Star Wars By Way of Marvel/Disney

Rating: 5/10 (7 January 2020)

I wanted to love this film. I really did. I had my doubts, though, heading in. I'm not the world's biggest J.J. Abrams fan, although I enjoyed "The Force Awakens" quite thoroughly. He just never seems to stick the landing for me.
All in all, "Rise of Skywalker" was pretty much exactly what I thought it was going to be: an OK movie with some good action, fun ideas, and a messy ending. The film starts off a bit messy. The opening scrawl is incredibly poorly written and hearkens back to the silly exclamation at the beginning of "Ep III's" scrawl, "WAR!" After that we get Kylo Ren's, Poe & the Gang's, and Rey's stories kick off to varying degrees of success. I found Ren's stuff engaging, especially as it is the sort of thing we haven't seen in the movies before; an unaffiliated Force Power User seeking to hunt down the Emperor because of the challenge to his power. It would be like "RotJ" opening with Darth Vader trying to hunt down the Emperor. Awesome.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Rey and Poe & Gang's openings. Rey is basically doing an amped up version of Luke's training on Dagobah but all of it crammed into one scene rather than spread out over the course of time in-depth martial arts and mindfulness training actually takes. Poe & Gang's intro is even worse as they play courier for yet another secret message that has to be transported via astromech. It felt more like the opening of "Solo" than one of the actual Saga movies.
After that, the movie actually started to click for me. It's rare that I find the middle of a film to be more engaging than the opening of ending but this is a rare exception.
The middle action of the film is full of exactly what I want from Star Wars; under-dog adventure, uncovering the past, fighting for the future, a power struggle for our hero's heart, and a healthy dash of humor. They travel to new planets and old but the film never feels like just a 'look-at-my-cool-cgi-world-I-built' extravaganza till the end of the film.
Unfortunately, as Rey and Ren get closer to Palpatine and the climax of the film, much of what is to come become extremely predictable, less moving emotionally, and more of an apparent attempt at CGI one upmanship, even by the standards of the prequels. The fingers of a MARVEL bloated Disney are all over the ending of "Rise of Skywalker." Specific moments of the film had me flashing back to "Avengers: Endgame" more than "Return of the Jedi."
That's a real shame because on its surface, I have no problem with plot points like Emperor Palpatine returning from the dead, Kylo Ren and Rey in a power triangle with the Emperor, or voice from the past speaking hope into a character but, in each of these instances, the scenes in which these things happen are stripped of their emotional import and relegated to a sort or 'look-how-clever-we-were' reveal. Frankly, nothing in this movie is so clever that anyone needs to hang a lantern on it.
Unfortunately, J.J seems to have taken his best shot with "The Force Awakens" with an awareness that the series had suffered a blow under George Lucas's prequels that Abrams knew he had to overcome by making a film that rang so true to what Star Wars is that the studio could be sure it was going to be a huge success. With "Rise of Skywalker" we have his 'prequel moment" where he thinks he has everyone's good will and can let loose with what he can really do with a property, which as any fan of "Star Trek" will tell you, is gut a series of its heart and replace it with action sequences that are fun the first time but mean very little and have no staying power.