Endings are hard. Ask anyone who's invested in a long-running TV show or book series or, yes, film franchise. Stories like The Lord of the Rings or even the Harry Potter series are usually the exception to the rule, especially when you're dealing with a franchise spread across four decades being helmed by a half-a-dozen directors and a small army of writers, script doctors, and editors who had major hands in shaping the story.
Unfortunately, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker lands closer to The Dark Knight Rises than to even the original trilogy's Return of the Jedi. It's not bad, but it's over-stuffed and unfocused and winds up selling some of the dramatic turns of the previous two films short. It's rousing and exciting in the moment, but leaves little of substance after it departs.
Like I said, endings are hard.
After the destruction of the New Republic by the First Order in 2015's The Force Awakens and the near-annihilation of General Leia's Resistance in The Last Jedi, Rise finds our heroes racing to gather allies as well as face the whispers of a new enemy. When word spreads of the reappearance of the former Emperor Palpatine, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren (aka Ben Solo, still brilliantly played by Adam Driver) is on the hunt for a threat to his power while Jedi apprentice Rey (Daisy Ridley), ex-stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and Resistance Commander Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) are hunting for a way to combat a specter from the past.
Since this is a J.J. Abrams movie, there's a mcguffin hunt and a bunch of chases as well as exciting action scenes set to playful banter. Unfortunately, there's about 2 more mcguffins than the film needs, way too many chase and action set pieces, and not nearly enough scenes of playful banter turning into meaningful character interaction and shifting dynamics or developed arcs. Abrams knows how to keep up momentum, but in The Rise of Skywalker, it feels like he starts the film at a sprint and is afraid to stop for more than a minute or two or things will collapse in on themselves. They film does as much as it can with giving the late Carrie Fisher a presence in the movie in spite of being only able to use archive footage from the movies made before she passed, and there's a couple effective moments involving her training Rey and Ben's struggle to maintain his devotion to the dark side of the Force in the face of her affection for him, but it still leaves a hole in the movie that not even Billy Dee Williams' return as Lando Calrissian can fill (though he's a blast).
What does work is basically everything involving the continually-complicated interactions between Rey and Ben/Kylo. Ridley and Driver have worked well together since the latter first took off his mask in The Force Awakens, and the arc of their relationship in Rise ends up being an effective spine that supports some otherwise questionable material. There are a couple revelations that have genuine thematic merit (especially combined with how Ridley plays their effects on her actions), but they're awkwardly revealed and unsatisfactorily explored at best and outright harmful to her arc in the previous film at worst. It reeks of the sense of there not being a concrete plan as to where this new trilogy would go apart from "remind people of the Star Wars they liked 40 years ago."
In fact, a lot of the film's problems seem to stem from a rushed and somewhat confused production. Where The Force Awakens needed every bit of its 3 years from announcement to release because of the mammoth size of the production (these movies always take years to make, but add in lots of set construction, location shooting, and practical effects work as well as production delays and rewrites due to the injury of one of the principal cast and you have a really busy time), and The Last Jedi was already written and starting up when its predecessor debuted. After the firing of original director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) and the return of Abrams, the script for The Rise of Skywalker (by Abrams and Argo's Chris Terrio) wasn't even started until between late 2017 and early 2018.
And it shows. Finn has 3 semi-formed arcs that get clumsily mashed together (although Boyega remains a charming and convincing presence) and Poe barely gets more than a cursory payoff from his arc in the previous movie. Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico is barely involved at all, but the film does make solid use of Naomi Ackie and Keri Russell as two very different freedom fighters that our heroes bump into along the way. Ackie's Jannah in particular gets some quality payoff from the thematic underpinning of The Last Jedi's final shot, and her dynamic with Finn could have used a lot more time. Where The Force Awakens wove a lot of characterization and relationship-building and exposition cannily into scenes of characters just trying to get stuff done and Rian Johnson's sequel slowed down to really dig into the dramatic meat of their choices, too much of TRoS is characters running and shouting during chases and explosions about why they're being chased or what things they should blow up. It's like the breathless pace of Avengers: Infinity War, except without the benefit of a dozen films before to flesh out the characters or another film after this to wrap things up.
This is probably sounding more negative than is intended. There's still some seriously big swings that genuinely work in this movie, from returning fan-favorite characters being surprisingly well-used to some very cool expansions/twists on established Force powers, and the final battle really is well crafted and has a solid (and very epic) narrative arc to it with Big Choices being made by characters feeling Big Feelings resulting in Big Consequences, just like you want in a Star Wars movie. If about 20-30 minutes of the movie could have been devoted to genuinely exploring the relationships between these characters instead of remixing reveals and action beats and iconography from the original trilogy, this could have been great.
As it is, it's fine. It's fun, energetic, pretty, and - even at its weakest - still delivers dazzling images that you've never seen before. It's a light, fun, comfortable blanket of a Star Wars movie.
It's just a shame that was all it seemed to want to be.
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