A long time ago – 42 years, specifically – George Lucas began what Lucasfilm is now calling “the Skywalker Saga.” And when Lucasfilm allowed JJ Abrams to produce the long-awaited final trilogy of Star Wars, he deliberately chose to model his story on the original trilogy, with similar results. In the first movie, a plucky young hero(ine) stuck on a desert planet meets a cute droid whose files happen to include data that the bad guys are desperate to get. In protecting the droid, the hero meets a new family of friends and discovers a great potential of inner power. In the second movie, the hero separates from the main group to train as a Jedi, while that main group gets progressively more and more screwed. And then in the third movie, the big bad guy turns out to be the pawn of a much worse villain, and in getting the whole thing wrapped up, they cram in a bunch of stuff, and the result ends up being considered the weakest of the three movies.
Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is hardly the worst Star Wars movie. That would be Attack of the Clones, which had some of the worst acting and dialogue in any movie period. This film has good acting and likable characters, and it wraps up the main story in dramatically appropriate fashion, but it’s just so busy and takes so long to get there. Plus, while JJ Abrams’ directorial style is often very effective, in this movie, you have the opposite of “lens flare” in that the scenes in Palpatine’s throne room are too dark to see.
But given that Rey is the central character of the trilogy, the reveal of her origins makes perfect sense to me, and it seems like the only way to explain how she developed such natural power before even being trained. And since the central quest of her character was to find her family, the lesson of the story seems to be that family can be self-created.
The other good thing about Episode IX? Maybe all these butthurt fanboys can agree that Rian Johnson wasn’t so bad after all.