Slightly below 21st century action flicks' average

Rating: 4/10 (29 December 2019)

Episodes VII - IX were very, very poorly written. What they offered in terms in visuals, they lacked in terms of storyline, depth, character development and consistency with the previous SW movies - even with Episodes I - III, which were definitely better in comparison.
What really makes no sense to me is people saying that Episode IX was better than VIII. How? Why? Both were equally awful. Episode IX could have simply followed VII, as VIII didn't prepare viewers for anything that would happen in IX, other than seeing pretty much the same faces. To me, that is the definition of awful story-telling.
There are many, many things to criticize about Episode IX, such as how easy and non-sensical it became for characters to turn from bad to good (although Ren's story is so irrelevant that it only disappoints by comparing it to Anakin's, which is so much richer, sensible and natural, sand or no sand). But the saddest thing, by far, was the way in which the Emperor died - shamefully and gratuitously. (Almost) the same thing can be said about including him in this movie, for no other reason than to give a few minutes of screen time to pretty much all of the major characters from the original trilogy, in a sad nostalgia act meant to sell tickets. By bringing the Emperor back from certain death (with absolutely no logical explanation, by the way), Disney not only turned Anakin / Vader's entire existence obsolete, but it also killed arguably the baddest villain in the SW universe in a timespan of 5 seconds, at the hands of an untrained brat.
I seriously expect Disney to bring back Vader in the next trilogy, 4-6 years from now. He will have turned bad again because hey, why not? Let's give someone the chance to kill him *again*, too. That's what the masses seem to want.
Finally, a short message to those of you who say that this was a good movie / trilogy: you are the reason why movie studios can put out crap like this without getting ran into the ground.