an opportunity for other people to play with the toys he created.  So like it or not, "J.J. Abrams is my master now."  I'll defend the job he did here, even though he still left a LOT of questions unanswered...and I just KNOW that's going to piss a lot of people off.

Who, exactly, are the Knights of Ren?  Was "Ren" a person, or a planet or another thing?  There's fertile ground between Episodes 6 and 7 for more stories, and Marvel Comics (also a Disney subsidiary now) is going to start exploring that in a new Kylo Ren comic.  How, exactly, did Palpatine survive his fall to the reactor core in Episode 6?  Again, yet to be revealed - basically if you're looking for clear answers in "The Rise of Skywalker", you'd better get used to disappointment.  Do we finally learn who Rey's parents were?  Thankfully, there's a resounding YES here.  So there you go, take some comfort in the fact that the war is finally over, Rey finally has a last name, the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and I think Lando FINALLY gets his spaceship back, but I could be wrong about this, too.  I hope he does, I think he deserves it.

But it already seems like the reviews of this film are either middling or poor - yet it's sold more advance tickets than just about any film, other than "Avengers: Endgame".  It seems like as on nearly every other issue, our populace is split right down the middle - you're probably either going to REALLY love this film, or REALLY hate it.  That's it, there's no in-between.  Get on board and enjoy the ride, or else don't show up at all, there's just no middle ground.  I just don't expect many people to say, "Eh, this film was just OK for me."  You either go all in or you don't.

I'm sure I left some NITPICK POINTS around here somewhere, let me take some time to think about it, and if I come up with any this weekend I'll add them right here.  (or maybe I'll add them after a second viewing in January...)  Beyond R2-D2 being CRIMINALLY under-used in this installment, that is.  Or was that a callback to "The Force Awakens", where he spent nearly the whole film deactivated and just taking up space in a storeroom?

Wait, I've got one - what about this Force healing?  It's a new power we've never seen before, so very obviously it's here because it needed to be to make this plot work.  So how come we've never seen the Force used this way before, except for last week in an episode of "The Mandalorian"?  Why didn't any Jedi use this power while fighting the Clone Wars?  "Screw it, they're clones, we've got like a zillion of them, let 'em die..."  Why didn't Obi-Wan use this power when Qui-Gon or Padme were dying?  Was he not aware of it, or is it some recent innovation in the use of the Force?  Either way, I'm not buying it...

UPDATE: I went to see Episode IX a second time on New Year's Day, with my wife who was seeing it for the first time. She really enjoyed it, which helps me justify my rating a bit - but she was also left emotionally drained afterwards, and that was how I felt after my first viewing, too.

Part of what stuck with me the first time I saw it was how Rey's battle with the Emperor (and to a lesser extent, her ongoing relationship (?) with Kylo Ren, and how they seemed to be riffing off of issues of sexual harassment.  I know, there's not really any SEX in "Star Wars", so I don't know how all the space people manage to have space babies, but I digress.  OK, you have to admit that even if it's not sexual, what's been going on in the new trilogy is a form of harassment.  Kylo and Rey are mentally connected somehow, and they've been sharing intimate conversations over vast distances for several films now, but sometimes on Kylo's end these devolve into threats, mixed with offers for Rey to come to the Dark Side so they can rule the galaxy together.  Putting aside the fact that these mental confabs can happen at even the most inconvenient times (like, what happens if Rey's in the shower or something?) they've put her through the emotional wringer, with Kylo being somewhat kind, then taunting her about her parents, then threatening her life.  It's like some kind of emotional abuse cycle, where the abuser keeps saying whatever he has to in order to maintain contact, and after a while, the victim doesn't know which end is up, whether to hate or love in return.  It's been like some ongoing form of mental rape, right?

Then to make matters worse, the Emperor comes back - and he's the classic example of the white man (really really white, like super-pale) in power, and to him Kylo's a joke, and the young girl's a pawn, someone who lives just to service his needs.  He's like super-replusive Harvey Weinstein, or Trump, and/or Epstein all rolled into one.  Emperor Trumpatine, or Palp-Weinstein maybe.  Forget the connection between them, he just wants her body (OK, not like THAT exactly, but is there really a difference?).  And she can't strike him down, because then he gets what he wants, which is for her to demonstrate hatred and join the Dark Side, so it seems like she can't win - much like how a harassed woman can't fight back against her accuser, because she'll lose her job and maybe become an outcast, and who's going to believe her story anyway?

Anyway, that was my first impression, and this stuff bothered me a little less during the second viewing, but it's still THERE.  Still, since I knew the major plot points, the second time I could relax a bit and pay more attention to things like foreshadowing, and how the whole movie flows, and really just the elegance of clues being placed in the early parts that tip off the twists in the later parts.  I think the film will hold up over time, there's just so much there that can be analyzed by the experts, so many little callbacks and Easter eggs and winks at the fans about Star Wars ephemera.

Also starring Daisy Ridley (last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Adam Driver (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), John Boyega (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Lupita Nyong'o (last seen in "Black Panther"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Kelly Marie Tran (aslo last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Mark Hamill (ditto), Jimmy Vee (ditto), Mike Quinn (ditto), Joonas Suotamo (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Anthony Daniels (ditto), Billie Lourd (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Billy Dee Williams (last seen in "Quincy"), Greg Grunberg (last heard in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Dominic Monaghan (last seen in "Mute"), Ian McDiarmid (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Jodie Comer, Billy Howle (last seen in "Outlaw King"), with archive footage of Carrie Fisher (last seen in "The 'Burbs") and cameos from (REDACTED - but last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), (REDACTED) and (ALSO REDACTED), John Williams, Lin-Manuel Miranda (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Jeff Garlin (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Kevin Smith? (if so, last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Dhani Harrison and the voices of J.J. Abrams, Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Stan & Ollie"), Andy Serkis (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), James Earl Jones (last seen in "The Comedians"), Alec Guinness (ditto), Hayden Christensen (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Olivia d"Abo (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Ashley Eckstein (last heard in "Star Wars: The Clone Wars"), Jennifer Hale (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Glass"), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Frank Oz (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Angelique Perrin, Freddie Prinze Jr., Liam Neeson (last seen in "Widows"), Matthew Wood and Debra Wilson.

RATING: 8 out of 10 Star Destroyers