Okay, here’s a first attempt. This isn’t final by any stretch as there still isn’t anything for Poe and Rose to do, and little for Finn to do. We’ll stick with Rise of Skywalker as the title ‘cause it matches Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith quite nicely.
The movie opens with Kylo with his repaired helmet leading an attack on Resistance controlled Coruscant, the Knights of Ren by his side, all wielding crackly red lightsabers. They emerge victorious, but during the battle, Kylo has a crisis of conscience.
Meanwhile, Rey is now a fully trained Jedi, wielding the repaired Skywalker Saber, its blade now crackly like Kylo’s. She is leading the Resistance in the fight for Coruscant. The planet is divided fairly equally between the First Order and the Resistance, the cityscape in ruins. She successfully leads her troops in a battle on the other end of the planet from Kylo. Maybe they have a Force connection during the battle.
After the battle, each side receives a hooded messenger accompanied by Sith troopers. They claim to be from Exegol, and declare an ultimatum; join the Sith Eternal or die. The messenger sent to the Resistance is a male with two tall, straight horns protruding through the top of his hood. The one sent to the First Order is a female with seemingly no unusual traits. Neither of their faces are visible. Give them masks, I guess.
The First Order leadership don’t take this threat seriously while Kylo does. Kylo goes rogue, vacating the First Order throne, and Pryde takes over as Supreme Leader. He sets out for Mustafar in order to find the map to the hidden Sith world of Exegol in the ruins of Vader’s Castle. His knights accompany him. With Kylo gone, Hux snoops around his quarters, discovering Vader’s lightsaber, damaged, but functional. He holds onto it.
Rey goes in search of Exegol, a hidden Sith planet she read about in the Sacred Jedi Texts. Darth Sidious supposedly kept a map to the planet in his throne room, so off to Endor we go!
After a bit of action and scenery, the Knights of Ren locate the map within the castle. There’s only one problem; half of it is missing.
On Endor, Rey has a fun encounter with the Ewoks, but it takes a turn for the worse when mangey grey Ewoks attack them. Being primitive, they don’t pose a significant threat to her, but it’s unsettling nonetheless.
With the guidance of a friendly Ewok, Rey makes it to the ruins of the second Death Star. Once aboard, she finds the throne room and retrieves the other half of the map, only to come face to face with Kylo. The duel plays out like in the real movie (albeit to the tune of Battle of the Heroes), except Kylo’s redemption with Han happens before Rey leaves. He rushes over and offers to help her, as they have the same goal. She agrees. The other Knights are reluctant, but agree. They take off together in the Knights’ ship. The Knights introduce themselves by name, removing their helmets, never putting them back on for the remainder of the film. They are of a variety of species.
Upon assembling the map, they find that it leads them back to Coruscant where they started. Exegol is Coruscant. They follow it to the coordinates of the supposed Sith capitol…only to find the ruins of the once prosperous Jedi Temple. Ben says he needs a new saber. The Knights like the idea so they head to a lightsaber storage room. There Ben finds Qui-Gon’s lightsaber and takes it as his own. The Knights take various other lightsabers.
They venture deep within the Temple. The upper levels are empty, but the map tells them to go deeper. Eventually, they start discovering…things. Most unsettling things. Natural rock formations, strange lagoons filled with stranger creatures, sleeping behemoths, and…more mangey Ewoks?
Eventually, they reach an ominous temple. This is it. They enter it, and while they find many Sith troopers, none of them attack them. Soon enough, they make it to the heart of the temple: a large room with a throne hovering above an endless abyss. And who sits upon that throne. Why none other than Sheev Palpatine. Decayed, blinded, and covered in horrific cybernetic implants. He’s been expecting them. By his side are Mas Amedda and Sly Moore, the two hooded figures from the start.
A staggeringly massive battle rages on at the surface above what’s left of the Senate Building. First Order Dreadnoughts leveling districts, only to be obliterated by Resistance warhammers. Resistance troopers climbing up the bodies of 5 m tall mecha stormtroopers and tossing grenades in the cockpits. Wookiees tearing off limbs. Superlaser siege cannons destroying the foundations of buildings so that they topple onto enemy platoons and capital ships. R2-D2 single handedly taking out a squad of stormtroopers like he was Jackie Chan. Poe being the ace pilot we know him as. It’s total chaos. Bodies flying left and right. And among it all is Finn, fighting on the ground.
Him and Rose are surrounded by stormtroopers, ready to shoot them down. Rose lovingly holds him tight, having lost all hope. That’s when Finn breaks out the big speech. Yeah, you know what time it is. It’s stormtrooper rebellion time. Soon enough, the entire platoon is on his side (and those who aren’t are shot).
Meanwhile, Palpatine is taunting Rey and the Knights. He Force grabs all their lightsabers simultaneously without even moving a muscle and begins playing with them like a toddler with keys. Shortly thereafter, he tells them of how he survived the Battle of Endor, crashed onto the planetoid, and was nursed back to health by a tribe of Ewoks he corrupted. He was then found by his loyal follower Snoke, who he then took as a Sith apprentice. However, after learning all he sought to know, he betrayed Sidious and left him for dead, as he had been when he was found. Having recounted his story, he drains their dyad energy to rejuvenate to his Prequel form, but paler and with Sith eyes. The Knights manage to regain their lightsabers, but Palpatine summons the corpses of Plagueis, Maul, Dooku, Ventress, Grievous, and Vader to fight them. He then turns to a hologram of General Hux and tells him the time has come.
Hux, who is aboard a mega class dreadnought, utters a code phrase, and he and a few officers promptly turn on their colleagues and shoot them down without hesitation. They start turning their ship around. Pryde, seeing this from his own mega class dreadnought is incredibly confused. But it’s too late, as the bridge of his ship is shot down by Hux’s, killing him instantly.
On the ground, the battle is going in the Resistance’s favor, as their ranks are now boosted by rebellious stormtroopers whose helmets bear colorful handprints reminiscent of the bloody one Finn had in the first film. That’s when Palpatine unleashes his secret weapon: the battle droids. Yes, the same ones who debuted in The Phantom Menace (albeit with their playful, silly modern voice), alongside other familiar Seperatist droid troops. So now the Resistance and half of the First Order are fighting battle droids and the other half of the First Order.
Back in the Sith Temple, the scene plays out the same as in the movie we got, with the whole “I am all the Sith and I am all the Jedi” routine, with the difference that Kylo lives.
By the end, the battle is going in the good guys’ favor. Hux utters the words “We’ve lost the Star Wars” onscreen before committing Sith Seppuku with Vader’s saber. The movie ends with a celebration montage and either cuts straight from that to normal credit, or from a quieter scene of Rey and Ben starting a new order to quieter credits.
