“I have been every voice…you have ever heard…inside your head.”

Oh boy. I’ve finally finished watching through the sequel trilogy again, and after being so frustrated with The Last Jedi more than I ever have, I honestly didn’t expect The Rise of Skywalker to hold up even worse. It definitely doesn’t make me as mad as its predecessor, but that mainly has to do with me simply not caring one bit about this trilogy’s story anymore. This is an absolute mess, quite literally from start to finish, and I can’t imagine many blockbusters out there being any worse than it.

Well, I guess I’ll start off with the very few positives that can be found here that I have. This movie is practically proof that whenever this trilogy isn’t focusing on nostalgia (and I actually love The Force Awakens by the way), Kylo Ren is carrying it on his shoulders. He is the only character that I think, by the end of this story, his overall arc was actually well executed and planned, where it seems like not much else about this trilogy was. Adam Driver is the only one of our main cast in The Rise of Skywalker that I feel like was actually giving it all, whereas everyone else seemed to be a bit tuned out, or the writing for them was just so bad that it seemed that way to me. Anyways, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is by far the best thing to come from the sequels.

This movie is just as notorious as The Last Jedi for retconning previously established ideas, but the one thing that J.J. Abrams decided to keep here from The Last Jedi that I really liked was the whole force dyad thing between Rey and Ben. I think it is actually expanded on quite well, and I really honestly love what he did with a particular lightsaber duel, and how elements of the environment played a key part in it. While Rey is written horribly on her own in this film, I think that her relationship with Kylo comes to a satisfying conclusion by the end of it.

And just like the other Disney Star Wars films (with the exception of The Mandalorian and Grogu now), the production is quite literally immaculate. The cinematography is incredible, the visual effects are entirely flawless, and while the script may not have deserved it, this certainly feels like a blockbuster. That being said, this cost about the same as The Force Awakens, which was an incredibly dumb decision on Lucasfilm’s part because not only was the script a mess, but even The Last Jedi made about seven hundred million dollars less than The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker undoubtedly lost a lot of money, even though it still made a billion dollars at the box office.

But yeah, if it wasn’t already clear with the last movie, the team at Lucasfilm/Disney had absolutely no idea where to take this trilogy, and even though the big ideas and things that they decided to bring in here were much better than The Last Jedi because they actually explained some of the mysteries of The Force Awakens, the fact that this film feels like it is actively trying to course correct so much comes off as incredibly baffling and bonkers. As much as I hated the ideas presented in The Last Jedi, they might as well have just tried to continue from there, but instead, it is quite clear that J.J. pretty much decided to ignore that film completely and start over from scratch. Because of that, we got this as a finale to the Skywalker saga.

Even if the retcons and changes weren’t incredibly ridiculous, the writing would still be a mess. This is by far the fastest-paced Star Wars film, and it’s not even close. The Force Awakens was about as fast-paced a movie as you could get without sacrificing quality, because that story still had time to actually breathe and let the viewer take in some of the more important moments, whereas The Rise of Skywalker does anything but that. Whenever we get a big reveal or question answered, bam, we just move on to the next scene. The script is just simply trying to do way too much, even for its well over two-hour runtime. This is pretty immediate from the get-go, where even by the twenty-minute mark, so many things have already happened.

There are also just really weird decisions made with the overall story and where it goes. Obviously, Palpatine is back when there was no buildup to him returning whatsoever, and even the opening crawl just sets this “off” tone for the rest of the movie. My least favorite force power by far is also introduced here, the reason for me not liking it being that if you take the time to think about it, it creates a massive amount of plot holes not only throughout this trilogy, but the entire franchise as well. Another weird idea is that in the first scene of the film with our protagonists, it is established that there is a spy working for the Resistance, and who that person ends up being is complete and total nonsense, considering everything that has happened in these last couple of movies so far. I mean, even having the Death Star II as a major set location is odd enough, because we clearly saw that get absolutely destroyed to smithereens. And then there is the very last line of dialogue of the film, which I’m obviously not going to talk about, but leaves nothing but a bad taste in my mouth for a movie that is supposed to be the end of a saga.

