The reviews are in and they are not good. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker currently has a 58 percent rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Spoiler-free reviews are being published around the web and some clear themes are emerging. One of those is that this final installment is packed with fan service in a way that makes it feel very busy and plot-heavy.

With a group of characters looking for random objects that will provide a map to a legacy character, we’re back to The Force Awakens narrative structure again. That journey takes the crew to several new planets, all of which are bustling with life, aliens, droids, and all sorts of awesome Star Wars background material. Each time the heroes arrive on a planet, something exciting happens—we meet a new character, there’s a battle, a mystery is uncovered, etc. But the repetition is incessant. They’re on one planet, then another. Now a ship. Now a speeder. Now Rey’s off. Now Rey’s back. Now someone is in peril. Now they’re OK. The film moves at a breakneck speed and, as a result, never spends enough time at any of these places or with any of the people. It’s all incredibly rushed and mind-bogglingly cluttered.

I doubt “rushed” and “cluttered” is what director JJ Abrams was going for with this 2 1/2 movie, but maybe that’s better than dull? Still, this does sound like it could be tiresome (minor spoilers here):

Plot developments depend heavily on coincidence and dumb luck, as our heroes keep bumping into clues that lead them ever closer to a tracking device that will point the way to the emperor’s secret lair. At one point they just fall into a cave where they come across a dagger whose edge is covered with runes that describe where the tracking gizmo is hidden. Later when we get a glimpse of the ruins of the Death Star (which is kind of cool), another clue turns out to depend on randomly stumbling across this sight from exactly the right angle. One major plot twist is essentially a rehash; another is just dumb.

One of the things that keeps coming up in reviews is the previous film. Some see this final episode as an attempt to walk back the disastrous Last Jedi and at least try to create something reminiscent of Star Wars:

“Star Wars” has never lacked for velocity but the pace here is schizophrenic. The movie can’t sit still. Everyone’s yelling and most of the bits of humor along the way are too blandly inserted. (C-3PO, at least, is in fine form.) Part of the rush, it seems, is to dismantle some of Johnson’s groundwork and refocus the spine of the story on Rey’s destiny and her complicated relationship with Ren. Whether that’s a gesture to the toxic fandom unleashed by “Last Jedi” or not, some characters suffer for it, most notably Rose.

The problem was never toxic fandom, it was bad writing, though a lot of reviewers failed to see it. It will never cease to amaze me that The Last Jedi earned a 91 percent approval rating from idiot critics while fans have given it a more accurate 43 percent. To this day, some critics still haven’t gotten the message. Here’s A.O. Scott at the NY Times today:

Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place.

You know I’m right, even if you insist on making a case for “The Empire Strikes Back” or “The Last Jedi,” to name the two installments that are usually cited as the best individual movies.

This is like saying that Richard Donner’s Superman and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace are usually pointed to as the best individual films in that series. It’s like saying Aliens and Alien 3 are usually pointed to as the best individual films in the series. No, dummy, they aren’t. I genuinely can’t believe this guy gets paid to write about movies by a major newspaper.

In any case, the Associated Press makes a good point about all of this: “if anything has been proven by the many attempts to rekindle the magic of the original trilogy, it’s that Lucas’ cosmic amalgamation of Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa isn’t so easily refabricated.” That’s true. Lucas himself couldn’t do it with the prequels and JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson failed to do any better with the sequels.

Of course that doesn’t mean they won’t cash in at the box office. Despite the tepid reaction from reviewers this film will probably still make a lot of money and that ensures we’ll see more failed attempts to revisit this in a few years. At least the next installments won’t revolve around forgettable characters murdering off our childhood heroes.