'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker'

People have an incredibly weird relationship with Star Wars.

They treat it like it’s theirs and they own it, when it’s actually owned by monolithic corporation Disney and also the most profitable entertainment entity in the history of mankind. As such, it inspires incredible amounts of vitriol, impressive even for these vitriolic times. When it’s good, it should’ve been better. When it’s bad, the world is literally ending.

I used to love Star Wars. I even read all the Expanded Universe books as a teen. But now that The Rise of Skywalker has come and is soon to be gone, I’m so glad that it’s over. Its mere existence has become exhausting, and I’ve never been so happy for a saga to conclude.

The dead speak! That’s the first line of the opening crawl, and how we find out that Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is back and meaner than ever. As Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) hunts him down to eliminate all potential threats, Rey (Daisy Ridley) trains with Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher) while Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) go on adventures. Eventually, they all meet in the middle and various endeavors ensue.

It’s pretty obvious that, to some extent, returning director J.J. Abrams wants to pivot away from the occasionally maligned The Last Jedi. Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) is banished to hang with CGI Leia. Rey’s parents, previously declared to be nobodies, are now somebodies. And rather than split the team up again, our three heroes spend the bulk of the movie by each other’s sides. There’s a clear focus on making The Rise of Skywalker a fun conclusion rather than a thoughtful rumination with shades of gray.

But it’s also jampacked with events. The first hour is mostly enjoyable, with the gang chasing MacGuffins and trying to avoid Ren and the First Order. But then we get into plot mode: Poe gets a bit of backstory, Rey’s lineage is revealed, C-3PO gets a short-lived memory wipe, Chewbacca “dies.” Meanwhile, there’s a lot of building around sparse footage of the sadly departed Fisher, which is a nice tribute but proves understandably limiting and forces an already busy movie to stumble even more.

As with Last Jedi, the best scenes involve Rey and Ren facing off. There’s no nuance attempted; you can tell exactly where it’s going, and it gets you there. But Ridley does the best she can as a suddenly generic hero, and Driver even gets to show a little personality once Ren sees the light and becomes Ben Solo again. I’m not sure if I believe that they’re in love, but I buy the bond between them as strong and worthy of exploration.

Then there’s Palpatine. He returns amid no fanfare and with a very generic plan to turn newly christened family member Rey into the empress of the galaxy. After Last Jedi emphasized the need to burn the past down and start over, Abrams resurrects a villain from the original trilogy for no good reason. If you don’t care about the overarching Star Wars story and just want some neat action, it’s tolerable. If you do care, it’s a lazy misstep that doesn’t add anything valuable to the mix.

It’s hard to watch these movies without thinking of Marvel. Though their 23-movie journey from Iron Man to Endgame wasn’t perfect, it felt like a cohesive vision that certainly stuck the landing. There’s no Kevin Feige overseeing Star Wars, and it shows. Letting Rian Johnson do whatever he wanted with Last Jedi and then burying him after the fact is professionally humiliating and creatively constraining. It doesn’t seem like there were a ton of unique plans for Rise of Skywalker anyway, but spending a chunk of the runtime walking back what just happened certainly didn’t help.

At the end of the day, these movies are all fine. The prequels are fine. Force Awakens and Last Jedi are fine. They all have their flaws, of course – even the original three – but dissecting and debating them has become the worst part of the pop culture internet. Once upon a time, a guy named George Lucas had some fun ideas for space movies. Those were interesting to discuss. Now, it’s like critiquing the merits of McDonald’s or Coke. Nothing interesting happens in The Rise of Skywalker because you don’t kill off Ronald McDonald or change the secret formula.

If there was a true creative spark fueling Star Wars, it’s long been extinguished. Come for the special effects, nice costumes, and lovely young actors being charming; after all this time, expecting anything else is just foolish.