Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Review

Welcome to my first blog post! This is still an experimental feature of the site. In my first post I am going to be reviewing the new movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

NON SPOILER REVIEW

I have reviewed this movie on Rotten Tomatoes already, however after a few weeks of reflecting on it, my opinion of it has dropped even further. Probably the only thing I enjoyed about the movie was how epic of a conclusion it was. Despite that the movie itself was done very poorly.

To start, I feel that this movie was completely rushed. I think most of this has to do with the fact that Abrams was left with the difficult task of not only wrapping up an entire saga, but also correcting the mistakes of The Last Jedi. Since he had to do this he spent up a good portion of the movie correcting these mistakes. Had Abrams been the director for the second movie of this trilogy as well, important content and characters could have been distributed more evenly. Another problem I had with this movie was that this movie was supposed to give closure to audiences, however in many cases brought up more questions than answers. One of the things I did enjoy however was again the character of Kylo Ren. Adam Driver has been one of my favorite developments of this entire franchise and does not disappoint again in this movie. Despite all of these flaws, I feel that this movie was an epic conclusion that answers many questions.

SPOILER REVIEW

One of the biggest flaws I felt this movie had was that it disregarded what is called the " Chekhov's gun"-- This trope says that if something is brought up in a story, it should be answered before the conclusion. This happened in many instances in the movie. There were so many new characters introduced that were completely meaningless to the overall story since no background was given. The biggest one I can think of was the character Jannah who is confirmed to be Lando's missing daughter with no explanation to this in the movie at all. Another piece touched on briefly was the concept of a Force Dyad. To understand this I had to do more research on my own. I felt this movie completely glossed over certain concepts and used this movie as a marketing tool to set up future Disney franchises or TV shows. This movie was supposed to be a conclusion, not just a marketing tool to create pointless characters to sell toys and characters with mysterious backgrounds to be explored later.