Cataline does not recommend The Rise of Skywalker:
The Rise of Skywalker shows every sign of having been repeatedly dismembered and put together again in the editing room, like a patchwork Frankenstein of a movie. Various versions of scenes were cut, then recut. Then slapped together into a final cut. Then pulled apart again when that version tested badly. Then various teams went back to editing mines to try to cobble together, something else slightly more pleasing testing gods.
It was a very surreal experience to watch this cinematic train wreck. I wasn’t angry like I was when I saw The Last Jedi because all of my disappointments had been front-loaded because almost all of the leaks were accurate. What I saw was hideous but there were no hideous surprises because I had done all of my groaning and eye-rolling well in advance. I was calm and resigned.
This is your spoiler alert but I suspect you already know most of the horrors that lie beneath this sentence already.
The movie starts with the standard title followed by a screen crawl that tells you almost nothing. There is has been a galaxy-wide transmission from Palpatine. Remember him. The guy Darth Vader threw down the light shaft in Return of the Jedi?
Well, it turns out that Anakin Skywalker’s entire redemption story arc was a complete waste of his life and your time because Palpatine survived being chucked into a bottomless pit and then getting blown up in a Deathstar explosion.
Trevor Lynch didn’t like it any better:
Even I didn’t expect Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to be this bad. It is simply a terrible movie: derivative, incoherent, arbitrary, superficial, and deeply boring and uninvolving—despite, or maybe because of, the frenetic action sequences, dazzling duels, and effects so special they’ll leave carbon scoring on your eyeballs.
The Rise of Skywalker is 2 hours, 22 minutes long, which is long enough, but it feels even longer. I saw it in a half-empty theatre, and when Harrison Ford showed up on the screen, a whole row of people began streaming toward the exits. It would have been the last straw for me too, but I had my duty to you, dear reader, to sustain me….
Since Abrams and Johnson managed to remake and mock the whole original trilogy in only two films, Abrams was in an uncomfortable position in The Rise of Skywalker: he might have to actually come up with something original. Of course he tries to minimize the shock of doing something really new by bringing back the original cast some more. Luke and Han Solo are both dead, but Luke comes back as a ghost and Han as a figment of his son’s imagination. Carrie Fisher really is dead, but Abrams cleverly incorporates unused footage from the first movie. He also finds Billy Dee Williams in carbonite to reprise the role of Lando Calrissian. But the greatest surprise is that he resurrects Emperor Palpatine.
Yes, I know, the last time we saw Emperor Palpatine, he was thrown down a shaft in the second Death Star, followed by a big explosion that we interpreted as the release of malign energies when he went splat at the bottom, followed by the destruction of the whole damn Death Star, to add an even greater air of finality.
But, as in the Roadrunner cartoons, when Wile E. Coyote falls to his death through a portable hole, or blows himself up with a bomb, or gets an anvil dropped on his head, only to be magically resurrected moments later for further adventures with the bird, Palpatine is back to spare Jar Jar Abrams the necessity of coming up with a new villain after Rian Johnson casually dispensed with Snoke.
The trouble is that, for all his Gungans and Ewoks and juvenile dialogue, George Lucas’ Star Wars still had a bit more realism and existential heft and credibility than Roadrunner cartoons.
As has been my custom with every Star Wars movie since The Phantom Menace, I will honor my childhood affection for the original film by refusing to see the latest.