Plateau of Skywalker

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2019)

I have never written a review before on IMDB but I felt like this was important. As a movie, Rise of Skywalker was good. Not great. Not bad. Just good. Take that was you will, which for most of you will mean it is a monumental letdown. For everyone else, I hope to to offer a different perspective.
First off, I never really thought this movie had a chance from the beginning. If you were expecting this to be a grand send off to all things Star Wars, you will probably leave the theater a bit numb. Again, this isn't a fault with this particular movie. From the Force Awakens, we never truly developed the same attachment to Rey, Kylo Ren, Poe, etc the way we did to Luke, Vader, Han, and all the others. What made the original trilogy so great was the simplicity of the story and the bonds created by the connections between those characters. Rise of Skywalker tried to overcompensate this lack of empathy by overloading the plot with devices that worked in the past, but ironically, this was what made the movie fall short.
As for the movie, bringing Palpatine back was a fantastic move on paper, but the execution was just off. How can you bring back the big bad of the entire galaxy on an opening credit roll and have him found 3 minutes into the movie? It's almost as if they needed, say I don't know, two movies before this is slowly bring him back (wait...). They also tried to recreate the Luke/Vader paternal shock value with Palpatine/Rey, but again, it fell short. The ideas were all there, but it never came across as genuine and meaningful. This movie in particular failed to have any true emotional depth, but that doesn't mean it was a bad movie, just not quite satisfying. The entertainment value was there and the visuals were obviously stunning (special shout-out to Darth Rey and that badass lightsaber)
If this was the story for this trilogy from the jump, the producers shouldn't have labeled them as Episodes VII-IX, but instead a soft reboot that folds in some of our favorite characters (in the end, isn't this what it was anyways)? For me, Star Wars will always be about the story of redemption of Anakin Skywalker. I think that we should view this new trilogy for exactly what it is: a fun, enjoyable series that reminded us about how great Star Wars was and what it meant to us. That way, Episode VI can be the perfect finale while we can say we got these three movies as an entertaining bonus.