"No one's ever really gone."
That's one of the taglines to the final installment of Disney's recent Star Wars trilogy. And boy, do I really hope not. I don't want to see anymore Star Wars movies coming out from Disney, ever. Star Wars is dead to me, a death as finite if not more so than Snoke's cumbersome demise in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It's gotten to the point now that I probably won't even bother watching another Star Wars movie in theaters.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does what it's supposed to do. Barely. It wraps up a franchise over forty years in the making, but it does so with as much grace and finesse as a five-year-old kid wrapping gifts for her parents. Sure, she gets the job done, but did she really need to use that much tape to keep it all together?
J. J. Abrams is that five-year-old girl and we, the viewers, are the parents in this analogy. Horrific, right? But look, he did his best after little brother Rian Johnson left such a mess with the previous installment. Unfortunately, well, Abram's best was not enough to close out the biggest franchise of our generation. Under Jar Jar Abrams, Star Wars limits it's universe to familiar worlds and storylines. The Rise of Skywalker plays it monstrously safe and skips through troubling scenes so as not to be consumed and digested, but thoughtlessly seen without time for appreciation. And really, what's there to appreciate anyways? The attempt to bridge together the trilogy reminds me of a soap opera on its unexpected series finale, with the writers unapologetically chucking in whatever ridiculous ingredient they can to concoct a passable last hurrah stew. And there is too much content that is passed over that could have been better fleshed out, probably in The Last Jedi instead, in place of the whole casino sequence. In an insulting way, The Rise of Skywalker is like a C-rated clone of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi combined.
The only character arc worth investing in is Kylo Ren's, but even his transformation is rushed to match Rey's progression. And who is the center of this trilogy anyways? The first six episodes were about Anakin's journey, from adolescent to death. With the new trilogy, I guess we can say the whole Star Wars franchise follows C3P0 and the universe falling apart around him.
I'm jealous of the kids and their families who've never seen a Star Wars movie before, and this new trilogy was their introduction to George Lucas's creation. For them, Star Wars is a fun, entertaining blockbuster that came out every December to mark the holidays. Shoddy wrapping of gifts isn't an issue for them when they don't have originals to compare them all to. And for them, Merry Christmas, you got your present. But for me and many others out there, Star Wars was never about plugging holes with ex machina over ex machina over ex machina. There were no perfect heroes from the beginning or convenient plot developments to excuse past mistakes. Hope? Stop shoving it down my throat with your words and show it to me. Why just continually talk about hope, when the original trilogy sold it so much better.