Well kids … this is it. The last chapter in the Skywalker saga. This time around J.J. Abrams is back to finish up this new trilogy. Some may say for the better and some may say for the worse. I’m in the camp of for the better. As much as I like Rian Johnson as a director, I just wasn’t a fan of his take on Star Wars. I know he was trying to set up some things to possibly explore in his own trilogy (which I’m not sure is still happening). But ultimately the film suffered from Quantum of Solace syndrome. It felt more like a prologue to The Force Awakens then it did anything else. While managing to take aspects of what Abram’s had set up and turned it on it head, it really wanted to do away with the past. Yet it needed to be part of the saga. It was confusing.
Now here we have the third and final film in this sequel trilogy and again … it’s confusing. Not once in the film did I cringe at anything like a “your mother” joke or the milking of a sea beast for nourishment. A part of me wonders if they had really planned the trilogy out as a whole in the first place or not. While The Rise of Skywalker does a pretty good job of ignoring the bulk of the last film, it also does a good job of tying together all the films before it. Some of which you may call “member berries“, but in all honesty that’s what this film needs to do. It needs to make you feel like a kid again. It needs to make you feel attached to the characters you grew up with from the original trilogy. It needs to feel cohesive. And it kind of does. Kind of. But it also feels like it was course correcting some of the missteps from the last film. Something that never should have had to happen.
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