I never posted my thoughts on Rogue One after seeing it, so I’ll do that that now because I feel like it.
★★
I was entertained by the extreme amount of fanservice that most of the film was drenched in; though, I was annoyed by some of it at times, when it went too far, and after the initial state of watching the film wore off, most of it just annoyed me because it didn’t make sense. The plot and the execution of the plot in the film were not to my liking, and it sometimes also just didn’t make sense. The first third of the film was rather boring (with small stretches of boring throughout), and the characters were boring and forgetable.
Gin Erso was not even remotely interesting to me. Once getting past the opening exposition, she was just kind of there, doing whatever the plot needed her to do. She didn’t feel like a “strong female lead” character because there was no character to be found.
The Cass man was almost equally uninteresting, though he was just enough more interesting for me to actually want a little more out of him. I didn’t get any of that.
The guy who called their team “Rogue One” was probably the third most interesting character, but he was immediately forgetable because they didn’t develope him either.
The Forceman was definitely the most interesting character. Like, he was the only legitimately interesting character in the film. I thought it was great when he fought the storm troopers with his bowstaff skills. It reminded me of how I thought the Jedi should have fought in the prequels after seeing Essence of the Force.
The Forceman’s dudebro was pretty cool, though I thought it was dumb when he was pretty much just aimbotting everyone.
The cheap-humor droid was a little bit entertaining, but again, he was just cheap humor; kind of like C-3PO, only C-3PO actually had a developed character and therefore a reason and an excuse to be the silly voice of comic relief; C-3PO was also more funny because of what his character acted like, rather than just spouting sarcastic remarks for no reason everytime he was on screen.
CG Tarkin looked bad, but not as bad as I would have expected; but he shouldn’t have been CG faced anyway because the guy who played him in the film already looks so much like Peter Cushing that it would only take some makeup and maybe small prostetics to get him looking the same. And CG Leia was really bad, and showing her at all was also unnecessary.
Now, the plot/story and the execution of said plot/story.
The whole thing felt rather weak. Or should I say, weakly written and developed. I don’t like the idea that the weak point on the Death Star was built in by a sabatour. When I thought about how the rebels stole the plans, I thought that they would have found out through some sort of intelligence that it had finished construction. So, they realize that to destroy it and stop the threat, they need to find the build plans and exploit whatever they can find (as was alluded to by the smart Imperial man in the round table scene of SW).
Really, it should have just been a fun heist movie like Ocean’s Eleven. No huge battle spectacle was needed at the climax.
And the last scene… I hated it so much. The Vader massacre was almost comically over the top, and the way the plans were brought to the Tantive IV isn’t even what they said happened in SW. “Several transmitions were beamed…” is not the same as “I watched a dude pass a floppy disk through a door after one transmission was beamed to a different ship.” The Tantive IV shouldn’t have even been at the big space battle. The ship that recieved the plans should have beamed several transmitions to them in another location after temporarily escaping.
I think RLM’s videos did a great job analyzing the film, and I have to say that I agree with most of what they thought.