Underwhelming in every regard, as well as the worst "Star Wars" to date

Rating: 5/10 (17 May 2020)

Asinine. If I had to use one word to describe "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," it would be that, and it pains me to write that about any Star Wars movie, a franchise that I was once so passionate about. The final film in the so-called Skywalker Saga is the greatest casualty of Disney's clear lack of vision while helming the franchise, and its wound shows the most prominently.
Left scrambling to pick up the pieces after its predecessor, "The Last Jedi," already blew a Star-Destroyer sized hole in the direction the sequel trilogy was trying to head towards, "The Rise of Skywalker" cannot even conceal the hail mary's it throws at the wall, trying desperately to have something stick.
This of course occurs literally from the start of the opening crawl, as it is announced that Emperor Palpatine has returned without so much as a throwaway line as to how that was even possible. This was an offense I was willingly ready to forgive as soon as the movie started to take off. Eventually however, I just got so so tired of contrivance after contrivance being shoved down my throat, with a musical swell meant to convince me that these were great moments despite making no sense.
Which brings me back to the word asinine. The success of this movie as a story hinges on your ability to turn off your brain; I don't mean suspension of disbelief either, I mean actively making sure you don't think about the banal plot points they present with any semblance of logic. The plot is effectively just a series of video game fetch quests in order to reach the final boss, with macguffins and conveniences thrown in wherever the story deems it necessary so that it can keep chugging along, or maybe even just to throw in a twist.
Nothing in this story is character driven. I would maybe go so far as to argue that the characters we've spent the last 2 movies getting to know don't even really matter, with the exception of Kylo Ren. They don't inform any of what happens or what we learn about them, instead, we only see a plot that happens to them. This is possibly the worst aspect of the movie to me, as these characters were once the saving grace of these movies that were either too derivative or too divisive.
It all builds up to a whole lot of nothing. I felt nothing as I watched the finale of what was supposed to be an entire epic. It was void of logic, void of emotion, and void of connection to anything or anyone on the screen. Thus, the Star Wars Saga, once the greatest and most influential blockbuster franchise of all time, ends with a whimper instead of a bang. How Disney bungled one of their greatest cash cows so spectacularly is beyond me. What I do know is that from this particular corner of the galaxy, I'm going to stay far, far away.