The Rise of Skywalker review: The new Star Wars movie undoes what made The Last Jedi great.

As they prepare for their final battle against the galaxy’s forces of evil, the characters in The Rise of Skywalker remind each other several times that if this doesn’t work, everything that’s come before—everything they’ve fought for, everything they’ve been through—will all count for nothing. But as the outcry from The Last Jedi’s detractors grew, Johnson has sounded less certain about his place on Lucasfilm’s call sheet, and J.J. Abrams, who launched the current trilogy and was brought back to close it out, used the first interviews on The Rise of Skywalker’s press tour to signal to the haters that they had been heard: “I don’t think that people go to Star Wars to be told ‘This doesn’t matter,’ ” he told the New York Times. Like Abrams’ The Force Awakens, which replaced the original trilogy’s Death Star with a larger, deadlier Death Star, The Rise of Skywalker’s default approach is: again, but bigger. The Rise of Skywalker gives people what they go to Star Wars for, but that’s all it does—and worse, all it sets out to do. The movie feels like it’s part of the post–Last Jedi retrenchment, when Disney jerked the leash on Solo and killed plans for future spinoffs by insisting that filmmakers stick to the established playbook.