Rise of Skywalker is what happens when you want a bunch of cool-looking (even that is debatable) happen, but couldn't care less about a plot that makes sense. Everything is resolved by plot contrivance, because lazy story-telling gets rewarded within the Hollywood system. The guy who wrote the "save Martha!" scene in BvS gets a job to write Star Wars, and this is what happens when you pair him up with a director who is essentially a teenage fanboy. What JJ Abrams did was to act like a schoolboy and back-stabbed Rian Johnson in the back creatively, instead of acting like an adult and disagreeing with him and saying one of them needs to depart for creative reasons. If you disagree with RJ, either fire him in a polite manner, or do not come back to direct Ep 9 and let another director who can respect what RJ did handle the plot.
There is no level of maturity about this movie, in terms of creative writing. There is no attempt at originality, of making a film that can reach out to people beyond the SW OT fanboys that only appreciates the superficiality of the original Star Wars. It's pure nostalgia bait, which utterly fails at reaching out to a new generation of potential fans.
Why should people care about the victory of the heroes at the end of the movie? It's entirely hollow because when Ep 10 comes out, everything will be reset. Nothing the heroes does matter because there is no consequences that matters in a story. The heroes are trapped in an eternal hell-hole that are brought back to life to entertain fans who can't grow beyond what they've watched as kids. Why should people care about the technology in Star Wars? Everything self-contradicts itself according to the need of plot. World-building and setting limitations on what your technology can or cannot do in order to tell interesting stories? Who cares!
I've said from the very beginning, that Kennedy and Abrams are the wrong person to handle the franchise. Kennedy might be an established producer, but she needed to understand you cannot create a trilogy the way she produced one-off movies. As a producer of a franchise, you absolutely need to have a clear vision ( not necessarily a clear plot arc) and communicate it with your directors. Instead, she hired a bunch of directors that could not work together as a team. She publicly voice support for Rian Johnson and said she'll help him make his own Star Wars trilogy, but yet at the same time, she approved of JJ Abrams' script for Ep 9 that undermined everything RJ did with Ep 8. She threw out the old EU, only to essentially remake some of the stupidest stories from the EU. She kept hiring the wrong directors and ending up having to fire them again and again. She created a "story group" with no powers whatsover to get the different directors on-board the same page.
She succeeded in the short-term with Star Wars, but she did long-term damage to the brand. She approved of a script that basically ( on a deeper and more thematic level) destroyed the accomplishment of the old movies. The movies she produce had made money ( except for Solo because that project never had any public interest to begin with), but in the long run, people will lose interest in Star Wars. She and Disney tried hard to break Star Wars in new markets like China, but that failed because the new movies are confusing mess to an audience that never watched the OT.
The value of the SW brand does not lie in the superficiality of the OT, namely the plot of the OT, the ship designs and the OT special effects. It's the world-building together with the characters that made Star Wars what it is. It's not Han, Luke and Leia that made Star Wars. It's what Luke, Han and Leia did in a story-universe that was engaging to all the kids growing up. It's about giving kids a big sandbox to play with, because Lucas established a clear and generally coherent universe.
This reviewer said it well:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmende ... 4561a5113cIt represents the cultural theft of Star Wars from today’s kids by today’s arrested-development-stricken adults.
The older generations in their selfishness had stolen the future of the kids today by wrecking the environment. Now they are stealing the entertainment from kids today as well.
