When it comes to the question of what went wrong with Rise, the only simple answer is, "It wasn't just one thing." While many fans weren't enthralled with some of the bolder narrative choices made by writer/director Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, Rise's seeming preoccupation with undoing many of those choices largely wasn't seen as a great move, either.
Then, there's the return of Palpatine as the Big Bad, with virtually no explanation given as to a) how he survived a tumble down a mile-long shaft on an exploding space station in Return of the Jedi or b) where the hell he's been all this time. The about-face of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo back to the side of light was widely considered to have been poorly and confusingly handled, and the near-exclusion of Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico — a major character in The Last Jedi — simply left a lot of fans peeved.
It's also been pointed out, most succinctly by the Washington Post's Gene Park, that the movie's narrative resembles nothing so much as the plot of a video game, with its over-reliance on "fetch quests" which ultimately proved to be of little to no actual importance. Truly, in contrast to the unified (if also divisive) vision of Star Wars creator George Lucas with his much-reviled prequel trilogy, it took a committee — which included Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, director and co-writer J.J. Abrams, co-writer Chris Terrio, and formerly attached director Colin Trevorrow, who retained a story credit on the film — to craft a conclusion to an epic nine-film series as flat and uninspired as Rise of Skywalker.
