The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is one of the worst ways of continuing a successful franchise. It only ever embraces its Star Wars elements on the surface level and fails to create a lasting impact on the viewer. When Disney started this trilogy, it’s clear they had no vision and just let their directors run wild. This led to the movies being a disjointed mess that felt like an affront to the original and prequel trilogy along with all other Star Wars properties. 

The first film of the trilogy is “The Force Awakens”. This is also the best film of the trilogy. While it isn’t anything amazing, it’s certainly entertaining. Most of the problems it has stem from it feeling too much like the first installment of the original trilogy, “A New Hope”. There’s a power hungry organization attempting to steal information from a droid, a force sensitive protagonist who lives on a desert planet, a masked antagonist who is linked to the mentor figure, the main characters needing to infiltrate the enemy base to save the female lead and a climax featuring smaller ships attempting to take a massive planet-destroying weapon. 

That being said, this is still an enjoyable film. It has fun action, great acting and does a nice job setting up plot points for the rest of the trilogy. While these plot points are ruined in the next two movies, that is not the fault of “The Force Awakens.” The film is not perfect but entertaining nonetheless. 

However, next in the line up is “The Last Jedi”, and this is where the sequel trilogy started to take a turn for the worse, which is no doubt in part due to the change in directors from J.J. Abrams to Rian Johnson. It doesn’t follow the same formula as the original trilogy, and even though it’s refreshing, so many parts of the plot just feel pointless. Finn (John Boyega) and Rose’s (Kelly Marie Tran) side plot of going to find a code breaker and Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) not telling Poe (Oscar Issac) her plan both needlessly complicate the plot and have zero payoff. The most interesting part of the movie, Rey (Daisy Ridley) training with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on Ahch-To, was ruined by Luke not acting anything like how he did in the original trilogy. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has one vision influenced by the dark side and so Luke instantly tries to kill him, which is just completely out of character for him. 

Oh, and those promising plot points set up in the Force Awakens? Well, they were totally trampled on. The mysterious leader of the First Order? Killed without the audience learning anything. Rey seeming to have important yet mysterious parents? Turns out they were nobodies. Even the ending of Force Awakens is ruined with Luke just throwing his lightsaber off a cliff. Many of these plot points are brought up again in “Rise of Skywalker” where J.J. Abrams resumed role as director, but that just shows the main problem with this trilogy: there was no road map. 

Finally, there’s “The Rise of Skywalker”. This is by far the worst of the trilogy and just the worst Star Wars movie in general. Disney had no clue what to do now that they’d killed off Snoke (Andy Serkis) so they just decided to bring back Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) with almost no explanation given. In fact, the direct quote said by Poe at the start of the movie is “somehow, Palpatine returned.” And that’s pretty much all that is told. Just about all the characters are side lined except for Rey and Kylo Ren. The action is mediocre at best. The lightsaber battles are just boring; granted, the lightsaber battles of the sequel trilogy were never great, but they feel especially stagnant here.

Of course, the main problem “The Rise of Skywalker” has is introducing a force ability called force heal. This completely ruins the whole foundation of the Star Wars series and introduces plot holes galore. So many deaths could have been prevented if force heal had been an established ability. Plus, the whole reason Anakin (Hayden Christensen) turned to the darkside and became Darth Vader (Gene Bryant) was to learn how to save people from death. But after Anakin becomes Vader, it’s implied that Palpatine never knew how to perform this ability and just lied to lure Anakin to the darkside. “Rise of Skywalker” truly just feels like a soulless movie. 

The Star Wars sequel trilogy is the epitome of unneeded. It ruins the satisfying conclusion of the original trilogy and isn’t even close to being good enough to make up for it. These films are just an insult to everything that is Star Wars.