My The Rise of Skywalker review is a 2 out of 5. It really wasn’t a good movie. The whole story just didn’t make sense, and it wasn’t really a good conclusion overall. I would have preferred that they did almost anything else with it. After nine films, and after The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens before it, I wanted to come out of the cinema feeling like the saga had finished properly, and I didn’t. This is the end of a story that’s been running for more than forty years, and it deserved better than what it got. Avengers: Endgame closed a decade-long saga last year and made it feel earned, which is the bar this was always going to be measured against.
Exegol and the wayfinder
It starts a year after The Last Jedi, with Kylo Ren as Supreme Leader finding out that Emperor Palpatine is alive and has built a huge fleet of Star Destroyers on the planet Exegol. Palpatine’s return is the big hook, and it’s meant to make you gasp, but it came across to me as a shock for the sake of a shock. Rey is training with Leia, and Poe and Finn go off to find a Sith wayfinder, a device that can lead them to Exegol. It’s a quest that sends everyone off in different directions, with a lot of places and objects and names thrown at you.
From there it’s a chase across the galaxy, with Lando turning up and a new droid called D-O, and a lot of stops along the way. The heroes jump from one planet to the next, picking up one clue after another, and it never seems to slow down long enough to let anything sink in. Rey finds out she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter, and the story leans hard on that twist working, which it doesn’t for me. It’s a big reveal that seems to come from nowhere, and it undoes a lot of what the earlier films set up.
Rey, Poe and Finn on the run
The adventure part of the film is a string of stops with the same three heroes, plus Chewbacca, C-3PO and the droids. They end up in a desert town, in a city of festival crowds on a planet called Kijimi, and on a wrecked Death Star in the middle of an ocean, and each stop is meant to move the story along a step. Poe is now a Resistance leader with a lot on his shoulders, and Finn is working up to telling Rey something important. Lando shows up to help, and he’s the one character who brought a bit of warmth to the middle of it. But it all feels like the film is running as fast as it can to get to the next set piece before anyone thinks too hard about it.
The pace is breathless, and there’s hardly a moment to sit with any of the characters. A lot happens, but it all happens in a hurry, and none of it has time to breathe. Even the best parts, like the heroes working together on a mission, feel like they’ve been squeezed in between bigger things. I’d have taken fewer places and more time with the people in them, because the characters are the reason I kept coming back to these films in the first place. The opening sets the tone. A message goes out across the galaxy that the Emperor has returned, and Kylo Ren goes hunting for him, following a trail to a dark world and finding Palpatine in a tank, kept alive by machines. He’s built a secret fleet of Star Destroyers, each one carrying a planet-killing weapon, and he offers Kylo the whole lot if he’ll do one thing: find and kill Rey. That’s the whole film, in a sentence. Kylo has to hunt Rey, Rey has to find the Emperor, and the heroes have to get there first.
The heroes, for their part, spend most of the film on a treasure hunt. They need to find a dagger and a wayfinder, and each clue sends them to a different planet, where something goes wrong and they have to run. It’s meant to be a fun, old-fashioned adventure, but it never seems to catch fire. There’s always another thing to find, another person to meet and another explosion, and it all flies by without much weight.
A story that doesn’t hold together
The trouble is that none of it connects. Palpatine coming back doesn’t feel earned, and Rey being his granddaughter feels like a patch to cover what the last film did. It just didn’t make sense, and that’s what sinks it for me. There’s no clear thread running from the start of the film to the end, just one event after another, and I found myself losing track of why anyone was doing what they were doing. A film that’s supposed to wrap up nine movies should at least make sense on its own terms, and this one doesn’t.
Kylo and Rey’s fight and the Force bond between them is the one place the film feels like it has something going on. They talk to each other across great distances, and they fight each other even when they’re in different places, and it’s a nice idea. Leia dies, and Ben Solo returns to the light. But it wasn’t enough for me.
It’s also hard to ignore how much the film is asked to carry. It has to answer everything the last two films left open, bring back a villain from forty years ago, finish the story of Kylo Ren, finish the story of Rey, and give Leia a send-off, all in about two hours. The result is a film that’s in a rush from the opening crawl and never settles. Every time something interesting looks like it’s about to happen, the story moves on to the next thing, and by the end I had no sense of what the heroes had really been through. 
Leia’s death and Ben Solo’s return are the points where the film is clearly going for the heart. Leia reaches out through the Force to her son in a moment that’s meant to turn him, and it does, and Kylo Ren drops his mask and goes back to being Ben. It’s an important moment for the trilogy, and I can see what they were going for. But it’s squeezed into a film that’s too busy to let it land properly, and I didn’t feel as much as I should have. It could have been the best part of the whole film, and it was over before I’d had time to take it in.
Not the conclusion I wanted
The final battle on Exegol has Palpatine wanting Rey to kill him and take the throne, and the heroes of the galaxy turning up with a fleet. It’s a huge showdown, with ships everywhere and Rey and Kylo standing together against the old Emperor, and it should be the emotional high point of the whole saga. Rey beats Palpatine with the help of the Jedi from the past, Ben Solo dies saving her, and she takes the name Skywalker on Tatooine. It’s meant to be a big, satisfying finish, and I felt nothing. It wasn’t really a good conclusion overall, because it didn’t tie up what these films had been building.
I’d have preferred almost anything else. Make it smaller, leave Palpatine out, anything. After all this time, a nine-film story deserved something I could believe in. It’s hard to describe how deflating it was to watch the credits roll on a story I’d followed for so long. I came out of the cinema feeling flat and a little sad, because I’d wanted so much for it to be a good ending, and it wasn’t.
What I made of it
I walked in hoping for a satisfying end to a very long story, and I walked out feeling like nobody involved knew what that would look like. There are moments I’ll remember, like the fight between Rey and Kylo on the waves, and the way Ben comes back at the last second. But a handful of good moments doesn’t make a good conclusion.
The story didn’t make sense to me, and the decisions it made undid so much of what had been built up. I would have preferred that they did almost anything else, and I’d have been happy with a smaller, simpler film that gave the characters room to breathe. It’s a 2 from me, and I’m sorry to say it, because I really wanted to love it. Rating: 2 out of 5. Not a good movie, and not a good ending.
