A lot happens but overall very good

Rating: 8/10 (19 December 2019)

I thought this film was very good. It answered all the questions set up in The Force Awakens, the acting was good, there was a lot references to the past films, the music was brilliant, Palpatine was menacing, the main characters had good chemistry, Rey and Kylo Renn's story has a good conclusion, there's were a few twists, the lightsaber fights weren't over the top like Episode 3 and it looked brilliant.
To me it seems that Disney realised that while some people like The Last Jedi, the majority of the audience and fans really hated it (probably when Solo did a lot worse financially than they expected). As a result, they basically told JJ Abrams to fix it and make a film full of fan service that pretty much deals with all of The Last Jedi criticisms and answers every lingering question. The best description I have seen is that The Rise Of Skywalker feels like a 4 hour movie squeezed in to 2 hours. In hindsight, Disney should have given JJ Abrams the whole trilogy so he would have been able to tell a consistent story. Some story arcs felt underdeveloped, such as stormtroopers turning good, and other parts felt shoehorned in to try and explain everything. Snoke is a good example. Originally it felt like he was going to be an original character with an interesting back story but now it's revealed that it was Palpatine all along. This only happened as Rian Johnson killed him off. He really should have been the main villain throughout as bringing back Palpatine lessens the impact of Vader sacrificing himself to kill Palpatine and save Luke. With Marvel, Disney plan quite far in advance but with Star Wars it felt like they made it up as they went along.
Overall, I think if they had split this film in to two films and got rid of The Last Jedi then the sequel trilogy could have been much better. The last scene is a very nice way to end the Skywalker saga though.