Flat ending to the Skywalker Saga

Rating: 3/10 (22 December 2019)

I will start off first with saying, YES I do like The Last Jedi. I really enjoyed Rian Johnson's fresh take on the universe. The Force Awakens was an alright and fun movie. I forgave the plot point comparisons to A New Hope as it was a solid start to the series. TLJ was really fun and I liked where they took the characters. The casino part could have been trimmed up a bit and made it a better movie overall, but I truly enjoyed Johnson's mark he left on the series.
When Colin Trevorrow was announced as IX's director I was skeptical. His directorial debut, Safety Not Guaranteed, was really great. The giant pile of dino doo-doo named Jurassic World came out and soured my interest in anything he had to do. From interviews he seemed like his head was in the right place and he wanted to emulate Lucas' early years as a filmmaker. But he then left and JJ Abrams was his replacement. I figured it would be TFA again, safe, but still fun.
It sure as hell was a safe ending, but just not a great or fun one at all...
Bringing back the emperor is probably the biggest reason this movie fails. Why not have just Kylo be the villain??? Why did Palpatine have to be back and be revealed to be the catalyst for luring Kylo to the Dark Side? His inclusion just soured the whole movie.
Even without Palpatine, this movie is just all over the place. Rey and the gang are on a relic hunt for a map to lead them to the secret Sith planet and Palpatine. This is the whole plot of the first 3/4ths of the movie. They just go from planet to planet and really have nothing interesting happening. Sure, even the simplest plots like that can work. Raiders of the Lost Arc is like that, but the stuff happening, road blocks, and character interactions are what made it such a damn fun movie. This is just really uninteresting.
Also holy crap is there so much fan service and callbacks to the original trilogy out the wazoo! It annoyed me in Solo when it happened, but this is 100x worse than solo. Whether it's repeated lines from the original movies being said in a new situation, or really poorly place musical cues, this movie really wants to mooch off your nostalgia to make you happy.
TFA worked, despite being safe and trying to please your nostalgia zone, this just really wanted to please all the online crybabies who disliked TLJ.
None of the resolution is satisfying for the ending of a SAGA. Kylo's redemption is quick and really doesn't have any emotional depth. Rey being the granddaughter of Palatine is stupid. The Knights of Ren are no more than glorified stormtroopers and barely utilized. Finn has no character arc at all. Poe's past is hinted at, but no depth is shown. They did the best they could with the Leia stuff, but knowing what they did to recreate her in this, it was really obvious they had to create other character's dialogue around hers from TFA deleted scenes. Lando was brought back just because Williams is still alive, his addition makes no sense. Rose, who I really loved from TLJ, is thrown to the background and barely a tertiary character. JJ really gave in to all the gross people who hated Rose, disgusting move on their part to make her appear in maybe 30 seconds total.
This trilogy needed one core storyboard writer to keep the whole thing consistent. As much as I like TLJ and TFA, they too feel like three separate movies and not ones that fit together as a trilogy. Directors can change, just like the original trilogy, but the core writers needed to stay the same throughout the series. Sure, the director has some leeway to tweak parts of the scripts, but the roadmap needed to be established as it's clear they had no idea what they wanted to do from the beginning. Palpatine was never a thought on JJ's mind when doing TFA, but since he was recalled after tons of fans were butthurt about TLJ, he had to do the best he could and his easy fix was "Hey, Palpatine is still alive and the catalyst for everything happening!!"
This is just extremely disappointing. It as so many great small parts, but they're surrounded by such a middling movie. Babu Frikk is wasted in such a mess of a movie, C3PO's reprogramming was sort of fun, and that's all I can think of that I really found memorable or enjoyable.
I will still enjoy the first two new trilogy movies on their own, but it will be in the back of my mind that they didn't even come close to properly ending the saga. If anything, this makes me excited for any non-Skywalker movies as we don't have any preconceived notions on old characters and we can start anew in the universe. That's part of what makes the Mandalorian so great, though despite it's fan service and call backs too.
Fingers crossed Rian Johnson gets his own separate SW projects, but seeing as Disney wants to appease the "die hard" fans, I doubt those will happen. I'm fine with him making original wonders like Knives Out.