Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

By some bizarre quirk of the universe, I happen to be living in the same town as I did  20 years ago when “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace” (1999) came out. Not only is this not my home town, but I lived in six other places in between. 
Super weird.

So here’s your 100% spoiler-free review of “Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker” (2019):
It was good.

While I grew up watching Star Wars movies, and my dad took me to the theatrical re-release of Episode IV, I’m a self-described Trekkie and there’s no nostalgia-softened spot in my heart for the series. 
The original trilogy clearly followed the Hero’s Journey story arc, and while the prequel trilogy and sequel trilogy “expanded” the universe outwards from that, I think the series as a whole has been somewhat kneecapped by the constant desire to be focused on the Skywalker family. In a galactic civilization, it’s annoying to see the same cluster of people over and over again. Surely there were other people elsewhere causing trouble for the Empire. Or, alternatively, else-when in the galaxy’s history, where we could see the stories of the Old Republic or the origin of the Sith, or a future event after a re-establishment of the Jedi Order. Anything else.
While I’m keenly aware that there are games and books of varying levels of cannon that cover all that, I don’t have time to consume all of that media, nor do most people, so I’m going to make the bold claim that they don’t count. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to start down that road with their shows on Disney+, which is just as frustrating - I don’t want to have to sink countless hours across multiple different mediums to be caught up in a story that is tent-poled by blockbusters. 
If you, as a story-teller, are relying on other things to support the movie you’re making to tell the ‘whole’ story, then you’re bad at story telling.

This movie picked up after Episode VIII, obviously, with the tiniest band of rebels that you ever did see still fighting against the First Order.
By and large, I’m very thankful that director J.J. Abrams avoided adding new characters of value. There were a few new faces, because Disney needs to sell action figures, but none of them were spontaneously important, like Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) or Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) from the previous film.
Blessedly, Rose only got about seven lines in the script for this one. I could have sworn they killer her off last time, but she was still here this time around. Much like Jar Jar Binks’ transition from Episode I to II, Rose went from “main character” to “minor supporting role,” and thus was much less annoying.
There was a new droid, named De-O, because Disney needs to sell action figures. It was adorable, but didn’t contribute anything of value to the plot.
There were new ships too, because Disney needs to sell rides for your action figures and LEGO has the official contract to sell new sets to take up room on your mantle piece.

If you haven’t already, I would advise that you stay away from the IMDB page for this movie, as the cast list will show a few actors and roles that I wasn’t expecting.
You will see the late Carrie Fischer in some scenes: when the actress passed away, her estate asked that Disney not CGI-zombie her into existence. Disney promised, so all of the scenes you see her in are actually her, filmed before she passed.

Something that continues to bother me about the Star Wars series are the out-of-place references to humanity that C-3PO keeps making.
Somewhere during Episode II, he said that he spoke English, and he’s repeatedly stated he’s a ‘human to cyborg communications droid.’
Per Episode VI, the events of these movies were from a long time ago in a galaxy far away.
E.T.’s species was shown in the Galactic Senate in Episode II, and E.T. came to earth in his own movie, so canonically the story happened in our reality, but I refuse to accept that Earth-humans, especially modern-English-speaking ones, were ever anywhere close to any of the events of the movies.
These are the kinds of Easter Eggs that I absolutely don’t enjoy.

A lot of pieces of this movie felt like J.J. Abrams cleaning up the series after Rian Johnson went ham with Episode VIII. I enjoyed VIII, generally, but you could definitely see how Abrams was trying to wrangle Johnson’s ideas back in line with the over-arching plot line that he (Abrams) had set in motion with Episode VII. 
Considering what he had to work with, I think he did an amazing job, but it makes me wonder where Episode IX would have ended if Disney had simply hired Abrams to make all three, giving him roughly nine hours to tell the story he wanted, instead of having to use part of IX to deal with the things that VIII had set in motion.
I think Disney saw how successful the “grab random directors” thing worked for the Marvel movies and thought that would work here, but inexplicably missed the part where the numbered Star Wars series must be a cohesive whole throughout, as it’s not designed to be a series of partially connected stories that occasionally cross over for massive cinematic monstrosities.

Interestingly, a fan theory came out about four months ago that was very close, theorizing a lot about this movie based on the first trailer and the events from Episodes VII and VIII. If you’re interested, you can watch it here.
Contextual spoilers, now that I’ve clarified the correctness of that vid.

The soundtrack was, as expected, outstanding. John Williams once again graced our ears with his compositions. 
One thing the Star Wars series has always gotten right is the music. Original pieces have evolved over time, like the “Emperor’s March” or the “Opening Crawl” music, while new stuff like “Rey’s Theme” popped up seven movies into the series yet still felt like they fit.

The special effects, both CGI and traditional, were great. There were the requisite alien puppets right next to green-screen-rendered spaceships and all looked great. 
One particularly fascinating scene included something exploding, and that explosion looked almost exactly like they’d pulled it from the original series, which means it was explicitly designed to be an homage. Odd to include, but I enjoyed it.

The final scene was an outstanding call-back to Episode IV, and very much felt like J.J. Abrams saying “we’re done here, the book is closed.”
While I realize that Disney owns the rights to this series and my grandkids’ grandkids will be watching “Episode LXXVII: Luke’s Lightsaber’s Revenge” when it’s piped into their holo-visors, but I really wish they’d leave it closed. Tell other stories in and around the universe, like “Rogue One” (2016) did, where it was tangentially related with only references to the numbered movies.

You’ll notice that I didn’t talk a lot about the movie itself. 
That’s because there’s not a lot to talk about. It’s Star Wars. You’re either waiting to see it in the theater or not. Rey (Daisy Ridley), Poe Dameron (Oscar Issac), Finn (John Boyega) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) all reprised their respective roles to do their stuff.
There were three character deaths that meant something, all of them earned, so that was nice, but none of them were particularly impactful.
Good v.s bad, light v.s dark, spaceships, force-powers, lightsabers. You’ve seen this eight times before, and the good guys win again.
The only part that actually stood out with any of the characters was Poe repeatedly telling C-3PO to shut up.

This movie got a solid 3-Claws because it was good, but it didn’t do anything new or exciting.
Not only that, but none of the scenes felt particularly theater worthy. There was nothing I saw where I thought “Wow! That was really cool on an 80-foot screen!”
To clarify: I’m not upset I saw it in theaters, I’m not mad that I dropped $20 on tickets and popcorn, but I also think I would have been fine waiting until it came out on DVD.
I’m more inclined to listen to the soundtrack repeatedly than to see this more than twice, but even the music was just remixes of things we’ve been listening to for the last forty years.
It was a good ending to the series, but didn’t hold nearly as much emotional sway as, say, “Avengers: End Game” (2019).