If You Want to See How to Close Out a Saga, I Have Suggestions Beyond The Rise of Skywalker

In the newsletter below, I talk about some movies, one of which is coming out today, and while there are no spoilers, there are critical appraisals. You have been warned.

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The end of a decade always has a pleasingly elegiac quality, so it's fitting that three enormous cinematic epics wrapped up their decade-plus stories in 2019. All three relied heavily on special effects. Two of them absolutely nailed the landing. One did not. Two of these epics were specifically and intentionally designed as epics. One is pretty much that way only in my own head -- but it provides an illustrative example of how to keep dancing with the girl what brung you, all while learning new choreography as you spin around the floor.

I am writing, of course, about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Avengers: Endgame, and The Irishman.

Like other people who were allowed into press screenings, I've been exhorted not to share spoilers or specific plot points of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Ever since I left the theater at Lucasfilm yesterday, I've been thinking about the parallels and differences between the Star Wars cinematic universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To be honest, it started at the press pre-movie briefing: We learned all about the new products in the gaming space, the licensing space, and the publishing space. I sat up straight when Jennifer Heddle, the executive editor at Disney publishing who oversees the Star Wars books, said of Rebecca Roanhorse's Star Wars: Resistance Reborn: It's the book that bridges the gap between the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the beginning of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and we find out how Poe Dameron's evolved from the impetuous flight jockey he was in the last movie to … whatever he is in this one.

And my first thought was, "I don't want to have to do assigned reading to understand why a movie makes sense."

This speaks to a bigger issue in the Star Wars universe: There's the implicit assumption that we're all going to do the reading. I was on a podcast for The Last Jedi and one of the listeners wrote in to say that we should have discussed Vice-Admiral Holdo's character in the context of her probable neurodiversity, as alluded to in the YA novel Leia, Princess of Alderaan. To which I reply: No. Star Wars benefits tremendously from having a rich and ever-unfolding extended universe, one that's accessible via a variety of media from gaming to television to comics to books to movies. But being able to enjoy exploring that universe via one medium should not be contingent on being conversant in every medium.

And that's ultimately what left me cold about The Rise of Skywalker. It's a movie made by someone who's clearly fluent in the extended universe -- the number of shot-for-shot pastiches of scenes that were thrilling or poignant the first time we saw them in other movies is higher than zero -- but adds nothing new to it.

The point to winding down the third trilogy in a set of three trilogies is to provide a satisfying resolution to all the goings-on of movies one through eight, but this movie doesn't do that. It argues that narrative backtracking is the same as narrative resolution, and that the answer to problems that persist across generations is to just keep doing the same thing that perpetuated those problems for generations. It's a weird argument to make -- "This way of doing things is broken! Let's keep doing it!" -- and it gives the saga of the Skywalkers an ending that feels strangely out of touch. Alderaan (among other planets) was blown to bits for this?

By contrast, a franchise that would seem to require supplemental reading before each movie managed to nail the ending of a 21-movie story without once requiring anyone to crack open a comic book. Avengers: Endgame is not a perfect movie by any means, but it is one that manages to simultaneously resolve a lot of character arcs while continually surprising the viewer with something they haven't seen in the MCU before. Most importantly, Avengers: Endgame leaves the MCU changed from how we found it.

One could argue that the whole point of every movie in the MCU is that change is coming whether or not someone's ready for it, and the challenge of every hero is to figure out the best way to rise to the challenge. Compare that to the nostalgia that's been soaked into the Star Wars universe since day one, by both its fans and its creators -- a more elegant franchise for a more civilized age ...

Which brings me to The Irishman, a movie which arguably caps off Martin Scorsese's trilogy of movies about Mob-adjacent criminals -- Goodfellas, Casino and now The Irishman. Unlike the previous two franchises I've mentioned, this whole franchise exists solely in my head but I'm prepared to argue for its existence. All three movies are about the perils of confusing wildly conditional love with more authentic and lasting human connection. There's a shift in directorial insight from movie to movie, however, an indication that as Scorsese has aged and lived his own life, he's kept interrogating his own definitions of everything from storytelling to morality. Goodfellas shows the viewer that some criminals aren't sorry they did anything; they're only sorry they had to stop. Casino shows the viewer that everyone carries within them the cause of our expulsion from paradise. And The Irishman shows us that we have a responsibility to keep reckoning with our actions.

I wept through the last ten minutes of The Irishman -- a movie about a very nasty person who does not ever own any of the nasty things he does -- out of pity. But also out of regret and remorse. Like Scorsese, I was raised Catholic, and thus sat through the final scenes of the movie unable to get the Penitential Act of weekly Mass out of my head: Forgive us for what we have done and what we have failed to do. Martin Scorsese has capped off thirty years of making movies about wiseguys with a meditation on the necessity of acknowledging your failures and finding forgiveness, and it feels like a goodbye.

During yesterday's Star Wars press screening, one of the Lucasfilm people commented that The Rise of Skywalker ended a story that had begun 42 years ago. I flashed back to when I first saw Star Wars -- on a kindergarten field trip, improbably -- and how, the minute Princess Leia appeared on screen, my whole brain lit up because this was something I had never seen before. Yesterday, I watched an entire movie full of things I've seen before, and I nearly cried again. As Marvel and Scorsese have shown us, an ending is a way to show how much we've changed -- and how we rise to meet change shows us everything we need to know about ourselves.

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This wildly intermittent issue of So What, Who Cares? brought to you by a press screening, two separate streaming services, and some strong opinions on how to do long-form storytelling in cinema. I'm always up for chatting on Twitter via @lschmeiser.