Deeply Frustrating and Often Unpleasant

Rating: 4/10 (20 December 2019)

"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" is a deeply frustrating film. In trying to please everybody, it pleases nobody. The pacing is break-neck speed as it tries to cram too much plot, and too much poorly-thought-out fan service into too little a runtime and it completely fails to make itself anything close to interesting.
Clearly everyone involved wanted to appease those fans who abhorred the previous film, but I'm not sure they accomplished that. Everything about this movie felt so fanservicey in the most perfunctory way. Things just happen with little-to-no explanation under the assumption the fans will love it for happening. But this approach fundamentally fails to understand why fans might want to see something happen. All of the reveals fall flat because the previous movies did nothing to set them up and the film is paced with such break-neck speed that it's difficult to get attached to (or understand) any of what you're seeing.
A lot of the visual effects don't work well - there's a CGI flashback that's worse than the Rogue One uncanny valley scenes. The actors all do a decent job with what they're given, but nobody is given much to do (aside from Ridley and Driver). The insertion of leftover Leia footage from "The Force Awakens" never really works as it never feels like she's talking to the characters in this film or they're talking to her - and they do so little with her character that she might as well have not been in the movie at all.
I didn't love "The Last Jedi" but at least it took a risk. It failed to be what the middle chapter of a trilogy needs to be - it didn't set up the final film at all - so "Rise of Skywalker" had to pick up some of that slack and was always going to suffer for it. But, God. I just didn't like this movie at all. It's so steeped in the past that it feels redundant and completely fails at concluding this story. It was never fun - and Star Wars film should always be fun.