Fini

The Rise of Skywalker purports to be an "end" to the 40-plus year saga of Star Wars. And if you accept the idea that creator George Lucas had a nine-movie sequence in mind that he began to unveil in 1977 with that original film then you could certainly see it that way. Of course, there's some good reasons to think that while three interconnected trilogies might have been one of the ideas Lucas had, the whole suggestion might also be bunk.

The entire sequel trilogy has labored under this burden: Why are they here? At the end of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader was redeemed as Anakin Skywalker. The Emperor was destroyed. Leia learned the truth about her own Jedi ancestry and her sibling relationship with Luke. She was with her "scoundrel," Han Solo. Luke himself had mastered the Force well enough to be a full Jedi Knight and begin their order anew. Everything was wrapped up. In order for a sequel trilogy to justify itself, audiences had to be sold on the idea that there was more story to tell. But none of the three movies that start in 2015 with The Force Awakens do that, with Rise of Skywalker missing out on the last chance to offer some reason for the story to continue -- aside from "pleasing Disney shareholders."

It's not entirely Rise director J.J. Abrams' fault. Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, for all of its visual flair and interesting Rey-Kylo interaction, trashed Poe Dameron's character and wasted Finn on a pointless MacGuffin hunt. Which meant that Abrams, returning to the director's seat, had a lot of work to do. He had to rehabilitate Poe, remind us why we should care about Finn, replace Snoke with another villain and wind up the actual storyline that the movie was supposed to take care of in the first place: The battle against the First Order. Abrams is a talented storytelling director but that multitude of tasks was beyond him.

We learn with the story crawl at the beginning of the movie that the believed-dead Emperor Palpatine was behind the whole First Order as a plot to restore his Empire and regain the throne. The beleaguered Resistance faces overwhelming odds as Palpatine's years of preparation and scheming come to a head and he attacks. Can its remnants survive long enough for Rey to find and confront the Emperor? Will Kylo recover his true self -- Ben Solo, son of Leia and Han -- in time to help her or will he stop her?

Rise is a fun time at the movies, with some well-crafted action sequences and a couple of really good performances from Adam Driver as Kylo and Daisy Ridley as Rey. But it's also overstuffed, forced to do too many things at once and offering no real connective tissue from one set-piece to the next. It's to studio execs' credit that they realized something had to be done in the wake of Jedi, but the discontinuities were their own fault. Unlike either the original trilogy or even the ponderous prequels, there was no directed vision of what needed to happen before the final "The End" scrolled onto the screen. Even a trilogy given overarching vision by Johnson's ham-handed deconstruction would have hung together better than these three movies, which simply do not gel with any cohesion beyond character names and the faces of the people playing them.

A sequel trilogy could have worked -- even something as simple as a "hero's journey" type story focusing on Rey as she learned her heritage and found her role in stopping some villainous resurgence of the Empire's power could make a compelling case for continuing the "Skywalker saga." But none of those choices were made, and instead Star Wars purportedly concludes with a slapdash cut-and-paste job that has some familiar names and faces but nowhere to use them.

So as the lights came up and the credits finished, I felt no great sense of completion, as though I had finally finished a journey begun by the 12-year-old me in a long-demolished theater in 1977. Rise of Skywalker wrapped up a couple of pages of Disney Annual Report status. Star Wars finished in 1983.