Going backwards

Rating: 4/10 (8 May 2020)

To me episode IX will always be Colin Trevorrow's unused script "Duel of the Fates".
I don't blame Kathleen Kennedy for what we got instead, we'll probably never know what really happened and why something logical yet original like Duel of Fates never came to be, but I sense a common thread with the contemporary cinema landscape: everything is done to maximise profit, make more of the same if that is easily digestible by the audience. Plot twist -it really turns out corporations are soulless, which is in antithesis with any good artistic endeavour. You HAVE TO take risks, take yourself boldly where no one has been before. The Rise of Skywalker is a waste of potential sacrificed for the sake of staying safe, it tries to appease the masses so that in the end no one is really happy about it.
Mostly, it's an empty vessel of cool concepts put together without much care, a Pavlovian experiment gone awry: you can't keep flashing bits of trivia from the past movies and let them do the heavy lifting with the emotional journey of the audience, it's cheap and weak. The audience is not made of dogs, at least most of us; we don't start to drool at the name "Skywalker".
This the time I really made my mind about JJ Abrams though, he's not the director for me. He can contradict me, but he's the director of aesthetics over substance, of breathless-fast paced-don't think-don't feel editing over character driven stories.
And he. can't. stick. a landing.

(speaking of the ending, the fate of Rey is as heartbreaking as the thought of Anakin Skywalker sacrificing himself for nothing. At the beginning of this saga Rey is lonely on a desert planet with a droid that's not hers, she made a family in the resistance, but we leave her yet again lonely on a desert planet with a droid that's not hers for the sake of showing Tattoine and her calling herself a Skywalker. Bet sounded cool in JJ's head but it really isn't.
And for the sake of throwing names around it would have make more sense for Rey to choose the name Organa.)