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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

A review by Forrest Humphrey 

I'll admit it freely, as soon as I heard J.J. Abrams was back on as the director, I had a bad feeling about this film. I expected a plot driven by coincidence and macguffin hunting with plenty of “jingling keys in your face” nostalgia and well, that's exactly what we got, with plenty of retconning thrown in as well.
But before I really dig in, I should at least mention there are some things about the film of note. Its visually stunning, but then its Disney, they can throw as much money as needed for that to be a win. But still, I would feel remiss to not admire the cinematography, gorgeous scenery and excellent CGI work. The cast have solid chemistry, especially John Boyega and Oscar Isaac as we've seen in the past films and Adam Driver continues to be a fantastic find. 
So we've got great visuals and a solid cast who have grown into their roles, sounds good so far right? Unfortunately that's where my praise ends, because the rest of the film is a mess. As I mentioned earlier, this film is dripping with Abram's anger at Rian Johnson's multiple subversions in the previous film. Regardless if you love or hate “The Last Jedi”, this film walks damn near everything about that film back, and is still trying to push its own story forward, resulting in nearly three hours that still feels rushed and strained with no room to breath. It just never slows down to let you think about what's going on and the pacing is a train wreck because of it. You can feel it now, that this whole trilogy ended up being two directors playing tug of war with radically different ideas of what these characters, and Star Wars in general, should do. 
And while I do feel the cast are mostly solid we have to discuss the elephant in the room. With Carrie Fisher's passing, every scene with Leia feels awkward and wrong, its distractingly obvious they are using old unused scenes and recorded dialogue for her as her responses in conversation don't really fit what's being discussed. I understand they did the best they could, and frankly I blame TLJ for this, they had time to reshoot scenes and let Leia exit the franchise more gracefully but they didn't, which left ROS in an awkward spot. That aside, outside Rey, Finn, Poe and Kylo Ren, the rest of the cast is barely in it, but I wont get specific regarding those spoilers. 

So what we have here is a visually stunning car crash. If all you want is to see lightsaber fights and space battles, I can't say the film doesn't deliver and have you covered, but if you want anything beyond that, I imagine you'll be disappointed. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I was hoping a new series would do more than jingle lightsaber-shaped keys in my face. But maybe the supposed three year hiatus Disney will be taking after the mixed reception to the new trilogy and flop of “Solo” will give them the time they need to figure out something better for the future.

Rating: 2/5



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