Star Wars: Rise Of Skywalker - Everything It Gets Wrong

4. Deaths Have No Weight, And Death Itself Is Meaningless

Back to a fundamental issue with making a movie that needs to serve not only a film trilogy, but an entire empire of merchandise and now a theme park, Rise of Skywalker plays everything as safe as possible.

Yes, there are a couple of deaths like Kylo and Leia, but multiple times we have fakeouts in regards to an earlier Kylo scene, plus Chewbacca AND C3P0 teasing the audience with a sense of finality and weight, only to rip it away.

Chewie's comes from being held captive on a transport that gets accidentally blown up by Rey - only to reveal he was on a different ship all along in the next scene. C3P0's memory wipe was centre of the second round of trailers, but his "amnesia" is played for laughs, until R2D2 restores the vast majority of his files 20 minutes later anyway.

Kylo gets some of the worst examples, going from being stabbed through the stomach by Rey, only to be healed back to normality. Later he gets his life force drained by Palpatine, who throws him across a room and down a chasm, but manages to crawl back to transfer MORE life back into a dead Rey for one kiss, then FINALLY dying in her arms.

Can you feel how exhausting this plotting is?