Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker Review - 6 Ups & 8 Downs

2. The Overall Story

There can be no denying that the overall shape of the narrative and where it wanted characters to get to and the big moments that Abrams doled out were generally very good. This absolutely IS still a Star Wars film and it does address a lot of the narrative necessities in Rey's arc and Kylo Ren's story as well as calling back more broadly to the Skywalker Saga's pillars.

There's nothing there to complain about in principle. Abrams has picked up the story from a difficult point at the end of The Last Jedi and advanced it in an interesting way, dialling up the stakes, changing things and exploring old ideas embedded into the fabric of Star Wars as well as introducing intriguing new ideas and reshaping things in a way that doesn't completely feel like a betrayal.

If you look at it in a broad sense and ignore some (lots) of the issues in the finer details of how it gets to those big points, it's good and a brief recap of the general story would definitely SOUND great, which absolutely suggests merit in the story. That may sound like faint praise, but there were issues with how The Last Jedi left things (given that it would have worked as trilogy ender itself) and to pick it up as impressively on the whole is not something to be sniffed at.