LogFAQs > #969575958

Rise of Skywalker is basically two movies crammed into a single movie. It has to undo The Last Jedi in a bunch of ways, set up its own story and pay that off, and then pay off a bunch of TFA's lingering plot threads because it's the third movie in a trilogy. The Last Jedi ended the trilogy at the second movie, so TRoS has to basically fix that while trying to be its own thing and pay off the two prior movies that it's a sequel to, and the entire thing is held together with spit and tangled hair.

The end result consists of flashy action scenes that always move forward, but which also feel very rushed because of the quick pace the entire movie has struck. They feel like theme park rides. Dialogue is almost entirely functional, nothing is lingered on - every line is a stepping stone to the next scene. Finn spends the entire movie yelling Rey's name and pointing at stuff, and the few times the dialogue tries to be funny, it's very flat quippy humor that lasts seconds at most.

Leia is a prominent character, being a CGI Frankenstein made out of old footage and computer animation, and while they try to send off the character with some dignity and grace, I think they really hobbled themselves by making a character played by a dead woman as instrumental to the movie as they did.

And all of that affects the plot. The movie is a series of McGuffin chases, where every scene is about getting one step further, then they get a new thing and they go somewhere else, then they get a new thing and go somewhere else - with that "functional dialogue only" thing making it that much more obvious, because everything they say is in service of Getting To The Next Thing. Leia's dialogue is basically a series of non-sequiters because they're stitching unrelated lines from the cutting room floor together to make any degree of sense, and you can tell. The way they explain Palpatine coming back is Poe saying "somehow, Palpatine returned". No other elaboration. That's it. They don't even play Palpatine's message in the movie, but they reference it constantly. The message debuted in Fortnite, of all places.

You know when you were a kid and you'd be like RPing with some other kids at recess, and there was that one guy who always one-upped everyone by pulling some supershield or whatever out of nowhere to explain why he can't lose? That's Palpatine in this movie. His plan is "actually I'm saying this now".

The action scenes might be entertaining if you look them up on YouTube, but you might see what I mean about how ADHD they are and how fast the movie rushes through everything just to get to the end point.

The Rise of Skywalker is a compromised mess with no identity of its own. It tried to pander to Star Wars fans after TLJ was divisive, it tried to act as a capstone to 45 years of Star Wars - including a callback to the very first movie and a popular internet meme about Chewbacca - and it tried to do justice to what The Force Awakens started while undoing what people didn't like about The Last Jedi. It fails on all those fronts and more.

Honestly, they should have made a quadrilogy. The third movie is where they walk TLJ back and re-establish the tone of the series, and then the fourth one is where Palpatine comes back with an actual coherent goal for an actual coherent reason that isn't just shallow fan-service. And they would have gotten to have their last movie as Episode X, which is fucking awesome. Instead, they crammed two movies into a single package, and the result was like taking a shit out of a moving car - it's the fastest turd you've ever seen, but the amusement wears off almost immediately and you're stuck with a shitty ass until the next gas station.