Alway entertaining and clever. ( )

The First Order appears triumphant and the Resistance on it’s last legs when sudden the voice of a dead man echoes across the stars sending everyone to the Unknown Regions to either inaugurated or stop the execution of the Final Order. Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s The Merry Rise of Skywalker concludes his adaptation of the Star Wars franchise the style of the Bard while dealing with the complete catastrophe that is the sequel trilogy.

After the difficult task of adapting Jedi the Last into a coherent play, Doescher had the less difficult though challenging task of adapting the official retconning of sections of the previous film into a Shakespearean play. With better written characters and somewhat better dialogue to adapt—though that’s not saying much—Doescher was able to stick with iambic pentameter throughout the play except for those special characters like Yoda whose speech patterns are different throughout the entire franchise. To challenge himself, Doescher once again infused the play with easter eggs and secret messages (Rey’s soliloquys) along with adding special dialogues for characters that didn’t have lines in the film but were portrayed by long-time contributors to the franchise. And the illustrations of characters in Elizabethan stage attire is a delightful addition to Doescher’s words.

The Merry Rise of Skywalker is based on a film that had to repair the damage of its predecessor and Ian Doescher was able to make a very good stage adaptation with what he was given though not as difficult as before. The rating of his book is based not on the original material, but Doescher’s hard work in adapting the films for the Elizabethan stage. ( )

"It seemeth our Ability to land is dubious." (pg. 95)

Ian Doescher's later Shakespeare/Star Wars mash-ups have been hamstrung by the fact that their source material has been – to put it kindly – sub-par, limiting Doescher's ability to do anything supremely positive with them. The original mash-ups from 2013-14 were excellent as they relied on the original trilogy, with its iconic lines, vivid characters and robust Joseph Campbell-inspired storytelling. The books based on the much-maligned prequel trilogy (which nevertheless had some residual strength) showed Doescher's struggle with elevating the material, but made up for it with clever wordplay, compassionate retconning and some tasty gimmicks.

However, the mash-ups for the Disney Star Wars films have, as I first wrote in my review of Doescher's interpretation of The Force Awakens, received a hospital pass. The new film trilogy deserves contempt, because its makers treat their audience with contempt: it is a shameless cash-in devoid of wit, interest, morality, courage or basic storytelling ability. Not coincidentally, Doescher has failed to translate these later films for his previously successful mash-ups, not only in providing engaging Shakespearean prose to compensate for the vapid dialogue, but also in repairing the story to such that it provides even basic competence.

The Force Awakens was bad but still resulted in an OK conversion by Doescher; its story was ripped shamelessly from the original trilogy, but that at least provided Doescher something to work with, however uninspired. The Last Jedi was a woozy mess, but paradoxically allowed Doescher a few subtle and entertaining digs at its incompetence (as I mentioned in my review of his mash-up Jedi the Last). The final film, The Rise of Skywalker, is, if less garishly incompetent than The Last Jedi, arguably the worst of the lot. The Disney Star Wars trilogy has always been circling the drain, and Rise is the risible, obnoxious final gurgle it makes as it drops down the plughole.

Mindful that I am writing a review of Doescher's Merry Rise on LibraryThing rather than Rise on IMDb, I mention this in order to point out that the hospital pass Doescher was played has, by the time of this third Disney infliction, become a full-blown medical crisis. The source material he has to work with is unfortunate: the film is a hasty collection of juvenile pizzazz, a tasteless sequence of storytelling cheats and retcons; a vain attempt to stem the bleeding of Disney's cynical carpet-bagging of a galaxy far, far away.

Not only are there no memorable lines for Doescher to render in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, but there are not even any substantive conversations, or coherent character arcs. Most fatally, the source film is one long (and incomprehensible) action scene, full of sound and fury and, of course, signifying nothing. The action of the Star Wars films has always been difficult for Doescher to recreate, even in his sublime original trilogy of mash-ups, and it doesn't help when the action, as in Rise, is mindless comic-book filler designed to distract rather than engage the audience.

Gone are those Joseph Campbell-inspired profundities which made Doescher's original mash-ups so vivid, that through-line from old popular storytellers like Shakespeare to newer ones like George Lucas which Doescher did so well to highlight. The new mash-up books are now what the uninitiated must have wrongly assumed the original ones from 2013-14 were: a Shakespeare pastiche, a superficial novelty. When the planet Kijimi is destroyed in Doescher's final Act of Merry Rise, I was adrift, because I had forgotten this happened in the film, even though I saw it only a few months ago. That's how stultifying Star Wars – which lit up my own childhood in the Nineties – has become. The new Disney films are memorable only in their awfulness, and even an interpreter as talented as Doescher can no longer do anything to make them tolerable. That said, in Merry Rise Doescher does provide one of the most telling stage directions since Shakespeare's famous 'Exit, pursued by a bear':

"Rey and Kylo Ren duel more, and in the process they knock over the pedestal where Vader's mask rests." (pg. 90)

That says it all about how far we are from Chewbacca's lamented "bygone glory days" (pg. 41). ( )

In William Shakespeare’s The Merry Rise of Skywalker: Star Wars Part the Ninth, Ian Doescher concludes his massive metatextual analysis of the Star Wars franchise, retelling the events of The Rise of Skywalker in the style of Shakespeare’s plays whilst including other theatrical elements. Just as Star Wars now reaches throughout American popular culture, Doescher does not limit himself to one famous English author, working in a reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in one of the many scenes of ghosts (pg. 111). The film included Easter eggs and cameos from throughout the Star Wars franchise as part of its celebration of the Skywalker Saga’s conclusion and Doescher does the same, using the styles he developed for the sequel trilogy while including special techniques he developed for Yoda in The Empire Striketh Back and Mace Windu in The Phantom of Menace. He even includes a particularly noteworthy cameo reference to John Williams through the character of Oma Tres, who has no lines in the film but here has a speech that conceals the Star Wars theme (pg. 70). Finally, illustrator Nicholas Delort continues his portrayal of the characters in Elizabethan costume with theatrical stage depictions of the special effects. Fans of this series will find plenty to love in Doescher’s merry conclusion. ( )