The Rise of Skywalker is the Barack Obama to The Last Jedi’s George W. Bush. Anything that The Last Jedi did wrong, The Rise of Skywalker did it’s damnedest to try and fix.

But since the movie drops this bit of info on us just as soon as the movie starts, let’s also start with Emperor Palpatine. Zombies are popular. Let’s put them in Star Wars. Lots of people were upset with this decision to bring back Palpatine because it could be considered invalidating Darth Vader’s decision to return to the light side. However, that’s looking at it in a shallow way. Let’s go deeper.

Palpatine is a religious cult leader. Vader follows him and finally questions his authority and makes his own decision to overthrow him. With or without Palpatine coming back, Vader has solidified his return to the light side of the Force. It’s not imperative that the Emperor stay dead. If Vader had lived past Return of the Jedi to see Palpatine come back, then maybe we could argue it invalidates what he did but that didn’t happen.

This leads me to my next point: Ben Solo truly did finish what Darth Vader started, as he promised to do from the very beginning. Although he wanted to rule the galaxy like Vader did, he ended up saving the protagonist like Anakin Skywalker did for his son, Luke. It all ties together very nicely and not realizing that or simply not liking it is disregarding good storytelling after a whole movie that was shit on for bad storytelling (this also reinforces my opinion that Star Wars fans are never happy).

So Ben became good again. Kylo Ren is a thing of the past. Can we talk about why they omitted the Knights of Ren in the movies before this? Was Kylo’s hunt not serious enough that he had to just now bring in the backup? I thought it was a good choice to finally bring them in. They didn’t do a whole lot but they were intimidating and their purpose was to let the audience watch Ben kick their asses all by himself. That’s good enough reason for me.

Rey Palpatine was a bit out of left field for me, as I thought by the last movie that they were 100% going with the whole “you have no important genealogy” thing that The Last Jedi fried so hard to push. It suddenly explains everything about why she’s got such a natural Force ability. To me, Rey has never had a lot of character. I love her, but all of the character development in this trilogy was given to Ben, which I believe was smart. The choice at the end of the movie to take on the Skywalker name doesn’t upset me - Luke and Leia were the first parental figures she had in a long time. She was the apprentice of both siblings, becoming incredibly close with them I’d imagine, and to distance herself from the Palpatine name it would make sense to choose Skywalker.

Some of the problems The Last Jedi had and how they fixed it with this movie:

There was fan uproar about Rose Tico’s character (which was completely unwarranted, especially the part where fans bullied her off of social media. Again, Star Wars fans are never happy and also the worst). In this movie, they decided to cut her from being a main character and instead basically had her there for moral support. There was no continued romance between her and Finn from what we could tell. Congrats, fanboys. You’re crybabies.

Leia’s Force powers were explained. After everyone threw a shit fit over Leia surviving being blasted into the vacuum of outer space, J.J. Abrams did a good job of explaining how Luke took time to train Leia into honing her Force abilities (with CGI young Luke and Leia, which was awesome). He also explained why she gave it up, after seeing what Ben/Kylo would become. This was a very smart way to explain multiple plot holes at one time, instead of letting the audience wonder what the hell just happened. He also explained why Snoke was so powerful (and easy to kill) through making him simply a figurehead for Palpatine which is a satisfying way to tackle Snoke, since his entire character made no sense. Why was he so powerful? Why was he so stupid and easy to kill? Oh, Palpatine was pulling the puppet strings, it was all part of his plan. Okay. Makes sense.

Fans were confused walking out of The Last Jedi because it felt... confusing. There were three plots going on at once that were handled with much less grace than other subplots in past movies. The movie was one big, boring chase scene sprinkled with a subplot that happened in Empire Strikes Back and a subplot which amounted to... basically nothing. With The Rise of Skywalker, it feels balanced and cohesive. The story made sense and flowed smoothly, leading you to each new part of the story with ease.

Why did everyone respond to the cries for help in The Rise of Skywalker and not The Last Jedi? This is purely speculation on my part but here we go... the galaxy had already seen Palpatine as this big, bad Sith Lord who ruled with fear. They had also seen him die. They knew it was possible to defeat them again and they knew that if they didn’t, it would result in the destruction of their entire galaxy. That’s why I believe people actually showed up to help in this one.

Leia’s death was handled with grace, Ben’s was a bit of a cliche with the kiss between him and Rey, but let’s talk about Chewbacca’s “death”, which was ultimately for shock. That was completely unnecessary. However, the lead up to finding out that Hux was the spy (who didn’t guess that, seriously?) and finally discovering that was pretty cool. Here’s another thing: movies do not constantly have to have people making funny quips. I know Star Wars is comedic a lot. It’s one of the lovable parts of it. Making your characters who wouldn’t normally quip (C-3PO) make quips while the galaxy is in peril is ridiculous. Poe and Finn quipping each other makes sense because that’s their friendship, but I’m trying to think of a time where C-3PO has ever really made a quip... and sure he’s had some funny things to say, but I don’t think he really has. That’s just a pet peeve. Marvel does it all the time.

We really are getting down to my pet peeves so here’s another I absolutely curse Disney for. You don’t have to have a fucking “I am (THE VILLAIN)!!” followed by “and I am... (THE HERO)!!” as your one liner. Endgame was cool, it made sense to have Iron Man say it. Rey did not have to say that she was all the Jedi, she could’ve said something else. It’s just fucking stupid.

Right before that however, which I think is super cool, is that they had a bunch of old Jedi pressing her to get up and finish the Emperor off. It’s a list with some favorites and some that have been important in the multiple Star Wars TV shows (Ashoka, y’all).

We are introduced to some new planets, including the badass Sith world of Exogal, which could potentially cause photosensitive people and epileptics to have seizures. Truly an evil place. It looks pretty fucking sick. The Star Destroyers, which are now quite literally Planet Destroyers, each have their own little Death Star gun attached to the bottom. Yep, the Emperor’s zealots were hard at work for many years building these suckers, only for them all to get blown up in the final act. That’s how you win an interplanetary war though, so can’t really fault them there.

Evil Rey probably wasn’t necessary but cool nonetheless. The horse-boars we saw in the trailers served quite a cool and practical purpose, as speeders can be jammed by comms but nature can’t! Haha! I thought that part was actually awesome, as it tackled something we haven’t really seen before for the same reason. By that I mean, sure, they used tauntauns on Hoth and the Gungan army had Kaadu, but it wasn’t for the explicit reason of not being tracked/jammed. The fact they threw this in was clever.

Fuck I don’t know what else to say really, but overall I think the movie was really well done, wrapped up the Skywalker saga in an amazing way, and was everything I was looking for to follow The Last Jedi, and was glad it wasn’t a dumpster fire as such. Onward to the next Star Wars film, and the rest of The Mandalorian.

Insert obligatory Baby Yoda meme here. Bye.