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A review by downby1
Resistance Reborn by Rebecca Roanhorse
2.0
The journey to The Rise of Skywalker is short, bland, and ultimately raises almost as many questions as the movie itself. Direct media tie-ins have a mixed reputation in the Star Wars canon--both old and new--but some of them manage to be serviceable and at least tolerable, like A Crash of Fate. Resistance Reborn spends much of its time trying to figure out what to be why retaining a breakneck pacing even J.J. Abrams would likely find intolerable at times. It is a messy effort to try and stitch together characters and other stories from across the Disney canon into the story of the most recent movie, which seems a strange use of time given how few of them appeared in the movie. Typically, you would at least expect such an effort to give some meaning and life to the background characters it tries to explore. What it gives instead is such a crude story as to be little more than stage direction.
Resistance Reborn underscores how much of its own story could have been incorporated into the film it is hurdling to like a drunk during a bar crawl. It would need to have been edited and would not be as long, but the novel did not use its length in any substantive way. Despite the purpose to show how the Resistance was rekindling itself, the book offers a depressing air of how badly the New Republic and the Rebellion era heroes must have been at rebuilding the galaxy after the Empire's collapse for its population to not even care about the government's abrupt end. In what is surely an effort to highlight the banality of evil, the First Order records clerk at what you have to call the center is a boring, two-dimensional character who falls well short of similar intentions like From a Certain Point of View's 'The Sith of Datawork'. The flight to planet to planet, the desperation of the Resistance's cause, and even the race to find allies old and new before they are swept up by the First Order is such a hot, empty air there is no reason to know any more of the journey to the movie than there was to watch a Fast and Furious preview before the movie itself.
Resistance Reborn underscores how much of its own story could have been incorporated into the film it is hurdling to like a drunk during a bar crawl. It would need to have been edited and would not be as long, but the novel did not use its length in any substantive way. Despite the purpose to show how the Resistance was rekindling itself, the book offers a depressing air of how badly the New Republic and the Rebellion era heroes must have been at rebuilding the galaxy after the Empire's collapse for its population to not even care about the government's abrupt end. In what is surely an effort to highlight the banality of evil, the First Order records clerk at what you have to call the center is a boring, two-dimensional character who falls well short of similar intentions like From a Certain Point of View's 'The Sith of Datawork'. The flight to planet to planet, the desperation of the Resistance's cause, and even the race to find allies old and new before they are swept up by the First Order is such a hot, empty air there is no reason to know any more of the journey to the movie than there was to watch a Fast and Furious preview before the movie itself.