A mediocre ending to a badly planned trilogy

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2019)

George Lucas famously wrote his script for Star Wars, then realised it was too long for a single movie and split the script into three parts. What J.J. Abrams did was the opposite. He planned to make a trilogy but only wrote the script for the first episode (along with Lawrence Kasdan). This ill-advised approach was made only worse by when Rian Johnson was given more or less free reign over the next movie.
When Lucasfilm asked Abrams back on the writer/director-seat on The Rise of Skywalker, it was time to reap what had been sown. The Last Jedi had killed off a lot of the mystery boxes (a favourite plot device of Abrams') set up in order to continue the plot from The Force Awakens. Among these were the main villain and the mystery of Rey's parentage.
The result is a movie that is filled to its brim with events to make up for the lost time and plot development of the previous two movies. Things that were introduced only in the previous scene already got a payoff in the next. Probably in an attempt to please everyone -- as well as to come up with ideas in order to salvage the trilogy -- a lot of known fan theories seem to have found themselves on the writers table.
As has recently come to light, multiple endings for this movie were made and shown to test-audiences. The one we got to see on the big screen was undoubtedly the safest and the least controversial ending. It ticked all the boxes for suspense, saving grace at the last moment, some fan-service in the form of certain events and characters. There is nothing controversial about this movie, which is of course the intention after The last Jedi.
Not much needs to be said about the visuals, they are what you would expect from a movie of this magnitude. The music is okay, even though the only really memorable themes (apart from reused music from the older movies) are Rey's and Ren's leitmotifs.