The Rise of Skywalker

LC and I saw this on Friday. Given that it has been out of a week, I'll keep this short. There are no spoilers below.

I thought this was a good film, easily the best of the sequel trilogy. By my count it is therefore the fifth best "Star Wars" film, after the original trilogy and then "Rogue One". Though it is a long way behind "Rogue One", largely because it only works in the context of the previous two, and they serve as a significant drag factor on this film.

I felt that the various decisions that were made in this film were about the best they could be, given the constraints they had to work with - Carrie Fisher's death meant that her role had to be built using pre-recorded material taken out of context, while "The Last Jedi" had left a real mess for this one to clear up.

And that's the big problem both with this film and with the sequel trilogy as a whole: they set up several mysteries in "The Force Awakens" but didn't plan out the trilogy with all the answers. This left the team who wrote "The Last Jedi" with free rein to take all of those mysteries and just chuck them in the bin... and left "The Rise of Skywalker" to pick up the pieces. Maybe they should instead have decided on the answers beforehand?

(Actually, there's no 'maybe' about that. They absolutely should have worked out the answers before they wrote word one of "The Force Awakens". Doing that would have allowed them to actually foreshadow the revelations: "Luke's just not a farmer Owen. He has too much of his father in him," "That's what I'm afraid of.")

But that's spilled milk, and "The Rise of Skywalker" does its very best to clear it up. And it mostly does a good job. A decent end to the trilogy, and a decent end to the saga. And, much like "The Force Awakens" and "Rogue One" before it, a film that leaves me keen to get back into some version of the "Star Wars" RPG, which is another win in my book.