But the “It undid ROTJ” arguments happened the second TFA hit, and were only more loudly repeated in the wake of TLJ. The Rise of Skywalker’s existence doesn’t change the underlying point I’m making. It makes the argument overall uglier and dumber, yes, but the content of the argument maintains its consistency. It’s an argument in which one side is upset that “happily ever after” wasn’t maintained - but the basic myth that Star Wars is built on never allowed for that anyway. Arthurian myth goes past the part where Excalibur is pulled from the stone, and deals with what happens past the point of initial triumph. The Sequel Trilogy is concerned with plumbing those parts of it and coming up with equivalents for our time, and delivering lessons for the youth living through a rise in global fascism in the 21st century despite the fact those youth’s grandparents and great grandparents bravely fought and died to defeat that fascism in its initial form in the past. That the Sequel Trilogy was pursuing that thematic goal doesn’t nullify the thematic drive of the Original Trilogy, nor does it cancel out the arcs that were built and completed in that story.
Or at least, it appeared to be pursuing that goal. It had the potential to do that. That potential was wasted in this last movie, unfortunately, because this movie isn’t really about anything at all. It’s about deleted scenes solving a plot puzzle created by a real-life death, and resurrecting a dead villain for the sake of adhering to the superficial (and already solved) mystery about the main character. Neither of those things are a theme, or have anything to do with theme, and that’s why the movie feels hollow and flat. There’s nothing it wants to say, and so it never says anything at all.
