Like the Third Car in a Three Car Pileup

Rating: 3/10 (21 December 2019)

Star Wars, the Rise of Skywalker. Hopefully the last Star Wars Movie.
How did Disney's Billion Dollar investment go so horribly wrong?
So really, you have to start with how the first two "Sequel" movies messed everything up. The Force Awakens decided to essentially undo all the happy ending aspects of the Original Trilogy to set up the new Trilogy. This is really where it all went wrong because it rendered the OT meaningless. Luke gives up, Leia and Han don't stick together and their Emo kid goes bad. The Empire comes back in the form of the "New Order" and heck, they're even building a new Death Star because the first two worked out so well.
Then you get The Last Jedi, where Rian Johnson decided to stick a big old thumb in the eye of the hardcore fan base. They decide to tell us the force is nothing special, and engage in an absolutely silly plan that gets most of the rebels killed. And they waste about half the film with Fin hanging out with the human equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, Rose Tico. Oh, were you waiting for Snoke to be a big deal? Nope, they kill him off without telling us anything about him and where he came from. Fans hated it, complained about it and even organized a boycott of the next Stand-alone film, Solo.
JJ Abrams was brought back to fix the mess, and just ended up making a bigger mess... kind of like the third car in a three-car pileup.
So, let's start with the silliness of it all. Turns out Emperor Sheev Palpatine/Darth Sideous isn't quite as dead as we thought he was. (Monty Python voice "I'm not quite dead. I'm getting better!") Yes, despite being thrown down a ten-mile chasm into a reactor on a station that then blew up, he's apparently alive and well on the Sith Planet, where he's building a new fleet that he wants to give Darth Emo.... I'm sorry, Kylo Ren. All he has to do is find Rey. Maybe he cloned himself. Maybe Snoke was something he grew in a lab. Whatever.
What we get is a convoluted chase sequence to find a dagger to find a Wayfinder to find the lost planet of the Sith that he's hiding on. Except they have to go on another couple of side quests to reprogram C3PO and rescue Chewbacca. This leads to a massive reveal at the end where Kylo and Rey fight a resurrected Palpatine and Kylo redeems himself before dying... um, wait, isn't this all terribly familiar? Don't worry about spoilers, kids, if you've seen past Star Wars movies, you've seen this one.
And this is the problem, I think with a franchise like this. Whether it be Doctor Who, Star Trek or Star Wars, you have to strike this fine balance between Fan Service and innovation. To much fan service, and you just get something that looks retreaded. Too much innovation, you risk making the fans upset that you are marring up their childhood memories.
Johnson went too far in "innovation" with Jedi. Abrams is going too far with "Fan Service, trying his very best to erase everything Johnson did to cheese off the fans. In the process, he made a movie where every story beat was kind of predictable.
All that said, let's look at some of the characters, and how they messed them up. It's a pity, most of the actors are likable enough, and they are reading the awful dialog as best they can.

First, Princess/General Leia Organa... which has a problem in that Carrie Fisher died before filming started. Invoking the spirit of Ed Wood, they took some clips off the cutting room floor, used the Dark Arts and CGI and inserted her into parts of the movie. While not as unsettling as the insertion of the late Peter Cushing into Rogue one, they really don't work that well.
Lando's back... because they ran out of other characters that they haven't killed off yet. Luke and Han's ghosts show up to tell our heroes to not be as tired of this stuff as we are.
Then we have Rey. This is her story, mostly. The complaint about her is that she's a Mary Sue, being perfect in every way. We have a montage of her Jedi-Training at the beginning of this one, which really should have happened two movies ago. Why does she need to train, she can do stuff we never saw other Jedis do? Literally. Like the new Jedi Healing Power- Nothing like pulling new powers out of your backside to make a story work. (Oddly, this magic power also appears in the Mandolorian.)
Oh, yeah (Spoilers), and we find out that Rey is Palpatine's Granddaughter. Didn't even know Palpy had a son or was even into chicks, but apparently, he was.
Kylo Ren/AKA Ben Solo/ Aka Darth Emo. - Well, wow, big surprise, this movie is about how he redeems himself, even getting a visit from Ghost Dad to say that he forgives him for the whole murder thing. Ugh.
Fans will be happy to see much, much less of Rose Tico. It's like they realized the fans hated her with Jar-Jar Binks levels of contempt and decided to not use her that much. They did introduce two new female characters so we know that Fin and Poe have a case of the Not-Gays. I'm so bored with it I'm not even going to bother looking up the names of these characters.
The whole ending involves them leading an attack on Palpatine's new fleet of Star Destroyers all equipped with Planet Killing Weapons because you can't have a Star Wars movie without planet-killing weapons. How these ships got built, who was crewing them... ah, who cares, it just means the First Order will have 100 times more ships and can conquer all the free people of the Galaxy who couldn't be bothered fighting them up until this point.
A major plot line involves going to a planet to find someone who will reprogram C3PO so he can read Sith writing on a dagger. Somehow, it is against his programming to read Sith. A bunch of problems with this.
The first one being, he was built by Anikan Skywalker out of parts. So where would this program come from if the Sith had been gone for 1000 years at that point. Second- they say this reprogramming would completely erase his memory. This is essentially erasing him as a person, and it leads to some silly comedy where he's wandering around battles not knowing who anyone is or what is going on.
This has kind of always been one of my complaints about the Star Wars universe. Droids are obviously self-aware. They have personalities, make decisions, form friendships, but they can STILL be treated like, well, machines.