I didn’t mind THE FORCE AWAKENS, despite the recycling. It was entertaining enough and felt like something that could be built on. I actually really liked where Johnson was taking it in THE LAST JEDI, which I suppose puts me in the minority. So if I were to change things, I’d mainly change THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. The big failing of that film is that it failed to address, let alone complete, Rey’s proper character arc. If you think about it, a recurring theme of each trilogy is the young hero being tasked with correcting the failures of their mentors. Anakin in the Prequels was supposed to break through the ossification of the Jedi Order, which had failed to extinguish the Sith and had become so hidebound and complacent that their great enemy returned right under their noses. Luke in the OT was likewise tasked with achieving what his masters could not: defeating both Vader and his Emperor.
In a nutshell, both Anakin and Luke live in a galaxy defined by the failures of the previous generation. The path to becoming a true hero lies in transcending those failures and finding a new way forward. Consider Luke’s situation. Obi-Wan and Yoda had failed to defeat the Emperor, and they had likewise failed to redeem Anakin. Their hope was for Luke to kill Vader and defeat the Emperor without falling to the Dark Side in the process. Basically, they wanted a rematch of the end of REVENGE OF THE SITH. Luke, however, forged a new path – his own path. He rejected the Emperor by throwing down his weapon, and offered his father unconditional love. It was counterintuitive, and it’s nothing Yoda or Obi-Wan would have tried (or if they had, they may not have succeeded). But for Luke, it worked. He succeeded where his masters had failed.
So what about Rey? She took Luke as her mentor, and his failures were not Obi-Wan and Yoda’s failures. Luke’s failure was that he had not passed on what he had learned. Setting himself the herculean task of rebuilding the Jedi Order, he had failed to build a vital community, a community that could endure. Rey’s task ought to have been to succeed where Luke failed … to bring together a fellowship of Force users that could survive the depredations of a fanatic like Kylo Ren. Ren’s goal would have been to prove that there was nothing Rey could build that he could not burn to the ground. Her triumph would have been to prove him wrong.
This seemed to be where Johnson was pointing at the end of THE LAST JEDI, with Rey rescuing the ancient Jedi texts, and Force-sensitives like Broom Boy awakening to their potential. But Abrams ignored all of that in RISE OF SKYWALKER. Instead, he has Rey grapple with her dark ancestry, redeem the bad guy through the power of love, and reject the temptations of the Evil Emperor. She doesn’t build on Luke’s failures, she just repeats his successes, beat for beat. It was an awful failure of imagination and it left me, as a viewer, totally uninterested and disengaged. Perhaps future films or shows involving Rey will address some of these concerns. But the chance to tell that story in the context of her natural ideological foil, Kylo “Burn it All Down” Ren, has been squandered. And that’s a real pity.