Unfortunately, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the finale to the epic Star Wars franchise, failed to live up to all the hype surrounding its release. While the film did give its viewers stunning CGI and a series of elaborate and fast-paced laser-shooting, lightsaber-swinging battle scenes, it also forced them to listen to a script that could have been written by a twelve-year-old in a seventh grade English class.
The dialogue of this film came across as if someone had just watched way too many action and space films and was just cobbling together the clichés that appeared in all of them into a single film. In addition, the characters only spoke their lines during brief interludes between the fight scenes, giving the audience only snippets of meaningless conversation instead of longer moments that would have allowed emotion and reflection to be shown. And when there was dialogue, it was either ridiculously shallow or filled with the type of psychology one could find from a children’s book. Phrases like, “I am afraid of myself,” were as deep as The Rise of Skywalker ever got. At some points, it even seemed as if the director of the film realized how bad it must have sounded and tried to salvage the dialogue in the film by throwing in a callback phrase and/or action. But this only made such scenes more cringy. As a result, it ended up being difficult to care much at all about what happened to the characters, which was sad, as we have been watching many of them for years.
In addition, the plot itself makes little sense. I will not spoil any details about how it unfolds, but I think it is fair to say that there are a lot of holes in the story, and these are made even worse through the repeated use of flashbacks of moments never mentioned or even hinted at in previous films. One could argue that the point of this plot device is to “uncover lost memories” of the main characters and to show their motivations as they embark on their final quest. But in many cases in the film, these supposedly pivotal moments are quite literally pulled out of thin air. It feels like they could build another entire film series just off of the partially explained backstories building up to this finale (which will probably happen as Disney seeks to make even more money from the Star Wars brand).
By the time the film is over, almost none of the conflicts created during its course are resolved. Yes, some main characters are killed. Others survive. But, we don’t really have any clear sense of why, how these events have tied to what has happened before in the Star Wars universe, and what will happen next. In other words, the whole film is essentially a string of non-sequitur fighting glued together by patchy backstories, poorly executed callbacks, Deus ex machina, and war tactics that are woven together in a way that is illogical.
Overall, this film is terrible, with its only strong suit being the fight scenes, which are amazing to watch because of the film’s use of top-notch CGI and special effects. So, watch this film if you want to see a bunch of stuff getting blown up in cool ways in outer space and various biomes. But if you are looking for something with any meaning, or closure to the run of the franchise, you will be really disappointed. Also, before watching, you will have to watch (or rewatch) every single Star Wars film that came out before The Rise of Skywalker, because otherwise, this film makes absolutely no sense.