Star Wars fans are a notoriously hard-to-please bunch. I can attest to this as a self-declared obsessive for the past 30 years. The biggest reason for the fandom’s sense of perennial dissatisfaction is an almost religious devotion to the original George Lucas trilogy, that began in 1977 with Star Wars.The devotion is so strong that Lucas’s own return to the Star Wars universe, with the 1999 prequel trilogy, angered, disappointed and divided in equal measure, despite the huge commercial success of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. So when Disney took over the reins for the last trilogy of the trilogies, following its $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, you could — pardon the unavoidable reference to the Force — sense the presence of the looming backlash, long before the first film hit the screens.It should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the most beloved — and repeated — lines of the saga, which has the distinction of appearing in each of the nine films, is filled with foreboding (“I have a bad feeling about this.”) That certainly summed up what I was feeling ahead of Episode IX, The Return of Joy.The first two Disney films of the new trilogy, perhaps a little too mindful of this hard-to-please fan-base, tried to be everything and nothing, to be old and new, to be full of reverence but also, somewhat surprisingly, with more than a little disdain for everything we loved, all at the same time.Also read: Star Wars Saw the Attack on Democracy ComingIf the task facing J.J. Abrams ahead of VII was difficult, he was left with carrying out the mother of all balancing acts when Disney brought him back for Episode IX. Not only did Abrams have to save the fate of sequels from complete disaster, but he also had to come up with an ending that would satisfactorily tie up the entire four-decade-old saga. Talk about mission impossible — blowing up the Death Star was probably easier.Yet in true Star Wars fashion, Abrams has not only pulled it off against the odds, but done even better than that with The Rise of Skywalker. Shorter-than-expected at 140-minutes, Episode IX is as you would expect for the finale, a breathless ride from start to finish.It is difficult to talk about The Rise of Skywalker without giving away details of the plot; suffice it to say it takes off right after the events of VIII. Rey (Daisy Ridley) is in training, while her nemesis Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), now the supreme leader of the First Order, is faced with his next obsessive search — to trace a transmission seemingly from the believed-to-be-long dead Emperor Palpatine, who we thought was thrown to his end by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi.The return of Palpatine was, of course, the big reveal from the trailers of IX, although it was left unclear in what shape or form he would come back. There is also a return for the loveable rogue Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), who is also given the honour of being the character that lets us know they “have a bad feeling” about what is to transpire in the climax.Episode IX has more space for returning characters than the previous films did (which, to be fair, isn’t saying much). The big challenge for Abrams was casting Leia, after the passing away of Carrie Fisher in December 2016. Using filmed footage from Episode VII, Abrams wrote the script around the unused scenes with Fisher, and has brilliantly woven her into the film. Fisher’s presence throughout IX lends the film an added emotional weight, and it’s no surprise that she has a role to play in the most powerful moments.Also read: ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Reveals the Roots of Han’s DreamsYet it is the performances of the four sequel newcomers that carry the film, starting above all with Ridley and Adam Driver who give by far their most complex and nuanced renderings of Rey and Kylo Ren, respectively. John Boyega (Finn) and Oscar Isaac (Poe) are also excellent in their roles leading the resistance.Perhaps the one criticism of the film is that you aren’t given a second to pause and breathe, and there are a couple of a little too obviously convenient plot devices. Yet these are, in the end, minor grouses against the bigger picture, considering Abrams has given us as perfect an ending as we could have hoped for.The early screening that I watched in Shanghai, where the audience was roughly split between a new generation of mostly Chinese younger Star Wars fans and older nostalgia-filled expats, ended with rapturous applause from both parties. It’s another matter whether the rest of theStar Wars fandom will agree with this assessment, given the widely negative initial messages flooding social media – including from many fans who admitted they were yet to see film, but had already decided it was rubbish. Perhaps that’s more of a reflection of the nature of fandom in the age of Twitter than of the film itself.The Rise of Skywalker is by no means a perfect film. But neither were A New Hope nor Return of the Jedi (granted, The Empire Strikes Back comes close). Yet they were films that left us with a lifetime of memories.Ananth Krishnan is a visiting fellow at Brookings India and was previously China correspondent for India Today and The Hindu.