But what is the purpose of keeping agency with the main characters, if the final showdown is so underwhelming, and unconvincing? The entire conflict is extremely contrived, since not even the creators’ believed the possibility of Rey going to the dark side was believable, hence the idea of Palpatine possessing her was introduced. Then they decide, that zombie Palpatine isn’t threatening enough, so he has to drain them and turn into ROTJ Palpatine for the final showdown, despite the fact that his clone looked like a Zombie version of PT Palpatine. Then he has to do something threatening, and so they say, let’s have him shoot lightning into the sky. That looks cool! Finally, they decide to blow him up (again), but let’s have Palpatine declare he is all of the Sith, and Rey all of the Jedi, such that we can pretend this is some kind of epic final showdown between the Jedi and the Sith. None of this is earned through good storytelling. Like with Poe declaring all is lost, and Lando suddenly arriving with a huge fleet, it’s all pay-off without setup. It repeats many of the pay-off moments of ROTJ, but without the buildup, and emotional context of its predecessor. Just make it bigger and louder, maybe then the viewers won’t notice, that it’s all a facade. Maybe they won’t notice, that we made the entire conflict of the last two movies irrelevant, because the FO is completely overshadowed by a contrived new threat, such that we can have our moment of redemption for Ben Solo. Let’s give all the Star Destroyers Death Star rays to artificially raise the stakes, but then put them in a situation, where they can’t actually use them. Rise of Skywalker in a nutshell:
