I watched episode 7 of the Mandalorian today, so "The Rise of Skywalker" isn't even the best Star Wars I've watched in the last 24 hours.

Unfortunately I had the misfortune of having to slog my way through The Rise of Skywalker twice this week. It is hard to imagine a more disappointing conclusion to the saga. As someone who loved the bombastic (though familiar) take JJ brought to The Force Awakens, and the visionary imagination Rian brought to creating perhaps the most morally pure and thematically consistent Star Wars episode ever in The Last Jedi, I knew it was going to be a hard task for any director to finish this off satisfactorily. JJ specifically is fantastic at creating new mysteries and setting up new characters, but disastrous at ending stories - whether his own or those of others. This movie is a perfect example of that. I was worried JJ would use TRoS to undo everything I loved about TLJ, but that doesn't even turn out to be the issue. Not only does he disregard TLJ, he disregards and seems to detest his own work in TFA, and has zero interest in crafting a finale to this epic nine movie saga. He doesn't just squander the potential of the prior two entries, but of the entire franchise. There is not a single plot thread in TRoS that hasn't been lifted from a prior Star Wars movie. Character motivations change scene to scene. There are some truly spectacular emotional moments... that only contain any emotional pay-off whatsoever because of Daisy Ridley's stunning performance and John Williams's sublime score. Given JJ's task here I tempered my expectations to the most conventional conclusion possible, and somehow this movie was still more boring than that. So many questions are answered - each and every one in the least interesting, most obvious, most predictable, most boring way possible. If you have played a video game with a quest log and fetch quests - congratulations, you will feel intimately familiar with the structure of this movie. This movie is what we feared Disney would inflict on this beloved franchise, even though we were somehow spared it in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. It's a case study in why pandering to every fan's checklist of expectations results in a creatively bankrupt endeavour that ultimately surprises no-one, delights no-one, and satisfies no-one who has had even a passing interest in the story arc - and philosophical viewpoints - of the prior eight movies. Given I've seen the movie twice now, as of now I'm fairly confident in saying: it's probably the worst Star Wars movie ever made, including the spin-offs and the prequels. It certainly is the one I have scored the lowest. The only good news? I re-watched the prior movies this week and they still hold up spectacularly. JJ may have fucked up the ending, but we can still re-visit the brilliant entertainment Lucas, Kasdan, Johnson, and even Abrams himself have previously given us. I love this franchise and I was rooting for this movie, even under the near impossible expectations placed upon it. I did not imagine that anyone could screw up the ending so massively. Nothing makes me sadder than to write this post.