Spoilers for literally all of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to follow.
The first sign of trouble for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker comes with the first sentence of the opening crawl: “The dead speak!”
This is basically a thesis statement for Rise of Skywalker, which is so, so much more interested in the franchise’s past than its future. In the most baffling opening text since The Phantom Menace began with a sentence on the taxation of trade routes, we’re told that the voice of Emperor Palpatine—who died all the way back in 1983’s Return of the Jedi—has been heard broadcasting “a threat of revenge” across the galaxy. It sounds like the Dark Side version of a podcast.
Even then, I held out a little hope. J.J. Abrams is as much a merry trickster as he is a film director, and he loves his little twists. The “return” of Palpatine could easily turn out to be some clever scheme by some unknown villain, who hopes gain power by drafting on the reputation of the terrifying emperor.
And then, just a minute or two later, Kylo Ren comes face-to-face with Emperor Palpatine himself—very much alive, thank you—and Rise of Skywalker starts digging a hole it never finds a way to climb out from.
If you remember 2017’s The Last Jedi, the previous movie in this trilogy, you might have had some different ideas about how Episode IX might go. The Last Jedi ended with several franchise-altering twists: the possibility that there might be a middle ground between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, or the promise of a generation of young Jedi whose names weren’t Kenobi or Skywalker.
Forget all that. Rise of Skywalker has no interest in it. Instead, J.J. Abrams has turned in a Star Wars movie that is only surprising in how unsurprising it is. Because yes: Emperor Palpatine really is alive, and it only takes a couple of minutes for him to win Kylo Ren to his cause. How did Palpatine survive his apparent death at the end of Return of the Jedi? Don’t worry about it. Has he really just been sitting around on a never-before-mentioned Sith planet this whole time, telling Snoke what to do and waiting until… I don’t know, until he remembers radio exists? Apparently.
In the meantime, Palpatine has also managed to assemble his own army, complete with what looks like thousands of Star Destroyers. Each of those Destoyers is, somehow, equipped with a Death Star-style cannon powerful enough to destroy a planet. That’s just the start of the many half-explained geegaws that will drive the plot forward, as a Sith dagger leads to a Sith wayfinder leads to a bunch of bullshit that leads to Emperor Palpatine’s big goofy chair.
This is as good a time as any to address the biggest and dumbest retcon in Rise of Skywalker: The question of Rey’s lineage. The subject was hotly contested at the release of The Force Awakens, and the odds-on favorites were that Rey was either a Skywalker or a Kenobi. The Last Jedi found a clever way to zigzag around all the fan theories: The mysteriously orphaned Rey really was a nobody, whose parents were random scumbags who sold her off for a quick fix.
That was clearly intended to be the final answer, and it should have stayed that way—but having originally raised the question in The Force Awakens, Abrams couldn’t resist mucking around with the answer. So it’s soon revealed that Rey’s grandfather is actually Emperor Palpatine, and that her “scumbag” parents were actually a noble, loving couple who rejected Palpatine and abandoned Rey to protect her. (If you want to learn about Palpatine’s family, I’m sure a canonical tie-in novel about his wife or his son or whatever is already on the way.) Rey’s proficiency was the Force wasn’t a fluke after all; it was in her blood all along. Her midichlorian count is probably off the charts! Everybody loved midichlorians, right?