J S

The best of the new Trilogy. If not for being tasked with cleaning up the mess from the prior 2 movies, it may have been the best space opera since Empire. Ignore the 1/10 reviews, this is NOT the sequel to Chewie’s Christmas Special that they seem to think. This movie is what I think the creative heads wanted the other 2 to be. It was fast paced and exciting, while giving a fair amount of fan service and tying up a lot of loose ends. The pacing this go round took some getting used to. This movie hit the ground running and bounced from story line to story line so fast that it took until the half way point for it all to start to slow down and become enjoyable. While it was exciting, it was too much for its own good. At least at the halfway point the story lines started crossing over and the pace balanced out. The character relationships and writing were MUCH better in this movie than in the other 2. Though we only saw Han and Luke for 1/10 the screen time, the character impact and actor’s deliveries made their appearances 100x more meaningful. No blue milk chugs here. That said, Finn and Poe were left a bit under developed, and poor Rose took a total back seat. I felt like these were all still strangers by movies end. The story was good, but not quite great. I felt this was mostly due to having to follow canon of 7&8 which we all know were pretty awful. I think they did the best they could to tie it all back together and present something digestible, and that’s mission accomplished. My biggest complaint with the story this time around was that it just felt sloppy and rushed. There was SOOO much to tie up from the last 2 movies while adding all the new material and it just didn’t come together well in 2.5 hours. I would’ve been happier with a part 1&2 so we could have slowed it down and got the full scoop. Overall I would give Rise of Skywalker a solid 7.5/10. It was a fitting end to a 9 part story that did it’s best to blend old and new, while trying to keep everyone at least somewhat happy in its long, yet still somehow limited runtime. Pretty good, but not great. Mostly because we know there was so much more potential. Then again, I think that’s Star Wars in a nutshell.