Probably one of the most unusual fumbles in recent corporate cinema history, the decisions that went into the making of ‘Rise of Skywalker’ Still to this day leave me kind of reeling as to exactly WHY they chose the direction they chose.

So, to my understanding, ‘The Last Jedi’ upset the fan base because it made the bold decision of actually trying to do something different with a francise that was (at that point) 7 films deep and had been trading on nothing but fan service for at least 5 of the entries up to that point. Was it perfect in what it wanted to achieve? No. But it set the groundwork to easily allow the ‘Star Wars’ universe (in time) to grow beyond its boundaries of ‘Good vs Evil with Overt Vietnam/Nazi references’.

Disney, noticing that the hardcore fans who were upset that a story DARE morally question its characters or the motives of the Jedi order decided TWO FILMS INTO A TRILOGY…that the BEST course they could have is to bring back JJ Abrahams (Because ‘Force Awakens’ was their safe gamble that paid off big time) and essentially get him to undo as MUCH as physically possible from what happened in ‘Episode 8’…

And so, we have this film. The closing part of the sequels trilogy that seemingly literally only exists to air lock the last film and set everything back to a ‘reset’ position so that in 5-10 years they can try this all again.

The plot? For reasons that make ZERO sense and have NO setup, Emperor Palpatine is back!..for some reason…and its retroactively revealed that EVERYTHING from the end of ‘Return of the Jedi’ up to now on the sith side of things has happened purely because the Emporer survived and built a weird clone lab/fleet of death cruisers in the bombed out basement of what was left of the second death star…

If you havent had an anurism by this point. the film then goes on to basically reset the characters from their place at the end of ‘Last Jedi’ more or less getting rid of Rose completely and resigning Finn to a position just above an extra, as the plot swaps to Rey trying simultaineously to find the emperor, deprogramme Kylo Ren AND learn who her REAL parents are.

While Kylo teams up with the Emperor with the ultimate aim being a total takeover of the emperors own army, christened ‘The Final Order’.

And theres lots of running around, and light sabre fights and references to the original trilogy…and we’re basically just back to ‘Force Awakens’ terratory of playing everything INCREDIBLY overly safe, cramming as many in references and MCU style gags in as possible…When I tell you that Richard E Grant turning up as a ‘special guest’ playing an admiral for the sith was the BEST part of this film for me…I hope that lets you know the dissapointment I was feeling.

The thing is, when I went to see this in theaters on its original run, I remember leaving the cinema kind of feeling a bit nonplussed…Not raging…But just kind of like ‘Welp…that was an ending I guess…’ But having watched this film now in close proximity with the other two ‘Sequel’ trilogy films, its ASTOUNDING that a corporation like Disney would have allowed this to be released. It borders on feeling disrespectful to the work Rian Johnson put into his entry in the franchise, but this film being the way it is makes the other two films NOT ONLY feel totally inconsistant tonally and thematically, but it puts the audience into a position where they’re forced to accept that non of this trilogy really matters now. they openly make the point of saying ENTIRE FILMS worth of lore can be rewritten and undone in less than half an hour with next to no effort. And thats insane to me.

My thoughts on this film are quite similar to my thoughts on ‘The Force Awakens’ really…in the sense that. This is a multi-million dollar corporate backed movie. It was always going to meet a standard. The direction and cine are fine to decent for the most part. But like ‘Force Awakens’ it rarely pushes any boundaries or challenges the viewer with striking work. The performances feel dialled back after ‘Last Jedi’ and now sit in this weird hybrid of cold with sudden sparks of animation. The score…Is ‘Star Wars’…

But for me? this was the film that kind of burnt out the last of the goodwill I had towards the franchise. ‘Force Awakened’ worked for me to a degree because, it’d been almost 10 years since the last run of Star Wars movies…the public were hungry for it, and at that point in time after a mixed response to ‘Phantom’ and a horrifying response to ‘Clones’ a ‘Safe’ star wars film that did just enough to curry good favour felt like water in the desert. This? This is curdled milk in cinema form.

The action scenes are CG heavy and nothing we havent seen in the previous two movies, the pacing is awkward, lumbered and overly slow. The tone is awkward, overly cold and lacking a sense of depth, the way the characters have been treated given the last 2 entries is frankly shameful…This film to me at least? smacks of the vibe that the studio knew this trilogy was DOA (in there opinion) and that they wanted it closed and gone as swiftly and safely as possible.

and on the rewatch, I felt that hard. A real letdown, It’ll be a LONG time before I give this one another spin…If I fancied watching some ‘Star Wars’ a couple of weeks ago…Im positively fatigued by this point…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker/