Taken on its own, "Rise of Skywalker" is a zippy sci-fi action movie with some fun bits that treats the main characters well after "Last Jedi" treated them horribly.
As Episode 9 of a "saga," it's the Hindenburg swerving to avoid a train wreck and plowing into the Titanic.
As Episode 9 of a "saga," it's the Hindenburg swerving to avoid a train wreck and plowing into the Titanic.
The last time I saw a movie retconned out of existence by its own series more vigorously than "The Last Jedi," it was "Highlander II." The opening crawl for RoS should have begun with a parenthetical note asking the audience to forget the previous movie. It would have saved time.
This is obviously a big problem for storytelling because it turns the entire Sequel Trilogy into a non-story, made up by different people as they went along. Everything intriguing in The Force Awakens was just random crap thrown at the wall to be figured out later.
And most of it was never really figured out, which makes the motivations of major characters inexplicable. Heck, the whole SETTING remains inexplicable as of RoS. Nothing that happened really made sense at all. It was just a faded carbon copy of the original trilogy.
A carbon copy with, if we're being honest, much better actors playing far less interesting characters. If the only thing Disney could think to do after buying Star Wars was remake the original trilogy with better actors and modern special effects, they should have just done that.
A good deal of the OT was made up or retconned later by Lucas and his collaborators, sure, but it doesn't FEEL that way, give or take an awkward sibling smooch. The OT has heart because it was made by people who cared about what they were doing.
The sense in every scene of RoS that everyone involved is just cashing a paycheck and trying to put the whole series behind them is palpable. They cut-and-pasted chunks of dialogue from the earlier films to finish the script. It has more callbacks than a "Family Guy" episode.
Worst of all, there's no soul to the Sequel Trilogy, no sense of mighty forces finishing an age-old duel, no clash of philosophies. The final showdown is a Dragonball Z fight with less grunting. They couldn't think of a single interesting thing for anyone involved to say.
For its flaws, TLJ tried to introduce a conflict of philosophy, but it was stupid and glib. Kylo Ren's urge to "murder the past" would have been more interesting if the movie didn't basically agree with him and tell the audience they were dumb for loving the world of Star Wars.
And in the end, we got RoS overcompensating by shouting from the rooftops that the past is ALL that matters, right down to bringing back the original Big Bad because nobody knew what to do after TLJ threw the new one away. It's the worst note a troubled sequel could end on.
It's almost like we had to limp through three movies to clean up the half-baked aftermath of the Original Trilogy so the lives of the new characters could finally begin, and that's the story we won't see, right down to the main characters still keeping secrets from each other.
A generation grew up daydreaming about Star Wars and further adventures in its fascinating setting, and somehow Disney handed it off to people who treated it like a term paper they got paid under the table to write on a subject they hated. /end
