Because exposition hobbit says so.

Pictured: Bail Organa, and before
you ask, no. I'm not better than that.

Well, since no one else is expressing their opinions about the new Star Wars movie on the internet, I guess I could. You know, if you really want me to. Oh, and I'm probably going to say some spoilery things. Not becuase I'm one of those sickos that gets off on spoiling movies for people, but becuase it's kind of hard to talk about the movie without talking about, you know, things that happen in it. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet and want to go in unspoiled, now's the time to bail out.

Still there? Super. So the movie. The movie. This isn't like a movie review blog, but on my scale of awful to great, Rise of Skywalker was a solid "eh." As in, not great, but maybe better than the prequels. Admittedly I went in kind of expecting the worst. Internet news stories about how director J. J. Abrams wanted to course correct after The Last Jedi-which I loved-prepared me to dislike Rise of the Skywalker-which I did.

"Critics loved The Last Jedi, so I thought I'd go a different route."

-J. J. Abrams, evidently

"How is the Emperor still alive...uh,
-hey look, it's the exposition hobbit!"

-The movie

I'll spare you the nitpicks, because total global internet traffic right now is seventy percent TROS (acronym!) discussion, but mostly I'm just kind of disappointed that rather than continue the interesting and new direction TLJ took, TROS was just some nonsense about the Emperor's return from the dead. How he came back after getting thrown down a Death Star pit and then exploding is something the movie just glosses over with a Dominic Monaghan cameo they hope will distract us.

"Ok Billy, in this scene I need you to
chuckle avuncularly. Yes, again."

-J.J. Abrams, evidently

There were some good moments in the film, the cast is great although Kelly Marie Tran's Rose is sidelined in what feels like a cave to the racist basement dwellers who drove her to quit social media. Oh, and scenes about John Boyega's Force-powers were cut for time as were scenes explaining Billy Dee Williams' relationship to Janna. Both omissions were extra weird because we see Finn doing force things without explanation and when Lando tries to connect with Janna at the end it kinda looks like he's hitting on her.

If not for the prequels, how would we
know Darth Vader's feelings about
sand and its ability to get everywhere?

All this and the frantic pacing and weirdly edited scenes with Carrie Fisher make the whole thing feel rushed and half-finished and it's a bummer since this is indeed the last Star Wars for a while. Which-why is that? I mean, this isn't ancient Greek theatre, not everything has to be a trilogy. Why not do an Episode X and pay-off the storylines they left dangling? That said, they should absolutely not make an Episode X. Sure, the sequels and yes, even the prequels had their moments but were any of them actually necessary?

Each new entry seems to undercut the original films. The prequels turned Darth Vader into a whiney child-murderer. The sequels make the Empire's defeat short-lived and TROS straight-up undoes Vader's heroic sacrifice, so why-oh...right, the hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Are ye daft? If anything we should be making
one of these every year. Maybe two!"

-Scrooge Mc Duck, Disney CFO