Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (spoiler-free)

The Spoiler Review is here.

Just to lay down a sense of my standards for Star Wars… I am a fan, not a fanboy. I have seen all the previous films multiple times. I saw Star Wars on opening weekend 42 years ago. I didn’t hate The Phantom Menace, but I do find Jar Jar and “Anni!” irritating. I didn’t dislike, but didn’t love J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens, mostly because I found his directing marginal at best and didn’t love the whininess of Kylo Ren. I think The Last Jedi is easily the best directed of the entire series, I loved a lot of choices that Rian Johnson made that others disliked, and I would place the film right after the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back on my overall list.

All that said…

I kinda hated Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

The stuff that Abrams walked back from the Rian Johnson film was slightly irritating, but isn’t keeping me up tonight. (There is one exception that I will have to wait for a spoiler review to get into.)

And the first sequence of the fil…