The Best Final Installment That Worked Hard to Repent for Last Jedi

Rating: 9/10 (7 April 2020)

The fact is that the most professional critics must be fools. When Last Jedi came out, they praised it till the cows came home. It was a train wreck of plot holes and political agendas surpassed only by Solo. Then Rise of Skywalker comes out and they have nothing but criticisms. "Finn looks lost. The Emperor is back and we don't know how! We are confused." Well, they were confused before the film came off and there's just no hope for them. The film isn't confusing when you understand that what it's mostly doing is ret-conning all the junk out of the Star Wars cannon that Rian Johnson pulled out of his backside to surprise us with a toaster when we wanted a hero?
Eliminate Holdo kamakazi hyperspace jumping. Check. Make the horses stakeholders in the defeat of the Empire. Check. Give us less whiny woman with a conscience by sidelining Rose Ticco. Check. Give us some strong females who understand self-sacrifice and have complex inner choices to make, but don't crap all over male fans by making Luke Skywalker a joke. Check. Surprise us with Rey's origin story in a way that fits with the prior 2 films. Well, if you didn't read spoilers before seeing the film, then check. Explain how Leah can fly like Mary Poppins. Check. Salvage Rey from Mary Sue land. Double Check. Somehow they even managed to salvage the notion of droid abuse from the mess that was Solo by subtly giving a character arc to D-O, and also having C3P0 memory wiped. Note that Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter implied that C3P0's memory has been wiped before. Can you say FAN SERVICE! I mean REAL FAN service!
Now, in fairness, to do all that massive patch job, the film introduces a lot of new Force powers. But unlike the BS from Last Jedi, they are at least consistent with what is cannon, or used to be cannon, or whatever you want to call stuff that fans think they know about the force. Yes, it can heal. That was established way back in the Zhan trilogy.
Now about the Emperor (I don't consider this spoilers because the freaking trailer gave it away -- but some of it does talk about other films, so if you don't want to know about stuff in the prequels or original films, then stop reading). One of the main criticism is "Well how did the Emperor come back... it don't make sense! They are retcon'ing Return of the Jedi." Well, up to this film, very little was known about the Sith. We know that in ROTJ, the emperor goads Luke to strike him down. The popular interpretation was that by giving in to hate and committing murder, Luke would become more powerful in the Dark Side than Vader. And even more so, by killing his own father, he would be owned by the Dark Side big time. When Ben's ghost discovers that Vader told Luke his parentage, Luke says "I can't kill my own father", and Ben says, "Then the Emperor has won". We assume this means that he will lack the will to go through with it. But it could also mean that killing someone you have an emotional connection to is the ultimate path to the Dark Side. And since Luke had not yet achieved the level of emotional and worldly detachment that we see the Jedi order demanding of all recruits in the prequels (and it seemed to not fit with what TOS suggested for Jedi), it now makes more sense. And at the same time, it explains why Vader's path to the Sith had to involve not just giving in to anger and fear, but also killing Padme. Since he didn't really kill Padme, he wasn't a true Sith. Which is why he could find redemption at the end of ROTJ.
Then you also have to take a very close look at the two times the Emperor was involved in fights. There is the time that Sam Jackson fried his face. There is his fight with Yoda... if you pay attention closely you'll notice that the two fights have something in common. Then there is the finale of ROTJ, where he is "killed" by Vader. That fight has some of the same "thing" happening to the Emperor, but then Vader throws him into the reactor, and that "thing" obviously had to stop before his corporal form was nuked. So obviously the writers of TROS went back and really teased out these things to come up with what I thought was a super ending.
Then there is Finn. In TLJ, he got paired up in a marginalized race-duo. I say marginalized because even though gets to knock off Phasma, it's due to a well timed distraction by Rose. All the Force sensitive suggestions from TFA were swept away. As though we were supposed to just forget that he had handled Luke's light saber against Kylo better than Luke did in TESB against Vader... and Luke trained with both Ben and Yoda at that point! And I felt that TROS did a great job of putting his character back on track to "A-list" hero status. Because that's what Star Wars had... 3 A-list stars: Luke, Leah and Han. The jury is still out on Poe, but definitely Finn and Rey make the "A" cut in the finale of this film. Poe ends up is somewhere in "Lando" land, the guy who wasn't particularly heroic but was there to get the job done. A leader by consequence, not by nature. In a way, one last attempt to shoe-horn in the disparaging treatment his character received in TLJ.
Overall this is a film that has many parallels to ROTJ. It gives some added context to Luke's face off with himself in the cave on Dagabah. Something that the Zhan novels ascribed to Dark-side juju at a place where a Sith had been defeated. It uses that, along with a touching final scene, to explain how the Dark Side hole in the ground from TLJ might have been formed. I supposed the only thing it can't really explain is Rey's actual vision form TLJ, which appears to have a bit of bait and switch, although there is a possible way to explain it in terms of Force Diad. What is needed is a "Abrahms cut" of TLJ and instead of seeing infinite "clones" of herself in the Dark Side Hole, Rey would see a single mirror image of herself. Now... is it her dark half, or it is something else? Just a few minor tweaks to TLJ, like overdubbing a few lines between Holdo and Poe, as well as Leah and Poe, changing the "you can't park here" guys into actual Imperial troops looking for rebels, etc.
Which brings up my one criticism of TROS. There are too many "over the shoulder" shots with Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and whatever they were using to resurect Carrie Fisher. We are not fooled. We know that the Back of Han's head was a double. We know Harrison Ford said his lines in front of a green screen, probably in his basement. Given how the prior two film's productions treated Hamill and Ford, it's not surprising. Of course Carrie Fisher had no say in the matter and gets a pass.