An Enjoyable Mess

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2020)

Yes, this movie is a gigantic mess. It moves so fast that you don't have time to let the emotional moments sink in. It introduces plot elements that don't make much sense in the grand scheme of things from the second sentence of the title crawl. It tries to "correct" The Last Jedi a bit too much. At this point, you've heard the criticism for this film, and I have to agree with most of it.
But at the same time, this is Star Wars : it's a fun adventure that moves at a frenetic pace, it features great actors giving great performances, and I believe it delivers the closure we needed to cap off this sequel trilogy. It's a movie that's fun to look at if you allow yourself to shut down your brain for some of the WTF moments it contains.
What's frustrating with this movie is that it makes it painfully obvious that Disney and Lucasfilm had no idea where they were going from the start and they just made stuff up along the way. In the words of the great Michael Scott : Sometimes I'll start a sentence and I don't even know where it's going ; I just hope I find it along the way." This is pretty much the sequel trilogy in a nutshell.
There are moments in the movie in which I can almost see JJ Abrams, sitting in his director chair, staring at Rian Johnson with lightning bolts coming out of his eyes. Love or hate The Last Jedi, once it got released, it became part of the Star Wars canon, and Abrams should have tried to build upon it instead of seemingly clearing the slate in the first half-hour of this movie. What follows isn't terrible like some people claim it is, but it's still nowhere near the payoff we expected since The Force Awakens.
In the end, this is how I will look back on this sequel trilogy : 1) It was my first time experiencing Star Wars in a theater and feeling the thrill that comes with each new release and 2) It was a highly enjoyable, but incoherent adventure in this amazing world. My only wish for the next trilogy is this : I want George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, Taika Waititi, Krysty Wilson-Cairns and heck, even Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni (who did a pretty damn good job with The Mandalorian) to sit down for a while, and map out their plan for the upcoming story they want to tell. That's all.