ignore the shoehorns and enjoy the ride

Rating: 9/10 (1 January 2020)

Knew this would be a tough film to make - I mean, it's the end of a trilogy they made up to reinvigorate an original trilogy of classics, and to revive after prequels that fell flat.
Personally after seeing this film i would place the force awakens as the worst of the three. It felt weird but for a couple of shock moments, especially with some questionable cgi characters.
The last Jedi is my favourite as it works best as a film with heart, soul, and for me captures what the force is all about. We were forever in wonder in the original series and learning about it as we went and last Jedi brought that back. The only reason a lot of nostalgic Star Wars hated it was because they decided they were now experts and nothing new could be learned - constantly whinging about you can't have this and where was that - basically writing their own death of what a Star Wars film could be. You've can't make the same film over and over again.
Rise of skywalker had a lot of convenient shoehorns to aide the story in the first 45 mins particularly, and a lot of action that felt a bit premature considering I'd just sat down, but once the story had been established I enjoyed it a lot - not with the same gravitas as last Jedi but in a fun and final character development sort of way - with some of the usual classic character dropping Abrams used in TFA. 7 & 9 are definitely more garish and obvious than the subtleties of 8 which feels more like a sincere, beautiful and rounded film.
I do worry now they have tied up the whole 9 episodes that anything subsequently released will suffer, because if the grand story is over what's the importance of anything else, really?