Star Wars: Ranking Every Film From Worst To Best
10. Rogue One
From here on in, things get way better. Because even though its technically second-worst on this list, Rogue One is ten times the film that Rise of Skywalker is.
Rogue One isn't a bad movie. It's a solid side story with likable characters, great setpieces, and genuine heart. It gave us Forest Whitaker's scenery-chewing take on Saw Gerrera as well as Alan Tudyk's instantly-iconic new droid, K2-SO. It also takes elements from a whole lot of various pieces of canonical entries in the larger Star Wars universe (comics, Star Wars: Rebels, novels, etc.) and sews them straight into the fabric of the movies themselves, which is neat.
But it also makes for an installment that feels more like excessive connective tissue than it does an actual film. Moments like the Darth Vader scenes or any of Tarkin's stuff are pretty fun to see onscreen, but they don't add anything to the actual film proper.
The film's biggest offense though is actively working to shrink the galaxy of Star Wars. In defining so concretely exactly what happened right before the crawl of A New Hope, up to the last second, it steals a great deal of the mystique and wonder which made Star Wars so endearing in the first place.