Review of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) by Arko777 — 20 Dec 2019

Star Wars the Rise of Marey Sue is a convoluted mess of a movie. The whole plot is nonsensical as it's based on Palpatine that somehow survived the fall, explosion from the reactor and on top of that the annihilation of the second death star. Maybe the audience will get an explanation for this amazing feat? Nope. It's shoved away by the line from the prequels about unnatural powers of the dark side. He's just here for some weird fanservice and to die by the hand of a "true hero" - Rey in one of the most anticlimactic endings I've ever seen in the cinema that makes the story of episodes 1-6 null and void. To even, get to the ending the audience has to endure the never-ending fetch quests for objects of plot value. It's so bad that at some point the main crew of characters have to find a missing person that has an item that leads to another item that finally leads to the big bad. All of this is held by the endless rush of action and scenes that overwhelm you with visuals and callbacks because in today's day and age you need to be distracted to not see the floppy writing.

The characters are as bland as in 7&8, but on top of that this time we spice things up with inconsistency. Rey's power level fluctuates depending on the plot. She had a year of training on top of the godly powers demonstrated in 7&8 so she should be pretty strong at this point right? Nope. She can't even beat Kylo which she defeated two times in previous movies, but somehow Leia has to die for her to beat him. Speaking of Kylo his power level changes as well, because somehow he can stand to the godly Rey now and even overwhelm her at one point. Consistency? What's this? Rey also pulls new abilities out of nowhere because she's that good I guess. Also, Kylo's story arc is this movie is that - he's super evil, then he's not evil because a phantom of Han Solo told him to be good and then he sacrifices himself for Rey by kissing her lips and transferring his life force to her so she can claim that she's Skywalker on the Tatooine. It's bad.

Finn exists now solely to yell "Rey". The movie tries to develop and bond him with a new character and her band that are also ex-stormtroopers, but it never goes beyond surface-level as the pace of the story won't allow developing anyone. Not to mention this squad's whole backstory is "we just gave up on killing civilians" and First Order didn't do anything about them.

Poe also received an additional backstory that is supposed to give him depth because he was a smuggler once and had a dubious girlfriend. It's only important to the story, so they can find another plot device and move on as fast as they can.

As for other characters, many fakeout deaths try to evoke emotions in the audience. At one point Cheewie is killed by Rey using force lightning on First Order's transport ship by accident. In the very next scene, he is ok so there's no lesson for Rey and the audience feels cheated by baiting out a character's death. The same happens with C3PO that "dies" just to read a message on one plot device so the crew can find another plot device. He's later restored by R2D2 so any emotional impact of "looking last time at my friends" scene is null and void.

At the end of the movie, I felt hollow. There was nothing, but empty fanservice and convoluted plot. I don't want a perfect story, but please J.J try to use basic logical consistency next time.