Star Wars: Rise Of Skywalker Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic Scores Highlight Critical Division

The reviews for Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker are in. Unfortunately, it doesn't bode well for the ninth Star Wars film, as many critics felt disappointed with this conclusion. The same sentiment is echoed across the average scores on aggregators Rotten Tomatoes and GameSpot sister site Metacritic. The movie officially hits theaters today, December 20, although the first public showings in the US--where the film is expected to make serious noise at the box office--began on December 19. (A bunch of us have already seen it--check out our review and our roundup of all the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Easter eggs to watch out for!)

Rise of Skywalker currently holds a 54 on Metacritic, with 50 published reviews factoring into the score at the time of writing. Of the 50 presently available, only 16 give the film a positive score of 63 or better. The 34 other reviews score the film negatively, handing it a rating of 60 or lower. Bookending the total number of reviews are two extremely positive (100) and two extremely negative (one 38 and one 30) ratings.

Things don't look too different on Rotten Tomatoes, with Rise of Skywalker earning a 58%. Rotten Tomatoes includes far more reviews, with Rise of Skywalker receiving a whopping 145 entries. Of that number, 84 are considered "Fresh" while 61 are labeled "Rotten." The review aggregator's general consensus says the film "suffers from a frustrating lack of imagination, but concludes this beloved saga with fan-focused devotion."

Rise of Skywalker is only rated higher than Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace on Metacritic, which scored a 51 since the time it released in 1999. The same is similar on Rotten Tomatoes, with Rise of Skywalker outscoring The Phantom Menace (53%) and the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars (18%).

We scored the film a 4/10 in our Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker review, saying, "In the end, it all feels simply empty. It should never be so clear to audiences that something in the filmmaking process has gone so terribly wrong--that the people who made the first film in a trilogy apparently didn't bother to sketch out a plan for the second and third, and that the movies' directors had visions for the series' future that were so fundamentally at odds. Star Wars deserved better."