Remember : I never took TLJ for anything original, and instead found it like TFA incapable of moving away from the OT's heritage. TLJ thus never offered to me something that I "couldn't see elsewhere" (mostly since I had already seen ESB and, well, TLJ looked a lot like it).
The issue with it thus never lied, to me, in not doing fan service. I don't care for fan service and couldn't care less about it. The issue was that Johnson wasn't doing a stand alone movie but doing a sequel he steered it TOO far away from the previous installment AND in such a poor fashion that 1) good luck keeping the whole thing consistent and 2) good luck with fans being happy with the "new" propositions considering how they were offered.
This being written, indeed, this 3rd finale makes for a completely Frankensteinian trilogy with a Frankenseinian finale. It tries so hard to do so many things that simply can't be all done properly in only one installment, it actually does look like a movie written by a 6yo on speed with no limit about the ideas he can cram in. It's exhaustive and numbing, but it also highlights how little the new trilogy had to offer to begin with and how it seems impossible for it to ever move away from the original trilogy and its characters. It's so bent on going full throttle it speeds through every thing it can, from characters to plot to twists to battles to space chases to face-offs, never taking any time for stitching the pieces together (I guess viewers will do that themselves), reminding to TV shows that had tons of useless boring episodes but arrive towards the end of the season and must absolutely catch back.
It does however manage to find the time instead not only to dismiss the previous movie but also pretty much pissing on its grave. I get that you want to make sure TLJ haters get their payback, but that's a tad superfluous and actually quite silly. But still, while it's a much more interesting movie than TLJ, it also quickly runs on fumes and I guess asserts in a definitive fashion the whole movie never had a lot to say to begin with.
Instead, we get another bunch of very convenient Force-magic, a few historical figures making pointless comebacks, but also again huge riffs from OT : TFA was Ep 4, TLJ Ep 5, so guess what Rise of Skywalker is ? The whole movie ends up being quite predictable, but it doesn't help that it keeps on resorting to fake suspense. Are we really supposed to believe a main character will die 90 minutes before the end of the movie ? Multiple times through the movie ?
Technically speaking, TLJ offered beautiful shots, but also awful CGI at times. RoS avoids the problematic CGIs but is pretty much pedestrian (and sometimes worse) when it comes to battle readability. Like the whole movie, they simply feel rushed, and no matter how many of them (IIRC, by 20 minutes, there was already 2 space pursuits and 1 combat on-foot), by the end of the movie, none leaves any mark. There's no sense of epic, no emotion, and even the climax has no time for it. There's no time for anything, no matter how much show the movie is putting on the screen.
It's hard any way in the end to make much sense of all this. I'm not sure, as said above, going into what Johnson paved would have yielded an interesting result considering how empty and lifeless his sequel was, but it's hard not to believe in a much better halfway compromise than trying to erase it and do a whole trilogy again in one movie only. The end result makes me wonder who the hell was helming this whole freak show, considering how inconsistent it ends up being as a trilogy, but I think that as an industrial product, it will make for a fascinating case study over the years.
One absolutely positive takeaway from it : Driver definitely got the best character in the whole thing, and totally delivers. Sadly, RoS seemed like Ridley lethal misstep to me, both in terms of character and acting.
All in all : not bad, just totally forgettable.
5.5/10
SpoilerShow
And I was of course totally right : Rey ends up being someone very important and of course she is of someone lineage : she's Palpatine great-daughter, hence his shoehorned comeback. This allows for a quite obvious RotJ rip-off in which Rey is facing Palpatine and he tries to convert her to the Dark Side by showing her the Rebels losing an on-going space battle. Yes, RoS is THAT imaginative. The whole climax actually is so predictable it's not even funny trying to guess what will happen since it's so easy. About 45 minutes before, it's all given away by the movie, and the whole RotJ rip-off only makes it that easier still. The way it manages though to cram roughly a dozen predictable twists in a single end battle is astounding though. It's as if the movie is trying to beat you numb.
