Entertaining but a bad Star Wars movie

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2020)

The Star Wars franchise is ubiquitous in many forms of media and across the world. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who has never at least heard of Star Wars. By the time the first three films were released in the seventies and eighties, a massive fandom was created and the influence of the series has grown ever since. Even when the prequels were released, which were considered to be not great movies by many fans, the franchise did not falter.
The prequels signaled the end of new Star Wars movies for many people, and they were mostly right. However, when George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney for 4.05 billion dollars back in 2012, people began to speculate where the franchise would go due to Disney's widely known desire for money and growth. The wait was short, however, because Star Wars: The Force Awakens was in theaters just three years after the acquisition. With it, a new generation was exposed to Star Wars and interest in the series was rekindled in popular media and in old fans.
Backlash against The Force Awakens was swift from many die-hard fans. Some common and fair complaints were the money grabbing atmosphere from Disney, reliance on nostalgia, Rey being too powerful with the force without any training, and the film being a blatant reskin of the plot from A New Hope. However, most of the fans still considered it to be a decent movie. This general acceptance of the new characters and plot would drastically change with the release of The Last Jedi. The content of that movie was so controversial that it immediately split the fandom into two groups, one that now vehemently disagrees with the direction that the franchise is going and one that vigorously agreed with everything in the new set of films. This conflict grew and became nastier over the time between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
Generally speaking, The Rise of Skywalker was an entertaining movie that appeals to many different types of people, including people who may not be invested in the lore and backstory of Star Wars. But to anyone with extensive or even moderate knowledge of the inner workings of Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker was a pretty bad Star Wars movie.
The basic premise of the movie is that the Resistance is preparing for a final attack against Kylo Ren and the First Order. It is quickly learned, first by Kylo Ren, and then the others that Emperor Palpatine has returned and has aspirations to take over the galaxy. Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewbacca, and C-3PO then go off on a quest to find Palpatine and end him, but Kylo is always right behind them and attempts to hinder their plan multiple times. After finding the emperor, both Rey and Kylo, who has been converted to the light sight by Leia and Rey, attempt to kill him. Rey is eventually successful after Kylo sacrifices himself. This allows the fleet of ships gathered by Lando Calrissian to dismantle the Sith fleet on the planet Exegol.
First off, this film felt incredibly rushed. This was actually proven after the fact and the rushed feeling was due to many reshoots of scenes and final editing that lasted up to the month before the movie was released to theaters. In addition to that, this film was almost entirely fan service. While most movies do need some fan service, this film clearly focused too much on it and subsequently, the plot suffered severely. I can partially justify the fan service because The Last Jedi was atrocious and went against much of the established feeling of Star Wars. Basically, every influence The Last Jedi had on the trilogy was wiped clean by Episode 9. Another criticism I have is the laziness of the design of the Sith fleet's Star Destroyer, the Xyston-class. It's practically the same Star Destroyer model from Rogue One, but it has a scary big lazer that can destroy planets because the franchise definitely needed another planet killing super weapon. If some of the recent leaks are to be believed, there were plenty of unique and striking designs for new Star Destroyers they could've. It would've added a lot to see hundreds of interesting new ships in the Sith fleet rather than the same design we've seen for years. On a smaller note, the Rey and Kylo kiss at the end was very unnecessary and did not add anything because those two characters had no romantic interest as they hated each other for the previous two films. To give this movie some credit, the score by John Williams was great and was, in my opinion, the best of the trilogy.
The Rise of Skywalker was not a horrible movie by any stretch of the imagination, I was entertained as I sent in the theater watching it, but it was most definitely a bad Star Wars movie. The original trilogy and the prequel trilogy are still considered by me, to be much better at creating an atmosphere and feeling even if they weren't as visually stunning.