I just find it bewildering to hear that The Rise of Skywalker is more competent than Revenge of the Sith. The making of that movie was such a public disaster that I just can not wrap my head around hearing that it’s more competently made other than it being contrarianism. Even if you’re unaware of how much of a shitshow The Rise of Skywalker was, it seeps through into nearly every aspect of the movie.

Episodes 7 and 8 definitely have far better acting, dialog, and editing than the prequels, but Episode 9’s editing is just as formulaic as in the prequels, the acting is all over the place, and the dialog is full of stinkers. So if you want to say the ST is a bad story told well, that definitely can not be applied to Episode 9.

The sequel trilogy looks a lot better than the prequels for returning to puppets, practical effects, and not shooting every damn scene on a green screen soundstage. But this really isn’t a sign of incompetence in the prequel trilogy, it’s the kind of movie George Lucas was trying to make. I think the new Avatar movie looks bad, and the human characters look similarly out of place against CG characters and a CG environment. But that’s not because they fucked up making Avatar. On the other hand, the disjointed, incoherent narrative of the ST is not intentional, and the ST is purely like that because of mishandling. Finn and Kylo Ren don’t get sidelined for any greater purpose, they did not bring back Palpatine because they had anything new for him, they did not redo Rebels vs Empire because they had anything more to add to it, et cetera.

I guess JJ Abrams deserves some credit for trying his darnedest given how bad its production was, and how much was riding on it. But how much worse would The Rise of Skywalker need to be for it not to be watchable? The movie is pretty fucking awful and he definitely did not succeed in taking over such a rocky production and turning into a decent movie.