Even for the previous two sequels, I think that one thing that everyone can agree on is that the performances and dialogue (dialogue for the most part - some cheesy humor here and there) are exceptionally well done. The Rise of Skywalker, unfortunately, does not continue this trend. This is a movie that, while I just said the performances aren’t very good, it’s a lot like the prequels in the sense that I blame the dialogue and direction far more than the actors. I know this sounds hypocritical because I rate the prequels much, much higher than this, but I can also get past the clunky dialogue there because they still tell a really good story, and I can very clearly see what George Lucas was going for (also, you know, nostalgia). This criticism kind of goes hand in hand with the weird story directions because a lot of really bad lines have to do with Palpatine's return and some of the revelations with Rey. With that being said, Daisy Ridley as Rey and Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron were very clearly dealt the worst hand with what they had to work with, so I don’t believe that their bland performances reflect their talent and skill whatsoever, because I’ve seen them both do so much better.

Speaking of Rey, she is quite simply just the icing on top for wasting what could have been a great character. Obviously, if you are reading this review, I hope that you have at least seen the other sequels or know what happens, so that this is not a spoiler (not spoiling The Rise of Skywalker, by the way), but I’m going to repeat what I said in my last two reviews of the other films because I think it is still very much relevant here. In The Force Awakens, a big narrative issue I had was that Rey’s character development towards the end was extremely rushed, with her Force abilities and all of that. This could have ended up being okay, though, if we got a reasonable explanation for why she was able to do the things she did (and so quickly), but instead, we got the answer in The Last Jedi that she was practically a nobody. While I understand this being quite powerful for some people, it simply makes no sense from what we know about the previous lore in this franchise.

Luke Skywalker was given a guide in the form of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the very first Star Wars to sort of help set him up for future success in training his Force abilities, while Rey had absolutely no one. In The Force Awakens, she, pretty much out of nowhere, is able to use the Force, and by the end of The Last Jedi, where she barely received much significant training at all from Luke, is much more powerful than Luke was by the start of The Empire Strikes Back, where he has already had three years of training on his own. There is even a really solid case for her being stronger than he was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, where he actually received substantial training from Yoda.

Anyways, continuing on my point, we learn stuff about Rey in The Rise of Skywalker that I think at the very least makes what she has been able to accomplish make a bit more sense, but at the end of the day, it also directly contradicts what was established in The Last Jedi. I like the idea of what is established here, but that should have been established in the last movie, and not here, where it makes it even more abundantly clear that there was no plan from the start for where this trilogy was going to go. I think that this is easily the biggest thing that makes the sequels feel so disjointed as a whole.

Then there is the disappointment that is Finn. It’s crazy what we could have had - a stormtrooper potentially turned Jedi. Even if Disney and everyone who was a part of the writing for the sequels decided not to go in that direction, he still could have ended up being a great and pivotal character by the end of the trilogy because he was honestly probably my favorite character in The Force Awakens. But nope, he is reduced to doing a side mission in The Last Jedi, where at the end, he almost has an extremely powerful moment, but then that gets ruined. There was practically no justification for doing what they did with him there, because in this film, he is completely reduced to a character that is just “there for his friends along the way,” until the final battle, where he actually does do some stuff. He also yells for/at different characters four different times, which is a bit weird.

On top of everything I have criticized thus far, this is supposed to be the end of an entire film saga, one that started all the way back in 1977, and it completely fails and falls flat on its face. With the one and only exception of Kylo Ren, not one thing ends this nine-movie journey on a positive note - not Rey, not the final battle, not the ending, not the closure to our main group of characters from either the original trilogy or this trilogy, and certainly not Palpatine - absolutely nothing can be called a “satisfying closure.”

This trilogy, and especially this film, is an absolute trainwreck in my book.