Episode 278 - Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker

Spoiler Alert - Movie Outsiders

Writer J.J. Abrams (Gone Fishin’), who also directed this film, returns to close out the mega-opus Skywalker saga with Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Coming off the stinkbomb of The Last Jedi, Abrams had quite a hole to dig out of. Rather than claw his way towards the light, the filmmakers plumbed new depths. A posthumous turn from Carrie Fisher (It’s Christmas, Carol!) lends this whole affair a creepy vibe from which it never recovers. Overstuffed with fan service and an attempt to wrap up all the loose threads in the saga and to ret-con the most dumb portions of Rian Johnson’s (The Last Jedi) The Last Jedi, this bloated, exposition-heavy film splits the uprights by pleasing nearly no one. It has made a billion dollars already because this is the world in which we live.