Get Him Outta the Game

Rey’s out and about rootin’ and tootin’ and shootin’ getting Jeddy training from Layer when something happens shit man I really don’t remember very many details from early in the movie okay so like the theatre that I usually go to for big movies I wanna see is a place called Cinebarre where they serve food and booze while you watch movie so like I was kinda buzzed for most of the film

Shit happens, Rey lightsabers stuff, Kylo is an edgelord, a fancy knife is required, Reylo is stupid, the end

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Rise of Skywalker is more or less what you’d expect from a decently-executed Ster Wer sequel. Nothing about it is terrible by any means, but it does suffer from one very significant issue:

The Last Jedi.

JJ Abrams didn’t make TLJ, and TLJ basically just said “Fuck You” to everything that The Force Awakens set up, so Rise of Skywalker spends quite a lot of its time un-fucking the sequel trilogy after TLJ fucked it, which leads to the film feeling pretty rushed throughout.

Not rushed like Sword and Shield were rushed, more like how Frozen felt rushed; Way too much goddamn stuff happens very quickly and not enough of it gets the time it deserves. Characters pop in, pop out, shit happens VERY quickly and you don’t really have time to think about what just happened, ESPECIALLY if you’re 3 drinks in.

By the end of the movie, stuff just sorta happens for no reason since they don’t have time to establish a reason, BUT it largely involves the weird sorta interaction Jedi have with the dark side (I still don’t know why you automatically become a Sith if you strike down another Sith while they’re telling you to do it. Five minutes later when they’ve stopped telling you to do it is fine, but if you stab ‘em while they want it? Bam, you’re evil. For some reason), which has been explored and explained before, so it’s not too terrible.

The movie’s not perfect, but it’s pretty enjoyable for what it is. You rarely feel like you’re watching a scene that has no purpose (unlike that entire goddamn casino debacle in TLJ), and the actions of each character don’t seem too out of place (except for one lady who just sorta gives the dudes a maguffin for no reason even though it’s explicitly stated that she hates the dudes).

It’s not gonna be the movie you write home about, but, like, it’s pretty good. I ranked it solidly in the middle of the 9 main Star Wars movies

(yeah, I know it’s heresy to not have Empire at #1- I just like A New Hope, okay?)

It’s very much an okay movie. I’ve said that like 6 times now. That said, I give it extra points because it was severely handicapped by having to follow TLJ.

I just... I just really don’t like TLJ, okay? Even the prequels are kinda goofy action-packed bullshit, but TLJ’s just sorta empty. There’s no reason to rewatch it, whereas the prequels are honestly pretty damn good if you manually edit out 98% of the scenes with Anakin and 105% of the scenes with Jar-Jar. And by that, I mean Ewan McGregor was good as Obi-Wan and he’s basically the sole reason why I enjoy the prequels at all. Oh, Ian McDiarmid too. Prequel Palpatine was just dumb fun.

...

Anyway, Rise of Skywalker’s pretty neat. 6.5/10. Kinda fucked up that they try to get brownie points for having LGBT representation when it’s, like, 1.5 seconds of 2 background women having a kiss after the big victory. So fucking token. The tokenest of token representations. Guess it’s easier to edit out for the Chinese cut later amirite feLLAZZZZZZZZZZ

TL;DR: Rise of Skywalker jams too much into a short span of time because it has to pseudo-retcon a bunch of stuff that Rian Johnson fucked up in TLJ, but it’s a reasonably enjoyable Star Wars movie aside from that. Far from the worst. Super goddamn far from the worst holy shit it’s not even close.