An illogical hot mess, with dabs of occasional enjoyment

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2020)

It's not a great start when the opening scroll makes you cringe and scratch your head. But in hindsight it was actually quite a good set up for what followed... That's if you can follow it.
The first half of the movie jumps around so damn much that it's hard to really take in what everyone is doing. The plot is forced along at lightspeed, as is the dialogue which could have easily been replaced in parts with a bunch of chipmunks squeaking over each other, and I'm sure no one would have noticed.
The writing is simply awful, and characters motives and actions are frequently illogical. Things just happen at random. All the time.
I have never in my life seen so many ex machina moments in a movie. In fact I swear that not a single character in the whole film solves a problem by themselves or without the solution just being handed to them.
The movie looks great, and there are plenty of cool aliens wandering around in the background, but the movie moves at such pace that you can't enjoy them because they are gone in the next second.
My favourite moment in the whole film is a moment when Rey is thinking. It's probably the first moment (and among the only moments) when the movie actually takes a breath and lets us get an idea on what a character is feeling. We can see the internal turmoil she is going through, and it's genuinely impactful. I remembered this one moment more, over the entire final battle scene because it wasn't just spectacle and chaos.
Surprisingly this films savoring moments are sprinkled out across the end of the film, which I, for the most part, enjoyed.
However it really does not exempt the rest of the unnecessary trash that is packed into this film, and so I just cannot get behind calling it a 'good' movie.
A meh ending to a poorly executed trilogy.