Unimaginative and simplistic, yet entertaining enough.

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2019)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker concluded the Star Wars saga with an uplifting spirit of togetherness. While it lacked originality and imagination, as did the other two films in the sequel trilogy, it provided the audience with a simple-yet-heartwarming closure to a decades-long galactic adventure.
The main problem with the sequel trilogy rooted from the creative differences during the production, especially in the screenplay department. For instance, the original trilogy was primarily written by George Lucas with the help of two other writers. The latest trilogy was written by several different writers, with Star Wars: The Last Jedi written and directed by a single person, who was then not involved in the making of the final episode. This resulted in unfocused plots that failed to tell a single coherent story. Moreover, the trilogy also suffered from the absence of a main villain - each episode had its own antagonistic characters, but not a single strong character to faithfully lead the dark side of the force. It seemed that Rian Johnson's decision to kill off a potentially major supervillain in the Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a blunder that the filmmakers simply could not bounce back from. This had set a mountain too high to climb for the writers and director of the final episode, and they could only do as much.
Nevertheless, one could still enjoy watching their favourite characters back in action after more than a decade of absence. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was also full of reminiscences of the past events in the saga that took the audience on a pleasant final trip down memory lane. This showed a commendable devotion of the filmmakers to the fans and an understanding that a Star Wars film need not be complex to be successful - it needs only to entertain and this film did just that. Overall, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was entertaining and evocative, although its unimaginative plot story and reliance on the appearances of characters from the original trilogy would draw criticisms from both critics and the general audience alike.
Rating: 6.5/10