According to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the ninth and final film in the Skywalker Saga has officially become the worst-reviewed live-action Star Wars film of all time, edging out Star Wars: The Phantom Menace to take over the bottom spot. Rise now sits at 52% on the old Tomatometer, while Phantom Menace has a score of 53%. While the development isn’t exactly surprising given the extremely mixed reaction from audiences and critics to Rise of Skywalker, it is rather shocking, considering that the highly-anticipated film closed out one the most beloved cinematic sagas of all time not to mention the fact that the preceding two films in the sequel trilogy, 2015’s The Force Awakens and 2017’s The Last Jedi, are both among the top four most well-reviewed of all the Star Wars flicks by professional critics, right alongside A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Obviously fans feel differently about The Last Jedi, but we’re talking critics only here. Since initially posting a score in the high 50s, Rise of Skywalker’s score has slowly but surely sunk like a stone as reviews have continued to come in. The movie, which saw the unexpected return of Emperor Palpatine, wrapped up the character arcs of Rey, Finn, and Poe, and served as a final cinematic farewell to the late Carrie Fisher, should have been a movie event for the ages; instead, it largely failed to satisfy, due in large part to the seeming insistence of the filmmakers or, if certain online conspiracy theories are to be believed, Disney on correcting course from The Last Jedi and shoehorning in egregious amounts of fan service. Rise can take solace in the fact that its lowly rating pales in comparison to the animated film The Clone Wars, with its miserable RT score of 18%. When it comes to the question of what went wrong with Rise, the only simple answer is, «It wasn’t just one thing.» While many fans weren’t enthralled with some of the, uh… bolder narrative choices made by writer/director Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, Rise’s seeming preoccupation with undoing many of those choices largely wasn’t seen as a great move, either. Then, there’s the return of Palpatine as the Big Bad, with virtually no explanation given as to a) how he survived a tumble down a mile-long shaft on an exploding space station in Return of the Jedi or b) where he’s been all this time. The about-face of Kylo Ren back to the side of light was widely considered to have been poorly and confusingly handled, and the near-exclusion of Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico a major character in The Last Jedi simply left a lot of critics peeved. Keep watching the video to see how The Rise of Skywalker just made sad Rotten Tomatoes history.
