The Review of Skywalker (spoilers for Episode IX below...)

So I saw the new Star Wars movie over the weekend - The Rise of Skywalker.  My big take away is that the sequel trilogy on the whole was not overly well done.  Kind of a large cash grab that paid stuff off with nostalgia and some call backs to beloved characters.  The biggest difference between this one and any of the other trilogies is the story isn't as strong.  Starting with "The Force Awakens" these Star Wars movies kind of want to throw gender in your face and show you how awesome women are, and Women are awesome, but that isn't a story in itself.  The original trilogy is a little different because it started off as a single movie and then kind of blew up and they had to make more.  So it was all self contained in the first one but there was room to grow for sure because Luke never even used the light saber in battle in the first movie.  So the next 2 movies kind of grew the narrative that was going to go back to the well so to speak to and blow up the death star again, but there was going to be some real conflict between Good and Bad and the Good was going to be pretty decimated after the second movie and then third would be a full redemption story.  Anyway they pulled it off and in my youth Return of the Jedi was about the only movie I would even rent to watch when we went to go pick out a movie, it was just that good to me, but we are here to discuss the new movie so... This movie was no where near as good.  I think part of that comes from the main character Rey and her development. In the first movie she is already beating a Sith lord with a light sabre and she hasn't even been trained.  By the third movie of the original trilogy Luke was a Jedi badass and everyone was willing to follow him into war, but he wasn't great from the get-go and that made him more relatable and believable.  Rey has basically never had a set back, and I don't think she has lost a one-on-one battle.  She is also so awesome and scary that Luke doesn't even want to train her in the second movie.  Then you get to the third movie and the shtick kind of continues.  You see Rey has never been knocked down a peg by her opponent.  The one time she faced Snoke in the second movie he ended up dead, and you are kind of left to the conclusion that Kylo did that, but did he...  So now you get to the third movie and the main big baddie has already been beat, but wait no he hasn't.  It turns out that the real bad guy was Emperor Palpatine.  From the first 6 movies. But not 7 and 8.  No in 7 and 8 he is never mentioned, like he was actually dead from episode 6, but it turns out he wasn't.  And the reason is...well the movie never gets into that, it just makes a vague reference to episode 3 when he is talking about unnatural means that the Sith can use to stay alive.  But no details of how this works.  He at least is in a weakened state so there is that and from what he says it's kind of like Snoke wasn't real in that he wasn't really a separate Sith just like a puppet of Palpatine, so the law of 2 Sith is preserved with Palp and Kylo during the series.  Whew right?  It still doesn't make sense though because one thing the other trilogies did was tie things to the end ahead of time.  Remember all the subtle holograms of the death star in the prequels.  This series not only has no hint of Palp being alive, but there was also no hint that Rey was his Granddaughter.  Yep, that gets revealed about half way through the movie.  The only thing that saves the movie as watchable is that it is moving so fast that you don't have time to question things while it is actually going on.  But the movie itself basically makes the second movie in the series a waste.  For one, in that movie it was stated that Rey's parents were just junk traders, but this reveal of Pappy Palpy at least makes more sense because of how powerful she was.  Even though the off spring of someone who was actually conceived by the force still needed training for like a movie and half and even at the end of the second movie got his ass kicked.  I think part of the problem with this series is that you had two different directors and two different stories trying to get told and I don't think the second movie fit the story of the first and third.  And they wanted to have 3 different directors, yeesh.  I think the series would have been better if they would have had the commitment of 1 director for all three movies and if the story and been developed and written for all 3 movies first so that cast, director, production, and crew were all on the same page going towards the same goal I think it would have had a different feel and been a better product and probably made more money.  They did tie a bow on the whole series but after 9 movies (and then some if you count the extra ones) I want complete story closure, kind of like Harry Potter or the Marvel series of movies.  The one bad thing about Star Wars is that there are hardly any consequences in the movies (except for in revenge of the Sith where every Jedi but 2 end up dead).  Through the prequels the only real loss (excluding all the Jedi in ep. 3) is Qui-gon and we didn't even know he existed until the beginning of the movie.  Well I guess Padme too, but we knew she was going to die.  In the original trilogy, Obi-won and Yoda die, but not really and I think one E-wok.  In this movie Kylo is killed, but then saved, Leiah dies, but she is dead in real life so not a shocker here (even though she some how survived in space without a suit or anything in the 8th movie, hmmm), chewy gets killed, but then it turns out he was on a different ship, so he is ok, and Rey dies at the end only to be saved by Ben who then dies in her spot.  Oh and also C3PO is going to have his memory erased to help move the plot along, but then R2 backs up his memory, so even that is saved.  Not even the millennium falcon gets destroyed and that is just a ship.  I mean I guess the rebels lost a lot of people in the last movie when all of their ships were destroyed, but those were kind of nameless faceless people so they don't count.  Anyway it is a watchable movie, but not one you are going to rent endlessly.  Maybe I buy it, but these last 3 are just not the old movies at all.  Overall it is maybe a 3 out of 5, but story telling gets a 1 out of 5, and answering all the questions the movies created on their own gets a (-1) out of 5.  One final thought, I will say that the actors did a good job, doing what they were asked to do, it is just that what they were asked to do could have been so much better.  How awesome would it have been for Luke to come back in Force Awakens in the snow fighting scene and he pulls the light sabre out of the snow.  He would battle Kylo for a minute or so, the entire planet cracks in half and ends the battle and they all leave of the