Absolute shameless hackery. But at least it's not Cats.

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2020)

It's hard to write a single review on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker because so much happens of so little consequence that it's almost impossible to pinpoint what to talk about and what to completely ignore.
It was pretty well known that Kathleen Kennedy and JJ Abrams royally screwed up when they didn't bother planning a three-movie franchise from the beginning of the first film's pre-production, even when George Lucas himself handed them a book full of ideas and a cohesive trilogy outline (they just threw that in the garbage). This screw up solidified with The Last Jedi, in which Kennedy just told Rian Johnson to just do whatever, nobody cares they'll buy it anyway. And they did buy it, since they didn't know what kind of disaster Rian had barfed into existence.
With Last Jedi, those former fans know better, and considering what I'd seen, I'm glad, because even in trying to undo TLJ, it manages to be just as awful in its own special panicked neurotic way. I've never seen JJ Abrams trip on himself this clumsily since reluctantly directing Star Trek Into Darkness, and Into Darkness looks downright magnificent by comparison to this trash.
I'll just skip to near the end when the truly heinous crap goes down.
After a bunch of nonsensical romping through several equally forgettable planets and a handful of beloved character death fakeouts and one actual character death that should've happened in TLJ when Carrie Fisher actually passed away, Rey Skywalker Palpatine Solo finds out that Emperor Sheev Palpatine came back from the dead, cloned himself (which ended up being Snoke because of course it did), and had a kid who ended up giving birth to Rey. Kylo "Ben Solo" Ren Skywalker is still evil but also still in love (wait, JJ later confirmed that he was still in "friendship") with Rey. They end up fighting each other, who cares, blah blah blah, and then Kylo fights Sheev, who throws him down a cliff or something. Then Rey uses two lightsabers to knock Sheev's lightning back at him until he doesn't exist anymore and then dies.
Then Kylo comes back and uses force healing to bring her back, and then he dies.
Then Rey decides her name is Skywalker.
The End.
Pad that with a bunch of useless spectacle nonsense and you have the epic conclusion to the Skywalker saga: a movie that managed to be worse than Phantom Menace. Well done.