As I was preparing to do some housework, I found myself loading up an old episode of Blank Check, and I'm thinking they're generally at their best when they talk about Star Wars... how about Rise of Skywalker? As I'm listening I'm anticipating jokes before they happen ahead of time, and I realize that I've listened to this podcast episode about a movie many times over how many times I saw the Rise of Skywalker (once).
Even the prequel movies I eventually went back to watch when they came to video. They're bad movies, but the things that are happening in them are interesting, at least. I like the design work, the way you can see the roots of Imperial tech in the aesthetics of the Clone Wars, the feeling of being in the old Republic, I like being in the space of the prequels even if I don't really care for the movies too much. There's a lot to dig into (which I think the Clone Wars cartoon makes a lot of hay out of, even if I'm not interested in watching them). But I find myself almost incapable of giving the slightest shit about what happens around and after the sequel trilogy.
I think a large part of the problem was that the sequels were afraid of being too "political" (in a procedural way, not in a 'we'll alienate our audience if we seem too left-or-right' way). They wanted to veer away from talk about trade routes and senate meetings. And they solved that by blowing up the capital of the republic in the first movie. We don't even see any of the new republic. Just the scrappy band of Resistance fighters. The only glimpses we see of this Canto Bight, where Johnson deliberately dips a toe back into how this universe functions outside of lightsaber battles and dogfighting, and even that is in the context of how it relates to the war machines of the First Order and Resistance. There is almost no worldbuilding to speak of, and so the world feels extraordinarily small.
This, I think, is an extreme overcorrection. There was a lot of problems about the prequels, but was the focus on how the republic functions one of them? Think of the original trilogy, where you actually do get a decent amount of worldbuilding. When Leia gets captured by Vader and claims that her capture will put the Senate in an uproar. The "board meeting" scene where Tarkin announces the Senate is abolished and the regional governors will take sovereignty. I Empire, where Lando talks about how he's managed to remain independent, and talks about trade guilds. Return of the Jedi, where we finally get to meet the emperor and... yes, it's a Special Edition addition, but we see how the galaxy reacts to the fall of the Empire.
And now we have Andor! Andor has so much worldbuilding in it. We learn about the parts of the empire which are much more insidious, more colonialist than fascist. You get the impression of an Empire that is insecure, that uses 'softer' power (e.g. their gradual plan to erase Aldhani culture). We see an Empire that feels more like it's being held up by inertia rather than any active force. We see how the Empire gradually becomes more fascist as more of a resistance forms against it. We learn about how fractious the anti-Imperial sentiments are and an inkling of why the Alliance part of "Rebel Alliance" is so important. How the Empire uses a prison-industrial complex to supply a military-industrial complex. We get a look into the Imperial senate, which seems to be in a permanent lame duck session. It's good food!
And I hope it raises the standard for Star Wars in the future, even if we are only given another season. People often talk about how Andor is good in spite of being Star Wars, but I think this is an oversimplification: Andor takes the interesting, sometimes deliberately ignored parts of Star Wars that have always been there and brought them to the foreground, complicated them, made them realer. Andor couldn't exist without Star Wars.
Anyway, I guess my point is it still is very funny to me that Rise of Skywalker tanked 'mainstream' Star Wars so heavily, especially when Disney invested so heavily into that world for Galaxy's Edge and their thousands-of-dollars-a-night fake cruise ship. It's so much schadenfreude. And I generally want Star Wars to be good, but it's still good to see Disney lose.