What a task...

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2019)

Given the task of wrapping up a 9 film family legacy, building on TLJ, and celebrating 42 years of SW mythology in one film I gotta hand it to J.J. Abrams.
I hate to say something like "it's not a perfect movie" because given the goals mentioned above J.J. succeeds in ways other directors would have failed. However, was anything really added that enriched the stories that came before? No.
We get all the previous movies rolled into one SW explosion featuring all the familiar tropes and Easter eggs fans could want. There's THE phantom menace, stuff about clones, the revenge of the sith, a new hope, an empire striking back, a return of the Jedi, a force disturbance, a last Jedi, and the rise of Solo/Skywalker.
Still, I wonder what earlier film enrichment is really worth at this point. As far as sequel material goes, the further intermingling of Anakin and Palpatines legacies is pretty damn near perfect, and Abrams manages to get it ALL in there while adding some new cinematic mythology.
So really, it's a "certain point of view" thing. From my point of view this was a great way to end both the film legacy and the family legacy. A towering responsibility that by all expectations should have been a complete let down. This, while somewhat disjointed, does not let you down at least 80% of the time and that's quite an achievement.