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.
I’ve been saying it for years.
J.J. Abrams can’t come up with an idea of his own. All he ever does as a director is recycle the pop culture he enjoyed in his childhood and adolescence.