Well, at least "The Avengers" had a strong finale this year.
Picking up a few years from where "The Last Jedi" left off, "The Rise of Skywalker" sees the Galactic Resistance regrouping for a final face off with the imperial remnants of The First Order when the unexpected return of the late Emperor Palpatine provides a provides in x factor in the conflict that will resolve the neverending war between the Jedi and the Sith once and for all and offer Rey closure on the parents that she grew up never knowing.
Billed as the definitive finale to the Skywalker saga that has been the flagship of "Star Wars" ever since its inception, "The Rise of Skywalker" sadly plays out as a feature length concession speech regarding Disney's overall handling of this license.
With the divisive "The Last Jedi" having abandoned the majority of the threads and themes set up by "The Force Awakens" for no apparent reason and yielding very little for doing so narratively, JJ Abrams returns to the director's chair to reconcile the difference between Rian Johnson's unchained experiment and the original plot outline for the sequel trilogy to mixed results.
To give credit where it's due, the best thing that "The Rise of Skywalker" has going for it is that it's the first film to actualize the potential of its new leads in an adventure that is wholly their own.
Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac are finally united as a functional unit as Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron respectively and getting to see them embarking on an adventure that is their own rather than being saddled with the leftovers of the previous cast in a trilogy that claims to be about moving past the legacy of its predecessors while contradicting said metatextual analysis by co-opting iconography wherever possible, go a long ways towards saving the film from being a complete disaster.
They actually have character arcs, dynamics, and shining personalities now that they must carry the film on their own unshackled to the presence of the previous cast, with Billy Dee Williams return as Lando Calrisian providing perhaps the best use of a previous cast member thus far, his presence uplifting the narrative and complimenting its new stars without actively wrenching the spotlight away from them.
Forced to reconcile the bizarre deviations to whatever loose roadmap existed for the sequel trilogy that were made by "The Last Jedi," Abrams' struggle to juggle multiple undercooked plot threads forces him to direct a tightly packed narrative that keeps moving and never quite drags if your just out for popcorn fun at the cinema.
If you were looking for anything more meaningful however, that's about where the positives end.
Despite being the 3rd longest "Star Wars" film of the franchise, "The Rise of Skywalker" may actually feel like the fluffiest and most disposable film that the franchise has produced since "Solo," and in some places, may even give that entry a run for its money.
The need to reconcile the outline with the thematic grandstanding and wheel spinning of "The Last Jedi" has saddled this film with a cavalcade of storytelling problems.
Ignoring whatever slavish devotion Abrams seems to have towards the original intent of the Sequel Trilogy's mythology arc that clearly wasn't respected well enough to be preserved by his producers and immediate predecessor, "The Rise of Skywalker" was the last opportunity to tell a real story with these characters that it has set up while serving as a thematic finale to all of the films that have preceded it.
Despite the bloat and awkward implementations of montage, clunky and expository dialogue, and the most painfully transparent usage of macguffins that I have ever seen this franchise fall back on (which is saying something given the first film's opening POV characters are macguffins), it passably succeeds in pulling off the former, even if many of the character revelations are rushed and lacking in development, leading to set-pieces, moments, and occasional plot twists that border on nonsensical.
Regarding the latter however, the sad reality is that even if the movie was firing on all cylinders, hitting the mark of a 4 decade build up across 9 movies was always going to be a Herculean labor.
It's no surprise then, that "The Rise of Skywalker," despite having a lot of really great ideas malnourished from a lack of proper set up and development, just can't manage to feel as grand as the legacy it was spawned from.
In being tied so closely with Episodes 4-6, the film inherits a tone that's too grandiose to feel but so intimately engaging, yet with all of its throwbacks to the previous films, with the original trilogy veterans hogging the spotlight up until now, it can't really nail down its own sense of identity, save for a few glorious but fleeting moments in which the characters actually get to uniquely respond to their surroundings and the alien nature of the galaxy actually gets explored.
Although this is not a bad movie, it does represent the tragedy of poor planning. With its release, it becomes obvious that whatever previous director Rian Johnson was or wasn't allowed to do with the franchise, its producers clearly had no sense of creative or artistic respect or investment enough in this license to create an actual outline to stick to. The zero hour mistakes that happen in the final entry of a trilogy like this are not intentional but they are more often than not the sign of executive negligence.
Despite its flaws, "The Rise of Skywalker" may actually be my favorite film of the Sequel Trilogy. It doesn't hold a candle to my beloved "Rogue One," which was also produced under Disney's tenure, but there's something mildly cathartic about sitting through 2 films of a trilogy hollowly pontificate on letting a new generation inherit its galactic swashbuckling adventures and finally getting to see that generation have said adventures actually be about their actions and consequences, even if the adventure in question has a lot of holes in it.
It's not the "Avengers: Endgame" of "Star Wars" but it's certainly not the "Game of Thrones: Season 8" either.
6 Bad Feelings about this out of 10
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