Spoilers for all of the Star Wars films dotted throughout
I have some sympathy for the people who had to try to pull this together, because The Force Awakens was a pallid retread of A New Hope, then Rian Johnson pulled The Last Jedi in a completely different direction (don't get me wrong, I think the Last Jedi is the best of the sequel trilogy but it's a terrible Star Wars film) and they then had to make a film to try to wrap up the story.
Unfortunately, it felt like none of the different parts of the film fitted together.
I'll use the title as an example. The Rise of Skywalker - excellent strong title.
Utterly meaningless within the context of the film.
Name me one Skywalker who rises in this film? By the end of it, they're all dead. (Yes, I know my genre conventions, if there is no body, they're coming back, if there is a body, they might still come back, if there's a body and they're the Master, check behind the door, but for the purposes of the film, they're dead.) Fine, Rey calls herself Skywalker (and Luke and Leia would support her in that) but there is no rise, there's just her giving things up in the desert.
Killing Kylo Ren is the easy narrative option. It feels cheap. The harder, more interesting option, would feature good guys trying to figure out where he fits in a better new world, surrounded by people he tried to kill and whose friends and relatives he succeeded in killing.
There's a few other parts like that, where you can feel them choosing the easy way out rather than trying something and I think that's the weight of being Star Wars. See also, mysteriously reappearing Palpatine.
There's also the lengths Hollywood will go to, to not show Finn and Rey kissing. I see you and what you're up to, Disney.
From a purely stylistic point of view, I'd re-cut the cavalry charge scene. I think I know what they're trying to do, but the way it intercuts with the rest of the space battle takes away from them both.
There's a serious emotional disconnect between what's going on on the screen and me in this film.
An example, they blow up Kijimi and no one cares (this isn't hyperbole. The planet blowing up doesn't even make it into the summary of the film - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Rise_of_Skywalker). It's not lack of time spent with the planet and its people; we never see Alderaan in A New Hope, but we feel when it is destroyed. That connection is completely missing here.
Because of that lack of connection, which I blame on them setting up three main characters then never letting them interact with each other much after the first film (I have a theory about the why of that in my sequel trilogy summary post that I am in the middle of writing), all the emotional weight of the film has to be carried by Chewbacca and C3PO. Despite my love for the characters, this is not a good sign.
(I am a fully paid up member of the "Chewie should have got a medal at the end of A New Hope" campaign and the bad thing that happens to him is why I stopped reading the Star Wars EU novels, while nothing in the new trilogy got to me as well as that moment where C3PO, knowing the risks, decides that the Rebellion needs him to find out what that text means.)
It's not that there aren't bits that I love.
Evil once again sounding British and sudden unexpected Richard E. Grant.
I like both the Hux reveal and his reasoning. I know people complained that it was a bit thin but he is completely the sort of person who would betray a cause just so someone he hated didn't win. Also, a non-Sith who can hide his feelings from a Sith through hate alone. That's going some!
I love Lando.
Adam Driver's mega-watt smile. There's reams to be written about the sequel trilogy being unbalanced by Kylo Ren, but oh the five-to-ten minutes of Ben Solo that we did get ... (I am a simple creature and I like a good pseudo-sword fight).
And there's these occasional hints of a much darker version of the film underneath, and that's a much more intriguing film. It fits in with DJ in The Last Jedi. Examples include Poe being a Spice runner.
There is also no way you will ever convince me that the vision of Han that Kylo sees isn't Luke pretending to be Han, not Han himself. Like, it makes no sense for it to be Han, Han is not a Force user and it's hard even for Force users to do that. But Luke, making one final bid to save Rey, that works, and it make him a much more manipulative character than the rest of the film is willing to let him be.
There's so much interesting potential wasted.
Rise of Skywalker doesn't work as itself, it doesn't really work as a Star Wars film, it's a damp squib of an ending to the series and collapses under the weight of being Star Wars.
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