★★☆☆☆Maybe it was the burden of completing a beloved nine-part movie saga. Or maybe it’s just something specific to the fanboy enthusiasm that seeps from the pores of this film like dengue fever. But somewhere round the halfway point into these new and final adventures of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) and the moody Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) it becomes screamingly obvious that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has written itself into an absolute mess. Nothing here is original, everything is repetition and yet, remarkably, in the context of the preceding eight movies (starting with the original Skywalker story in 1977), there’s very little narrative coherence. Characters die, then come back, then die.

Source: The Times December 18, 2019 08:15 UTC