My wife suggested that we go and see The Rise of Skywalker at the cinema when it came out last Christmas. I felt it would most likely be a waste of time and money. The local cinemas charged €17 for a ticket and I felt it was too much. They were largely showing it to almost empty houses.
We saw it at home today. I hooked up one of our laptops to the TV in the sitting room and rented the film from YouTube. It was ten times cheaper than going to the cinema. I'm glad I decided to save the money. I'm sick and tired of the same old. If Disney or whichever mega corporation owns the Star Wars franchise the next time around if they decide to make movies based on yet another installment of an evil empire lurking in the shadows and building super weapons, I'm not going to watch them even were paid a little bit.
The final trio of films set in the post Return of the Jedi SW universe was a disappointment but one that I should've seen coming in retrospect. It was a re-run of the series of three that was released first by Lucasfilm. It wasn't satisfying in the same sense the second series was in answering questions that the first series left unanswered. There was a sixteen-year gap between The Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. The viewers knew the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker before we got to know him as a boy and a young man. Despite the flaws of the first of the Disney trilogies, the fact that we knew tragic things were going to happen to the main characters added some dramatic effect to them.
I would say that the third installment of the (hopefully) final trilogy was the best of the three. Rey's identity is revealed and the intertwining fates of her family and Ben's are brought to a conclusion. But it was hard to get excited about the story and the characters. I think that was to a large degree because because Rey was so extremely powerful almost from the start when she had not had any training at all. Her character development was uninteresting and uninspiring. She was, in fact, even inside the story a placeholder of a kind. Ben Solo's story was more relatable but even that left much to be desired. Viewers were never shown why he had so much anger in him. He was also somewhat pathetic from the start. Losers who do despicable things are not inspiring.
Leia got a reasonable amount of screen time despite the fact that Carrie Fisher who was the actress who played her has been dead for three and a half years. She did have time to complete all her scenes in the second film of the trilogy but in The Rise of Skywalker her face was a digital construct on a stunt actress' face. It was incredibly well done! I can honestly say I've never seen a dead person act so well. Carrie Fisher was even credited for the role, which is understandable because it was her intention to act in all parts of the trilogy. When the late Peter Cushing was brought to life to appear in Rogue One as Governor Tarkin, the result looked creepy. Carrie Fisher looked much better in The Rise of Skywalker. I wonder how long it will take before AI is capable of doing everything without a human artist's touch and what the implications that will be.