The Rise of Skywalker is a lawyerly movie. Emotion, style, theme, etc., are less important than the esoteric rules it follows. Compare Palpatine's urging Luke Skywalker to kill him in Return of the Jedi with his urging Rey to kill him here. With Luke, the concern was that killing someone out of anger is wrong. With Rey, it's that if she does so as part of some ritual, properly performed, the spirit of the Sith will possess her. He gets her to agree to kill him by threatening the lives of everyone in the Resistance, and telling her she can save them if she kills him.
In fact, Rey would have been killing Palpatine for the same reason Darth Vader did in Return, namely, to save someone else's life. But she still would have suffered the same consequences Luke would have suffered had he struck down Palpatine in anger. The significance of killing a Sith Lord is no longer determined by personal character. Rather, it's about being in the proper location, having a faceless chorus chant the proper incantations, and so on.
Now, Palpatine's defeat in Return of the Jedi is no deep philosophical text, and many are put off by its hasty "redemption" of Vader. Nevertheless, many more are deeply affected by it as the culmination of the original Star Wars trilogy, and the fact that its climax hinges on some matter of personal edification is at least a small part of that.
Perhaps what The Rise of Skywalker's approach shows is that today, people are less interested in personal struggles and more interested in double binds created by bureaucratic rules. But the rules are never really broken or overcome in this film. It's more like it just forgets about them. Also, while the film's marketing basically responded directly to the demands of some viewers, those demands had nothing to do with this. Rather, they had to do with the inane backlash to The Last Jedi.
I liked some parts of The Last Jedi. It is by far the best-looking of the new trilogy, and in the first half of the film, it times its switches between Rey's and Kylo Ren's storylines consistently enough that you start to be able to anticipate them. Then, it exploits that anticipation by crossing Rey and Kylo Ren's stories. Overall, I did not think it was very good. I agree with the criticisms that the scenes on Canto Bight add little to the film and go on way too long, and that its treatment of the politics of the war is too cursory and superficial to justify itself. But it was obvious that a good portion of the vitriol it received came from incuriosity and shallow nostalgia.
The much louder and more frequently-echoed criticisms are that the death of Snoke and reveal of Rey's parentage were unsatisfying, and that it "assassinates Luke's character." Honestly, it baffles me that anyone gave enough of a shit about Snoke to be disappointed when he died. Nothing about The Force Awakens gave us any reason to believe that the mystery of Snoke's background would be remotely interesting. Please recall that the original trilogy revealed nothing at all about Palpatine's background. And even if the point the film was trying to make by Rey's parentage was trite, there's no good reason for her to be part of any galactic dynasty.
As for Luke, I'm not even sure what part of The Last Jedi people are talking about when they say it assassinated his character. His criticism of the Jedi Order consists of basically the same points that fans of the prequels—surely the biggest of all Star Wars fans, and often the most insightful—had made for years before The Last Jedi was ever conceived. A better guess is that they're referring to the scene in which Luke reveals his history with Kylo Ren. But all things considered, I don't agree that Luke was well-characterized enough in the original trilogy that one can assume that something like that would never happen. Besides, the scene from the original trilogy in which Luke's moral character is most important is the scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which he confronts his own potential for evil and sees his own face behind Vader's mask.
Despite The Rise of Skywalker's capitulation to these people's demands, the film's reception by both critics and audiences was mixed, not clearly good by any means. I think this is appropriate, because I understand that some people liked the movie, but also think this is one of the worst pieces of garbage I've ever seen, down there with Jurassic World and Captain America: Civil War. It's not quite as bad as Rats, but it is more cynical.
Infamously, we get the line "somehow, Palpatine returned." Consider this article. It argues that this line is defensible, because Star Wars really shouldn't need to explain much, since the Force can explain anything, and because there are tie-ins explaining it. It completely misses that the problem with this line is that Palpatine shouldn't have been in this movie at all.
The sole function of his presence is to capitalize on hypothetical connections between objects of fandom, the promise of tie-ins explaining shit like this. We see the same thing now with the after-credits scenes of superhero movies, most recently Black Adam. They get breathlessly excited press, but about what? They play up excitement about the idea of hypothetical future movies and express none about the actual, existing movies they're asking you to watch. (Update: Black Adam isn't getting a sequel.)
Roger Ebert's review of 2009's Fanboys made observations about the audiences this kind of stuff is trying to appeal to. I actually think his characterization is unfair. Some people do have profound experiences with films like this (though I assume the filmmakers achieve this by accident). There's more creativity in the communities he's talking about than he acknowledges, and the behaviors he criticizes also exist among people like me, just about films like Citizen Kane rather than Star Wars. I cannot say I'm personally interested in Star Wars fan works but all kinds of things can happen when you give people the chance to make their own contributions.
But The Rise of Skywalker isn't fan work. The fans can make anything they want, speculate however they want. The Rise of Skywalker is constrained. Its inability to commit to anything betrays a fear of straying too far from what it assumes audiences already know, and an expectation that you will get excited by shibboleths rather than any kind of intense or emotional experience. There is no discernible purpose behind it, or sense that anyone was really interested in telling this story.
Rather, it feels like it's spitballing, a series of moments loosely connected and overturning each other. Chewbacca dies, then he doesn't. C3PO dies, then he doesn't. Rey is revealed to be a descendant of Sheev, but announces that her name is now "Rey Skywalker," demonstrating that what we once thought was a story about everyman underdogs fighting an evil empire was actually about clashing royal families. Princess Leia is present in this movie, but whenever it feels like she should say or do something, she doesn't, because Carrie Fisher tragically died before her role in this film could be completed.
Maybe you care more about fandom than movies. And maybe that means there's something in The Rise of Skywalker for you that I can't see. But wouldn't you like the people behind the scenes to be at least as enthusiastic as you are?
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