In the run-up to the release of last year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a steady stream of bad PR in the form of disgruntled test screen audience members began to trickle forth from the recesses of the internet. Gradually, the leaks that told of disastrous test screenings and a completely nonsensical plot grew more credible, and at a certain point I decided I would not give any money to watch what was clearly going to be yet another disrespectful piss stain on a long-respected franchise.

Six months later, I was ranking all the Star Wars movies in my head and realized I couldn’t do so properly without having watched RoS. Now that RoS is available for viewing through…non-paid means…I gave it a go to decide for myself whether or not it was as terrible as the hardcore Star Wars fans made it out to be. Spoiler alert: it is.

On the back of The Last Jedi, which was unambiguously the most awful, disrespectful piece-of-shit movie ever made in the history of everything, director and writer JJ Abrams elected to try and turn things around by making a crowd-pleasing Star Wars entry that would close out the saga and tie off all the mysteries raised in The Force Awakens. This comes at the expense of any meaningful or coherent narrative, because judged purely on its own merits, RoS is an utter trainwreck.

The plot is a very, very long sequence of “We need to go here to find the thing, then go here to find the other thing” in a hasty and incompetent attempt to hit the necessary plot points. In the first 30 minutes alone, Poe, Finn and Rey retrieve information on the Emperor’s return, flee from a squadron of TIE fighters, brief the Rebels on the entire mission of finding a Sith dagger so they can determine where he is, fly to a desert planet where they meet Lando, battle stormtroopers, explore underground tunnels, encounter a giant worm/snake creature, and escape. The movie rarely stops to take a breather so that the audience and characters can reflect on the events that have transpired, and as a result, so much of it is forgettable.

In all good movies, the events that move the plot along are vehicles through which characters and themes can be explored. RoS is nothing more than those events that move the plot along. By the end of it, the entire sequel saga has said nothing, absolutely nothing, that hasn’t already been said in the preceding six movies. If anything, RoS all but confirms that the sequel trilogy is a vastly inferior remake of the original, with so many similar plot points as Return of the Jedi that it really feels like JJ Abrams and team, with little time and lots of pressure, simply copied that movie while trying to undo the damage dealt by The Last Jedi. Here’s a very small sampling of plot points that RoS steals from RoJ:

RoS: The Emperor returns with another superweapon 
RoJ: The Emperor shows up with another superweapon

RoS: Rey discovers her tie to the Emperor, ostracizes herself to protect her friends, and is convinced to face him by a Force ghost Luke
RoJ: Luke discovers his ties to Vader, ostracizes himself to protect his friends, and is convinced to face him by a Force ghost Obi-Wan

RoS: Kylo Ren, after trying to turn Rey to the dark side, has a change of heart and helps her defeat the Emperor.
RoJ: Darth Vader, after trying to turn Luke to the dark side, has a change of heart and helps him defeat the Emperor.

RoS: The Emperor forces Rey to watch his fleet decimate the Rebels, and beckons her to strike him down.
RoJ: The Emperor forces Luke to watch his fleet decimate the Rebels, and beckons him to strike him down.

Then there’s the tone of the movie, which feels borderline schizophrenic with how it abruptly shifts between the feel of a grandiose space opera and an oddball sitcom. This is a symptom of any movie by JJ Abrams, with characters suddenly breaking out into bizarre arguments or having unusually witty lines on hand. Here’s one example: After an emotional scene between Rey and Leia, in which the former struggles with her training and the weight of the events from the previous two movies, Poe and Finn return from a mission that has left the Millennium Falcon badly damaged. The mood suddenly shifts into JJ Abrams-style quirkiness with a really shitty version of a comedic David Mamet-style conversation between Poe and Rey:

Poe: Hey, we really coulda used your help out there!
Rey: How’d it go?
Poe: Really bad actually! Really bad.
Rey: Han’s ship-
Poe (noticing BB8): What’d you do to the droid?
Rey: What’d you do to the Falcon?
Poe: Falcon’s in a lot better shape than he is.
Rey: BB8’s not on fire-
Poe: What’s left of him isn’t on fire.
Rey: Tell me what happen-
Poe: You tell me first.
Rey: You know what you are?
Poe: What?
Rey: You’re difficult. Really difficult, you’re-
Poe: You-
Rey: …a difficult man
Poe: You are…
Rey (noticing Finn): Finn, you’re back! (Runs off)

This sequence is about 15 seconds long with close to 20 cuts, with the camera rapidly cutting back and forth between Rey, Poe and BB8 as each line is spoken. In moments like these, RoS momentarily stops being a Star Wars movie and becomes an exercise in Abrams’ comedic self-indulgence. If you want a genuinely funny Star Wars moment, check out Chewbacca saving Threepio from a junk pile and trying to repair him in The Empire Strikes Back. Great comedic moments like that seem like they’re inadvertently triggered as a result of the characters’ personalities, without killing the mood or grinding the story to a halt.

An astonishing aspect of RoS is how, despite how much plot it crams into its 142-minute run time, so many characters are given such little room to be explored and yet are made out to be important to the story. There’s General Hux, who for the past two movies was made out to be an important villain, then is suddenly revealed to be a spy helping the Rebels and is promptly shot dead before any rational explanation can be given. There’s Jannah, an ex-stormtrooper like Finn who is critical in the final battle and suddenly develops a close bond with him, despite having only met once. There’s General Pryde, the leader of the First Order who for some reason wasn’t in the previous movies and therefore instills no feelings whatsoever besides being a generic bad guy. There’s Zorii Bliss, an ex-compatriot of Poe’s with a very distinctive look, yet somehow doesn’t contribute anything to the plot besides giving us more insight into Poe.

And then, of course, we have Emperor Palpatine himself, who was clearly brought back because the trilogy didn’t have a good villain anymore ever since Rian Johnson decided to kill Snoke off just to be subversive. Just like Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, this iteration of Palpatine doesn’t carry any of the weight of the original, who had been scheming for six frickin’ movies, engineering the demise of the Jedi and the rise of the Galactic Empire. The Emperor in this movie is not that Emperor. Without two trilogies to build him up as a truly effective villain, he serves as nothing more than yet another plot point to be discarded once he has served his purpose. I’m not gonna lie, I actually felt kind of bad for him when he gets obliterated by Rey at the end; the poor bastard barely got the chance to set his evil plans in motion. And wasn’t it the Emperor’s idea for Rey to kill him so that his soul could transfer into her body? A much better conclusion that would have barely redeemed this movie (and trilogy actually) would have been for Rey to spear both herself and Palpatine at once with her lightsaber, preventing him for manifesting ever again, undoing Rey’s reputation as a terribly written Mary Sue, and providing a subversive ending that fans would actually like while making Rian Johnson shit himself with envy.

The only things that save RoS from being worse than The Last Jedi are the concluding space battle, which is a sight to behold, and the return of Lando, who adds some much needed grit to the cast in the absence of Han Solo. Everything else about this movie is a complete mess; a hodgepodge of plot points hastily stitched together and approved by corporate drones, with no overarching themes or meaningful character development to speak of. As time goes on, it would probably best serve Star Wars fans to treat the entire sequel trilogy as one gigantic creative misadventure that should be ignored.

So, to conclude the impetus that motivated me to watch this dreck, here’s how I rank all the Star Wars movies to date, from worst to best.

11 – The Last Jedi
10 – Rise of Skywalker
9 – The Phantom Menace
8 – The Force Awakens
7 – Attack of the Clones
6 – Solo: A Star Wars Story
5 – Revenge of the Sith
4 – A New Hope
3 – Rogue One
2 – Return of the Jedi
1 – The Empire Strikes Back