The Resistance immediately gets word that Palpatine is alive and has raised a world-killing army of super-ships, news that everyone takes pretty well. Everyone else is required to act around her, with the story dictated by what footage they had on hand, resulting in some genuinely goofy filmmaking (see: Leia and Rey pass a lightsaber back and forth because it’s probably two takes of the same deleted sequence!).

With all due respect, Carrie Fisher’s performance in The Force Awakens was not her best work, and now we’re dealing with deleted scenes from that previous Star Wars movie being awkwardly inserted, not unlike Raymond Burr’s Godzilla footage, into this new movie. But once we find ourselves back in the new home of the fractured Resistance, well, you have huge chunks of plot that are written and edited around deleted scenes of the late Carrie Fisher. The next sequence, involving multiple jumps to light speed, plays out like the Star Tours ride. It is so concerned with character reveals and “chase the MacGuffin” plotting that it finds no time for any real character work. It even shies away from The Force Awakens’ darker real-world implications. It undermines the previous two “episodes” in the name of giving (some but not all) original-trilogy Star Wars fans a reassuring pat on the head.

It inflicts additional damage to the legacy of the first six Star Wars movies. The problem with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just that it absolutely walks back a number of potent reveals and plot threads from the last movie, but rather that the 142-minute movie spends almost its entire running time retconning its predecessor and adding painfully conventional “plot twists” and patronizing reversals in the name of mollifying the fans who merely want to be reminded of the first three movies.

Abrams and Chris Terrio’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a genuinely bad movie, one that repeats the fatal mistakes of the likes of Spectre, Spider-Man 3 and The Crimes of Grindelwald to end the Skywalker Saga on an all-time low.

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