My therapist has forbidden me, for good reason, from wading too far into the whole debate about 2017’s The Last Jedi—the second film in the new Star Wars trilogy that continues the Skywalker saga—but it is my cursory understanding that some Star Wars fans do not like that movie. If those gripes were made loudly enough for me to hear, they probably made their way to Disney, too. Which could explain why the final film in this trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker (out December 20), feels like such a desperate scramble to win back fans’ affection, to re-create that probably uncapturable sense of awe conjured up by the original series. The movie never rests, relentlessly ardent in its grasping for mythos.

The movie is directed by J.J. Abrams, who kicked off this latest set of films with 2015’s zippily winning The Force Awakens, a retailoring of the Luke Skywalker story that had a pretty well-laid track to follow. Not so for Rise of Skywalker, which tasks itself with an exhausting double duty: tying up the strands of a scattered series in some satisfying fashion while also attending to fussier fans’ Last Jedi tantrums, an atoning for supposed sins. Abrams is a talent, but he’s no match for a corporate mandate that heavy—his sleek, Spielbergian whimsy isn’t enough to cut through all the tortured brand maintenance. But he thrashes away anyway, filling Rise of Skywalker with a million moving parts. It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

It’s technically illegal for me to tell you anything about the plot of Rise of Skywalker, I think, but I’ll risk censure by giving you the vaguest outline. When the movie opens, Rey (Daisy Ridley) is continuing her Jedi training while her friends Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac) are gallivanting around the galaxy getting information about the dreaded First Order from a mole within that fascist organization. Elsewhere, conflicted emo prince Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, entirely checked-out) is in search of something rather serious, something that’s the key to unlocking both the past and the future of this whole dynastic melodrama. I am definitely not supposed to tell you what that something is. I will say, though, that its reveal—and a subsequent, related reveal—would be genuinely frustrating were they not so obvious, and so silly.

I found it hard to care much either way about Rise of Skywalker, neither betrayed nor sated. The movie is too determinedly on its sweaty course, heedless of actual audience interest in its tunnel-visioned quest to be broadly loved or, at least, Internet approved-of. The action set-pieces—a desert chase during an alien version of Burning Man, a rescue mission in a starship brig (unfavorably reminiscent of the one in the first film), an airborne melee full of radio squawk and explosions—all hurry along with perfunctory plainness. There’s a passion lacking in the movie’s big scenes (and, really, in the little ones too), as if Abrams was woken up in the middle of the night and told to rush down to the studio to put out a fire started by some intern named Rian.

In that way, the film is an interesting study in how mega studios react to fan feedback, a whole movie crafted out of Sonic the Hedgehog’s retextured fur. There doesn’t seem to be any real organic idea animating Rise of Skywalker; instead it feels cobbled together from notes stuffed in the suggestion boxes of Reddit and Twitter. Which is awfully cynical. (The way this film handles the unfairly maligned Last Jedi character played by Kelly Marie Tran—which is to say, by completely sidelining her for this last outing—feels like a bad concession to bad people.)

It’s sad, too, all this lifeless bombast made to appease some vague idea of a pure Star Wars fan. I don’t think Rise of Skywalker is ill-intentioned, exactly—it’s not malevolent like some joyless tentpole films are. But it takes no pleasure in its own existence, weakly adding some cutesiness here and there to liven things up (mostly in the form of a new droid whose existence feels redundant at best) but otherwise shuffling around morosely as it does what it thinks it needs to, piteously unaware that it didn’t have to be like this.

Or, I dunno, maybe it did. Maybe there was no way Disney was going to allow a final (for now) chapter that takes any lively risks, that doesn’t tightly bind the latest IP to the original IP, a snug package of content that can self-reinforce as it appreciates in value, sitting and fermenting in the newly ajar Disney vault. Maybe Rise of Skywalker is mere fait accompli, the inevitably boring end to all the fun. (There was some fun along the way!) In that, the movie could be a valuable life lesson for its younger viewers: get your kicks out in your first couple acts, kids, because the final one is gonna be about settling accounts and trying to graft some canned sense of profundity on to it all before you’re done.

Oof. I don’t want to end this review on too much of a down note. So, here are some things I did like about Rise of Skywalker. In one sequence we see the hulking wreck of the Death Star from Return of the Jedi, looming in the distance as a potent, and poignant, reminder of all the stars and all the wars that have come before. There’s a deliciously hammy turn from a particular actor whose name I won’t mention, but you’ll know who I’m talking about when you see them. And, it must be said, there is a sweet new lil’ alien guy that we meet in the movie, a wee tinkerer named Babu Frik who has a funny voice (done by the great Shirley Henderson) and is very small and has a frown. With his grumpy old man moue, he could be the miniature Mr. Wilson to Baby Yoda’s Dennis the Menace, maybe.

Which, hey, reminds me: if you want some of the real good times of Star Wars, all that scrappy space marauding and oddball pluck that made the original films so endearing, you could just watch The Mandalorian on Disney+. Your subscription fee will be less than the cost of a ticket, and you won’t have to worry about parking. Which is exactly the kind of mundane thing you worry about when you get older, once life’s giddy wonder has dimmed and begins to, all too often, give way to the wan disappointments of responsibility.

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