Star Wars, She ain't what she used to be...

Rating: 2/10 (27 December 2019)

So first, to all the 9/10 and 10/10 reviewers criticizing the 1/10 and 2/10 reviewers, let me just say that only if you know nothing about Star Wars and only if you've never seen any of the original films would you ever think that this was a great or even good addition to the Star Wars legacy. It just wasn't, and that has nothing to do with being on any kind of hate for Star Wars, preconceived negative outlook going into this movie. So my thoughts...
The fact is, this is part of an overall "Story" one that has lost it's way, it's passion, it's character and plot development. It's a story that started with creativity and originality and has ended with nothing more than the regurgitated plots over and over. Don't believe me? How about 5 times writing the exact same "Evil seeks to take over the galaxy with a super powerful Death Star x2, a Planet Killer, a Super Dreadnought and planet killer, and finally an entire fleet of planet killing ships? All of which were somehow built in complete secrecy for the entire galaxy with the Rebels somehow finding out about them at the 11th hour and somehow managing to miraculously destroy these weapons of destruction just in the nick of time! Once was cool. Twice, well, I could give it to the Emperor to try again, but the third, fourth and fifth time? I mean Really!? Come on. That's just lame and lazy story writing.
What about the characters? The original gave us Han, Luke, leia, Chewie and the Droids. The Prequels at least gave us Yoda, Obi-Wan and Mace Windu that we cared about, What has the last series given us? An old, unlovable and disinterested Luke, a Leia who did nothing although we did get to see here float through space. That was a neat and stupid trick, and then we have the new Characters who I thought they did a good job building characters for in The Force Awakens but then totally dropped the ball on in the Last Jedi and for all the very evident effort in The Rise of Skywalker, the damage was done. I just honestly didn't care if the whole lot got killed. Even the light-saber duels looked more like Rey and Kilo were chopping wood rather than using the force to wield an "Elegant Weapon". I mean really, go back and look at the duel of the Obi-Wan vs Anikan and compare that fast moving dance of light-sabers to the out of breath chopping of Rey and Kilo. Huge Difference! Whoever did the choreography for these fight sequences should be shot.
But more than these issues, the whole story just seemed very forced and disjointed. The entire story about the Emperor coming back and again, no one, not even all the supposed force ghosts out there, could see this or clue anyone in. It was just ridiculous and poor story writing that seemed to serve no purpose other than to finally give us a worthy bad guy (let's face it, Kilo Ren was a joke).
In short, it was just a hot mess. No passion, no characters, no story, just a lot of great camera effects and action scenes and that was never what Star Wars was about. I;m glad it's finally over. They should have stopped with Return of the Jedi and let a good thing rest.