'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' is a half-baked pie full of amazing moments that unfortunately fall apart on close examination
Imagine you're baking a pie but instead of actually following a recipe, you just randomly pick a bunch of items that individually taste nice, toss them in a vessel and stick them in the oven for an hour and a half. Well, that's essentially what 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' feels like.
WARNING: Spoiler alert for 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker'
Looking over the movie as a whole, it has all the things fans wanted to see in the final film of the Skywalker Saga including the return of Emperor Sheev Palpatine / Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) and most of the old heroes including Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford), plus a few references to past films thrown in. However, all the space between those really cool moments is just wasted on forgettable storytelling.
In all fairness, the movie is actually a fun watch, so long as you enter the theater with more than a little suspension of disbelief. If you're just going to watch the movie for the fun of going to the theater and watching stuff blow up, 'Rise of Skywalker' is perfect for you. But give a little thought to any of the actual plot points and the whole movie just falls apart.
Visually, 'Rise of Skywalker' does an excellent job creating spectacular vistas of alien landscapes. The familiar collection of jungle planets, ice worlds, and desert lands are combined with some really cool new designs, especially in the Unknown Regions and the ghost planet Exegol.
Between the killer opening scene and the last half hour of the film, the plot just goes round and round without actually moving forward in any real way. In fact, most of the actually impressive events that are revealed to have happened took place off-screen, with the events in the film only providing us the bare tips of the proverbial iceberg.
If you're just a casual moviegoer who is fairly acquainted with 'Star Wars', this movie might be a good way to pass the time. But if you're an actual hard-core 'Star Wars' fan... well, we'd suggest you still watch the movie but mostly so you'd have enough context to understand the multitude of tie-in novels and comics that will undoubtedly have to be released to make sense of the actual story.
'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' began playing in theaters starting on December 20.