The Force is NOT Strong in This One

Rating: 2/10 (22 March 2020)

In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey and her band of rebels have to find the thing to find the thing that will show them how to get to the thing. This is basically the cinematic equivalent of a ten-million-dollar supercar but under the hood all you'll find is a rusty lawnmower engine with a clogged spark plug and a busted fuel line. The writing is so abysmal that it defies belief. Convenience and dumb luck rule the day, and anything consequential that happens later turns out to be completely inconsequential. Abrams leaves the audience with no time for thinking, and by moving everything along at close to the speed of light, he is desperately hoping the audience won't even try to as they're relentlessly assaulted with a delectable mix of action, idiocy, and nostalgia. As far as Abrams' directorial talents go, it's highly likely that a ten-year old playing with his Star Wars toys could come up with something far more engaging that this glorious dumpster fire that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. It's so bad it's actually kind of fascinating, and I'm not even gonna get into the whole shoehorning of Emperor Palpatine into the plot solely to give Kylo Ren's get-out-of-jail-free-card after having elevated himself to central antagonist The Last Jedi. At the end of the day, just about the only positive I can think of when it comes to The Rise of Skywalker, is that it's the last film in the new trilogy, meaning I won't have to subject myself to yet another Star Wars film courtesy of this so-called creative team. Thank God for small mercies.