Star Wars IX Rise of the Skywalker

What I liked: I liked the light saber battles. No surprise here but I particularly appreciated the coolness of whatever the force projection was. Now the characters weren't limited by being in the same place, they could have light saber fights across the galaxy and bring back souvenirs. This is particularly important in a situation where you have a hard deadline and several hundred years worth of lightspeed travel to get to all the places you need to visit. Not to mention it looked really cool. I liked the cavalry charge. At first I thought that maybe horses need breathable air, gravity, and to not be on something likely moving at hundreds of miles an hour; but then I remembered these are space horses and it was alright. I liked that they caught a sand worm from Dune. Rey continues to learn the force stuff remarkably fast, with no real teacher. So, I am left to wonder, why did we bother training Jedi in the past? Maybe they would have been more effective just figuring things out on their own. I did like the planet that had a super huge storm on its ocean. There may have been more effective ways of crossing said ocean and there could have been cooler music for the lightsaber fight, but it was pretty cool. I am impressed that the bad guys have made such huge advancements in weaponry to drastically reduce the size and cost of planet destroying artillery and yet have made exactly zero progress in armor, marksmanship, or counterintelligence. As far as I could tell there were a total of 2 spies in the galaxy who were remarkably effective

What I didn't: The kiss. Why, why would you do that? Wholly unnecessary and weird. The whole thing was fairly jumpy and as much as I appreciate a plot with some good pep, it seems like if you are just going to redo the whole last movie, maybe you should do that with an apology rather than smash two movies together in the time of one. While I realize that the end of a 9 film saga is going to bring back a number of dead characters to get closure for everyone, I was annoyed that only one of those dead people had the decency to show up as a ghost. Seriously, there were more dead people popping up than in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is billed as being full of zombie pirates. I am impressed that the new Empire bad guys were able to raise an enormous army in secret with no resources, but I am also a little confused about their staffing requirements. Where did the trillions of people needed to run thousands of star destroyers come from? Where did the people in the cave come from? How long were they there and what were they doing while they were waiting? Ya know, in the dark, without snacks, or WiFi. Also, every time I am planning on going and fighting an army and I throw away my only weapon, I tend to think that was a mistake. Finally, can we talk a little about electricity? Please excuse the math. A quick google search for how many joules it takes to break an airplane yielded nothing besides a flight ban and that a 5kg bird hitting a plane going 275 km/h can ground a plane. If we take that as a minimum to bring down a starship and assume one wanted to stop approximately 500 starships as a low guesstimate, you get 189,062kJ of theoretical energy. Another quick search told me that the Hoover Dam produces 11,000MW of electricity in a day. So if one wanted to, independent of any hypothetical plot, shoot enough electricity into the sky to stop 500 attacking starships you would need about 20 times the daily output of Hoover Dam. And then there is the issue of aim and turning things back on when they get fried by a bolt of lightning. All this is just meant to say that maybe, even if it looks very cool, there should be limits to what characters can do.

Who should watch this? It's the end of Star Wars, let's be honest everyone is going to see it.

Would I watch it again? Once was enough