movie with the assumption you already

Rating: 8/10 (23 December 2019)

Which is that there was no overarching story to this trilogy planned.
Talk trash about the Prequels all you want, they aren't secretly great or misunderstood. But they did one thing right. They expanded the universe of Star Wars. More world building, more lore, some good, some bad. The prequel story, while stilted, was a single vision. You had a bad execution with good building blocks.
The Sequel Trilogy doesn't expand anything, instead it makes everything smaller. Star Wars has never felt so small and tired as it does after The Rise of Skywalker. Each movie exists just to tear down and apologize for what came before it. Anakin/Vader's entire character arc is completely and unforgivably undermined after this film.
Overall the movie was so bloated and overstuffed with choppy pacing to course-correct from The Last Jedi. It's Flanderization in action. The original movies had so many little touches and so much atmosphere and craftsmanship beyond a few big reveals, neat action set pieces, and bizarre coincidences with the same ten people running into one another over and over. The original films built iconic imagery and characters in the context of them doing things and bonding and building. Not always perfectly done, but enough to feel meaningful.
You can't just write a movie with the assumption you already have all of those things and skip the work it takes to get them. You can trick people for awhile by using the familiar imagery and beats and deconstructing the world with meta-humor (Abrams did that well for The Force Awakens if nothing else), but you just cash in that goodwill and cheapen all of that stuff by association.