The Rise of Skywalker is a mess of a final chapter of the Disney Sequel Trilogy.

Review REVISITED

Score: 2.5 / 5

Out of all the reviews I have published on my blog, this is the only one I felt I had to go back and give a new take. At the time of the original release, I was so caught up in my love for the franchise that I had some massive blinders on. Well, it’s time, time to right a wrong that, sadly, Disney and Lucasfilm cannot.

The Rise of Skywalker is a hollow, audience-insulting coward of a movie. It started before the movie even began! As tradition, Star Wars movies typically have an opening crawl. This movie’s crawl references something that was revealed in the video game Fortnite. Right off the bat, there is a problem, but the problem gets worse as the crawl reveals that the main villain of the first six Star Wars movies, Emperor Palpatine, is alive. For those who have watched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, that should come as some kind of shock, or at least confusing, read. He hasn’t been referenced in any way in this new trilogy, and now he’s suddenly back? It’s the first of many baffling story decisions that came off as lazy or back-peddling to appease the most toxic members of the Star Wars fanbase.

This movie is a constant middle finger to The Last Jedi and tries to erase that movie from existence, all while trying to tell a new story but relying on the greatest hits of Star Wars to save it. Bring back an old villain, add some forced romance, and make sure to bring back the point home that Star Wars is about bloodline drama. At every turn, the movie does what it can to swerve away from anything challenging or interesting, for what some board at Disney deemed “safe.”

The dialogue in this movie is beyond painful at points. “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” “They fly now!” Characters have devolved into more one-note copies of themselves from previous movies, relationships shifted on a dime, and one scene that is meant to seem like a triumph of love over evil produced a theater full of laughs when I watched it. This movie is all the more painful to revisit and think about after the leaks of the work-in-progress draft from Episode IX’s original director. The what-could-have-been feeling is strong in this movie.

The one thing this movie has going for it is it looks good. The visuals and effects are top-notch, even if the plot is painfully offensive to fans who have been watching the other entries. I would like to say the score is a positive, too, but it does not have any major standouts, so it’s kind of just playing the greatest hits.

The greatest hits approach sums up what the Disney brass took from fans not universally loving The Last Jedi. Instead of sticking to their creative guns, they took the coward’s approach, and it shows, both in the product and the overall whimper this movie did at the box office versus other Star Wars films. To say that the Rise of Skywalker was a letdown is an understatement. It was a failure that, ever since, Disney has been doing its damndest to retcon through other Star Wars media to middling effect. Damn, this movie was bad.