A few more brief non-spoilery thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker, while it’s still fairly fresh in my mind.
I thought the first hour or so of the movie was far too rushed. There was no time to breath, to take anything in, and it felt like Abrams was concerned that if he gave the audience time to actually think about what we were watching, instead of just reacting, the film would fall apart. Which, in a lot of ways, it would.
This Twitter thread by @ZenOfDesign raises a lot of good points and questions about The Rise of Skywalker, many (but not all) of which came to my mind as I was watching it. Obviously, spoilers all through the thread, and if you absolutely loved the film, maybe you don’t want to click through.
It was very pretty, of course, and I was generally entertained. However, there were so many moments (like many of those in the above-linked Twitter thread) that pulled me out of the film that I never really got truly invested. I’ve seen other people comment on how fanservice-heavy the film was, and I’m very much in agreement; I think it was so concerned with trying to 1) touch on as many pieces of the saga as possible, and 2) satisfy as many fans as possible (unfortunately, particularly those most vocal about not liking The Last Jedi) that it hindered more than helped.
I also think it shares some DNA with Avengers: Endgame in that it was so wrapped up in being the end of a saga that there’s simply no way the film can stand on its own. Neither of these films are comprehensible at all without having watched some (and, preferably, all) of the films that came before them, and as such, suffer when thought of as single entities rather than as chapters in a larger work. These certainly aren’t the only films to be in such a position, of course, but it seems particularly the case for these.
Of course, that saga theoretically stretches over nine films, but I was very amused that everything about the end of TRoS calls back to the original trilogy, and there’s actually very little at all in the film that is a direct or even offhand reference to the prequel trilogy (one line about Gungans is all I’m immediately remembering). It’s very possible to ignore the prequels entirely, and just view episodes IV-IX as a complete story.
In the end, as I noted just after seeing it, it is an entertaining film, and an acceptable, though not incredible, end to the Skywalker saga. But it’s definitely the weakest of the three new films (with The Last Jedi being the strongest).
I just realized you re-enabled comments so I wanted to get in here before you closed them again! I really enjoyed reading your thoughtful remarks on this movie–it brought up some things that I was uncomfortable about while watching and didn’t necessarily understand why. Upon reflection after my viewing, it felt to me like the movie couldn’t commit to anything one way or another, that it was so afraid of internet backlash that it tried to have things both ways, and they did so much dead!alive!dead!alive! that it robbed the deaths of impact. I also felt like I saw so many g-d ghosts in this movie that I was waiting to see the ghost of that porg chewie ate in TLJ.
I followed your link to the twitter criticism which led me to their post about their love for TLJ (http://www.zenofdesign.com/yes-the-last-jedi-rocks/) and as someone who didn’t really connect with chapters IV V VI because they never really felt like they were for me, it really helped me understand Luke’s journey and the overall story arc much better and if you haven’t read it you may enjoy it.
Yay! My first comment since I turned them back on! :) (Right now, I’m leaving them open for two weeks post-publication, but may extend that out depending on how things go.)
And I hadn’t dug through to find that post about TLJ, thanks! That captures well why I liked TLJ so much — and, in comparison, I think it also shows why TRoS is ultimately unsatisfying, both as an end to the story and as a followup to that film. There was so much thought behind the subversion of what many people expected from a Star Wars story in TLJ, and TRoS just…shrugs it off. It’s entertainment, but not nearly as interesting entertainment as TLJ was.