Star Wars #65 Review

This issue is our fourth installment in the Scourging of Shu-Torun arc, Kieron Gillen's final arc on the series. Leia and her team have infiltrated Shu-Torun, planning to halt the planet's role in the Empire's war machine, but a wrench is thrown in the plan when Benthic and his Partisans betray the group with the intent to destroy the planet entirely. Luke is forced to come up with a way to stop them while Trios tries to retake her planet.

There isn't too much more to say about this issue that I haven't said about the arc in my previous reviews. I think it's been a pretty average story so far. Not disappointing but not very surprising either. It is nice to get a big finale that brings all of Gillen's arcs together for one satisfying conclusion, and I imagine that the story will keep heating up as it gets closer to the ending. Until then my feelings on the story will remain mostly neutral. It isn't particularly bad or unsatisfying but I don't think that there was anything in this issue that I couldn't have said would happen before it came out.

I hope that SCAR Squad's role in the story isn't solely limited to sending information to Kanchar offscreen, but I'm starting to suspect that it is. Gillen seems to want to focus on his own characters and stories and not the ones that he inherited from Jason Aaron's run, which is understandable. I hope that Greg Pak's upcoming run utilizes them more often. His work on Age of Rebellion so far has clearly shown that he does his research and references other works thoroughly in his stories.

Unzueta's art continues to be toards the bottom of my list of current art in Star Wars comics. General Kanchar especially takes me out of the story. I'm not sure I've ever seen either Larroca or Unzueta draw him in a way that didn't distract me, most likely because I'm just not a fan of his design.

It's a very middle of the road issue. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about it. This is an arc that, like most of Gillen's arc, I think will read far better in a trade when you can get the entire story in one go. Until then, I'll continue to read the issues one by one and hope that they catch my interest more and more.