Star Wars Has Gone Off The Rails

Rating: 3/10 (22 December 2019)

Overall, this a jumbled, incoherent mess, which openly denigrates the story of episodes 1-6 and all of our heros efforts in those episodes. Even for a sci fi, or alleged space adventure, this movie is ridled with substantial leaps of logic and ridiculous/cringe inducing moments, which will make you wonder how Disney ever greenlighted this nonsense.
Clearly Abrams is incapable of writing a complete story from beginning to end. His only proficiency seems to be the setup/mystery box portion of a story, but that's where his skill ends.
Positives:
John Williams score, strong performances by Adam Driver and Daisy Ridly (with what they're given), epic visuals at times, and Abrams, though he tells an incoherent story, blatantly throws Rian Johnson and TLJ under the bus, which was a pleasure to watch.
Negatives:
Too many to list, from pacing to duex ex machina moments to new godlike/superhero like force powers, etc. Other reviewers do a good job of covering these. Allow me to go into detail on how the underlying plot of the movie makes no sense:

The initial premise is Palpatine wants Kylo to kill Rey. Kylo agrees.

Then Palpatine wants Rey to kill Palpatine, so he can transfer his Sith powers to her.

Rey refuses. Then Palpatine tries to kill her.

So then Rey kills Palpatine, by deflecting his force lightening with two lightsabers (initially she struggles to deflect it with just one, but TWO lightsabers changes everything).

So again, Rey kills Palpatine as he says he wanted, but of course none of Palpatine's powers transfer over to Rey as he initially said they would.

Also, Kylo survives falling from a cliff and force heals an injured Rey, but for some reason this healing power kills Kylo, even though we earlier see Rey use force heal powers twice with no adverse effects.

Also...no explanation for how or why Palpatine is alive in the first place and no explanation how he amassed that massive fleet or their crews...don't ask questions!!! Just roll with it!!! Pay no attention to how this trashes episodes 1-6.
By the way, the entire battle among the First Order and Resistence fleet (which was a mess to begin with)? Ultimately rendered meaningless after Palpatine dies.
And the Rise of Skywalker is her just taking the Skywalker name at the end??? It's a complete joke.