Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker Review - 6 Ups & 8 Downs
The end of the Skywalker Saga doesn't quite work...
The time has come, my dears, for the end of things. For Skywalkers to rule no more, for a true end to the Palpatine Saga, for Star Wars truly, apparently, to kill the past. For the sequel trilogy has ended and with it the Skywalker story for real.
This was always going to be a discourse-provoking movie, no matter what side of the Last Jedi divide you sat on. Because, fundamentally, it couldn’t be all things to all people.
It couldn’t both “mend” the problems created by Rian Johnson’s sequel and continue the good ideas presented in it. In short, it was always going to be defined by contradiction. But the question now is which group it caters to most, who it plays to best and whether it's actually any good both as a stand-alone movie and as the end of the Skywalker Saga.
Though there will absolutely be huge fans and it will absolutely make a billion dollars, this is not a flawless film by any means, nor is it utterly irredeemable and there’s a lot to discuss. So let’s get in to it, starting with the positives...
Ups
6. It Really Is An End
There was a creeping suspicion for a while there - and let's call it the Disney Effect in action - that we weren't actually going to get an end to the Skywalker Saga. That Disney would see too many dollar signs in the sky and they'd fail to wrap up the Saga and offer us an opportunity for extension with another trilogy that continues this same story.
Mercifully, that didn't happen. As it stands, there IS opportunity to take some of these characters on - though how they do that in an interesting way is anyone's guess at this point (they will though, because dollar signs), but JJ Abrams absolutely stuck to his promise of a full-stop. And that genuinely is a good thing.