Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2019)

So, after 9 films, the saga ends and the difficulty facing Abrams is how to neatly tie everything up when Rian Johnson went slightly off piste with the previous film The Last Jedi, which was disliked by many SW fabs who wanted something different as long as it was the same as A New Hope. What he does then is to largely ignore it and instead create a sequel to his first effort, the popular The Force Awakens.
To do this though he has to cram a lot of action and story devises into a short space of time and what you get us some hugely impressive set pieces and a rather messy storyline which is created so he can shut this down neatly. The notion of Palpatine being alive is fun but daft, there is a spy within the First Order which is predictable, but again silly and much of the rest of the plot is Rey and Ren coming face to face fighting the dark side / light side as is a Jedi's want. All this is done whilst in the background the rest of the cast do all the heroic stuff - dog fights, big action scenes etc.
Overall then there is much to criticise and undoubtedly there is room for improvement, but it is still a very impressive, spectacular watch, Ridley and Driver are good value, it's nice to see McDiarmid again and the handling of the late Carrie Fisher's scene's are well done. For all it's faults, I thoroughly enjoyed it.