Damage control at its best

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2019)

Without a doubt, The Rise of Skywalker is an outstanding technical achievement (and artistic, to some extent). Great visual and special effects, impressive locations and sets, lots of well-directed action scenes, mostly decent acting (with Adam Driver shining above all), and of course perfect stunts, lighting, props, make-up and sound design. Last but not least, TROS has an inspiring score, with John Williams heavily stealing from his old work and binding it all together in a beautiful and coherent musical structure that wraps up a saga of 9 epic movies.
Unlike Williams' score, J.J. Abrams' job was much more challenging and frustrating. Instead of simply having to tie up lose ends from the first two movies and bring everything to a climax, he had to reinvent an entire trilogy almost from scratch and condense it in one movie; or so it seems. Rian Johnson's arrogant experiment ruined everything for a lot of people, especially the scriptwriters of this final Skywalker chapter.
How do you deal with Snoke getting killed for the sake of plot twist in the middle of the second movie and without the slightest hint about his backstory ever revealed? Make him a puppet of a bigger villain, who lurks in utter darkness. How do you justify Rey has become so insanely powerful without any training? Make her the granddaughter of someone insanely powerful we already know. How do you explain the whole duality concept and the intimate bond between Rey and Kylo? Well, you don't really, but at least you have to find a way to make it work. A bit, which is a pity, because it could have been a nice idea to expand the myth of the Force to that direction (apologies to Jedists, I mean no offence to their religious beliefs).
Enter Palpatine. Whose middle name is Damage Control, and he excels at it, with the wonderful Ian McDiarmid delivering every single line with the frightful awe of the "one and only true emperor". Kylo Ren could not possibly carry so much burden as a villain alone, and let's not forget the murder of his father in TFA was meant to conclude with some sort of sacrificial redemption. With Snoke out of the picture, poor J.J. didn't have the option to invent a brand new threat and develop his (or her) ark in just one movie. So, Palpie had to be ressurected, and also connected to the bunch of nobodies we never got to care about as much as the main characters of the original trilogy. And if that wasn't enough, Abrams also had to work around the fact our beloved Princess has passed in real life but not in the story. Her lines from outtakes and deleted scenes had to be re-purposed to a totally new context. A real jigsaw puzzle that could drive mad anyone attempting to solve it under so much pressure. No way Disney would wait for a couple more years till the movie got released, or accepted to distribute a movie long enough to make the Irish seem average.
There are plot holes big enough for a whole Death Star to squeeze through. How did Palpatine use those "unnatural" abilities of the Dark Side and revived himself in a new body? We never learn, but we do get to see some Snoke clones hanging around. How did he manage to keep a secret he was building the most formidable fleet the galaxy has ever seen? With what allies and resources did he do it? Where did he recruit all those hundreds of thousands stormtroopers, officers, etc and how did he bring them to the unknown regions without anyone taking notice? Investigative journalism in the galaxy far far away sucks, same goes for Resistance intelligence.
Lots of crazy coincidences, heroes conveniently finding immediately what they're looking for in every world they briefly visit, a frantic pace (especially in the first half) in order to cover lost ground and set up a new narrative, not enough time to develop further any characters (while bringing on board new ones, who were basically extras with a few lines each). Sure, comic books (and possibly animated series) will somehow make some sense out of this chaos by filling the gaps, but the movies are supposed to be complete and self-contained stories, not bits and pieces of a Frankenstein monster on crack.
I honestly pity the people who watched this movie without having seen first any of the previous two Star Wars films; they must have left the theater sooo confused by what they just saw. But what a spectacle! And those rewarding moments, like the "I am all the Jedis" badassery of Rey (cool, but let's not analyse further if there's any logic to it). Kudos J.J., your job sucked and you still did the best anyone could to salvage this wreck of a trilogy.