Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

Plot holes dominate the complaints, and viewers enumerate them: a major revival the film asserts in its opening minutes without ever explaining, abilities that arrive with no setup, dangling threads left unfollowed. Many trace the trouble past this installment to a trilogy nobody planned, arguing each chapter exists mainly to undo the one before it, so this one spends its runtime course-correcting instead of telling a story. Pacing draws nearly as much fire — detractors describe breakneck editing that never lets characters simply talk, plus a crowd of new faces added to an already overstuffed cast.

Defenders rarely claim perfection; they argue for enjoyment. John Williams' score, the effects work and the lightsaber choreography come up warmly even inside scathing write-ups, and several viewers single out Adam Driver's Kylo Ren as the performance that lands. Parents report children leaving thrilled and asking to go again; longtime fans describe feeling like kids once more, moved by the callbacks and by the send-off given to familiar faces. For them the nostalgia is the point rather than the crime, and a story they followed without difficulty is enough.

Striking here is how much of the room is arguing with the room rather than the film — a whole recurring type of write-up opens by urging readers to ignore anyone at either extreme and positions itself as the reasonable middle. The dividing line is legible: viewers deeply invested in lore and in George Lucas's continuity are the angriest, while self-described casual watchers report a good time. Allegiance to the previous entry sorts people too, some praising this one precisely for reversing it, others blaming that reversal for the incoherence.

Written from the reviews Rankquant collected for this title, and AI-curated from them. Opinions are the reviewers', not Rankquant's.