Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has not exactly been embraced by critics, though this is unlikely to blunt its box office draw much. Stars Wars fandom is ever hopefully that the dark times are over and what they love above Star Wars will finally be restored (when the fall from grace occurred, depends on who you ask, and probably what point in their life you ask them).
Like Abrams' first Star Wars film, RoS feels like it's trying to jam several movies into one, though the finale draws mostly from Return of the Jedi. It all moves very fast, and largely that's to its benefit, though that means no location develops a sense of place beyond set-dressing and character development is pretty shallow. (This film and the short run-time of the Mandalorian episodes, which are like hour dramas with most of the non-action excised, make me wonder if perhaps SW works best as a modern serial. Certainly the Clone Wars animated series played to those tropes as well to good effect.) It's fine, but it has the upshot of only occasionally (for me) wringing any real feeling from the proceedings, even failing to evoke any appreciation of it on a toyetic level. I saw nothing in this one that makes me want to buy the art book to delve into the design.
None of this is to say I didn't like it. It was a pleasing experience, though the enjoyment was pretty shallow. Only in a couple of places did it evoke any nostalgic feelings for the series' passing (I won't say which scenes for the sake of spoilers), and then only on the level of say the recent finale of The Deuce. Nothing on the level of the death of Spock (to evoke it's closest cultural competitor).
I am curious about the future of Star Wars, which will probably get me in a theater to see at least one more.
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