One Big Mess

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2019)

The Rise of Skywalker begins by invalidating the first 6 movies. In the opening crawl the emperor is said to be alive without any explanation as to how he survived episode 6. This completely negates the entire point of Anakin being the chosen one and the sacrifice he made to save his son and bring "balance" to the force. The beginning of the movie was very poorly paced as it hops quickly from planet to planet without allowing the viewer to even enjoy the planet while also trying to set up some semblance of a coherent plot for the rest of the movie. Overall, the whole movie felt very rushed. The plot was very bland and unoriginal as half of it was, "hey we need to find this object, to lead us to this other object ,to find this place". Most of the characters introduced were throwaway characters who were extremely forgettable and were only there as plot devices to move the protagonists to the next point in the movie. The knights of Ren were laughable as all they did was walk around looking cool before getting absolutely demolished.
The humor in the movie was very hit and miss and seemed very forced for the most part.
The visuals were stunning as they have been for all of sequel trilogy movies but the lack of any good story really took away from the awe and wonder of it all. It felt like talking to a pretty girl (or guy) with no personality. Eye candy, but that's it.
The Force in The Rise of Skywalker has become insanely overpowered in comparison with other movies without much explaining except a short training montage from Rey. The movie continually introduces new force powers without much explanation that conveniently allow the heroes to succeed in whatever they are doing.
The worst part of the whole movie for me was that none of the characters actions really had any consequences. Whenever they were in a tough situation or something bad happened the movie reversed the consequences. Any sacrifice or failure a character made had no weight to it as it would be undone 5 minutes later.
The only redeeming quality was the actors performances, Adam Driver does an amazing job as Kylo Ren yet again and Daisy Ridley did a fantastic job of portraying her struggle of finding her identity.
Overall the movie was a jumbled, hurried mess. It was glaringly obvious that there was no overall plan for this trilogy which resulted in this disaster of a story. If you turn off your brain and don't think about logic or good storytelling you might be able to at least enjoy the visuals and the fact that it is a Star Wars movie.