Sean Mason

Rise of Skywalker is a solid-but-not-spectacular conclusion. It's clear JJ Abrams was trying to pull the Star Wars airplane out of the TLJ-induced tailspin; nothing fancy, just bring it in for a landing. The Good: The film finally treats the characters as more than incredibly shallow, 1-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Rey and Poe (especially Rey) are given compelling backstories that make their character arcs have real impact, while Finn and Kylo Ren's stories are expanded. The main actors (especially Daisy Ridley) really stepped up to the plate, as compared to the previous two movies. For the first time, these feel like real characters, not cartoons. In addition, the movie is completely lacking the political overtones of TLJ. Rose Tico got the Jar Jar treatment; screentime significantly reduced and when she is on-screen she's been dramatically toned down. The visual effects are fantastic as well. The Bad: It's painfully unimaginative; essentially it's just a repeat of Return of the Jedi. The movie constantly gives away its future moves, which are already seen in previous Star Wars movies. It got to the point where people in the theater were whispering to each other what was going to happen next and I can't remember a single instance where they were wrong. I would have liked to see a "wilder" conclusion. Bottom Line: The movie is obviously intended to bring traditional SW fans back into the fold after the TLJ trainwreck, and it does bring things to a predictable conclusion. I expect most of the people who hate this movie will be the ones who loved TLJ, and they will be upset with this movie's lack of political messaging. The single knock on this movie is its lack of creativity in the storyline. They did a great job finally creating meaningful arcs for the main characters after utterly neglecting to do so last time around, but it seems like they ran out of time to really to do anything with them. There just isn't enough space in the movie to do all the character development TLJ failed to do and still set up a wild finale, so they essentially developed the characters and brought it into a "safe" conclusion.