8. Lack of a unified lore
There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to the overall Star Wars lore and its consistency.
Remember the suspense around Rey’s mysterious lineage? Fans were feverishly debating theories, analyzing every frame for clues, only to get strung along and misled. One moment Rey’s parents were “nobody,” then they were suddenly royally important and part of the Palpatine family. And then there’s Supreme Leader Snoke. This enigmatic character was set up as what we assumed would be the trilogy’s Big Bad, and then… he was randomly dispatched by Kylo Ren, who had shown no intentions of ever wanting to take Snoke’s place to begin with, leaving fans scratching their heads.
And critics weren’t just wielding their red pens for fun; the inconsistencies were plain as day and truly bothersome. It feels as though each movie in this sequel trilogy was a game of hot potato, with J.J Abrams directing The Force Awakens, then Rian Johnson directing The Last Jedi, and then J.J Abrams coming back to direct Rise of Skywalker.
Rise of Skywalker felt like two movies smashed into one with weird plot twists, awful pacing, and random redemption points that felt incredibly forced at times. One can’t help but imagine the writers and producers of Star Wars and Disney sitting around a table discussing the sequel trilogy, shrugging and saying, “Eh, we’ll figure it out in the next one.”
Sure, it’s fun to have moments of joy and redemption and the first kisses we had been daydreaming of (couldn’t have been just me, right?), but the overall lore suffered a great deal at the hands of Disney and its story writers. Not even mentioning the amount of Extended Universe lore and characters that Disney completely shut down and disowned, claiming them non-cannon. Sure, they’ve brought a few of the EU elements back, but there’s a lot of stuff out there that Disney could have kept and introduced to the big or silver screens.