Rogue One isn’t a movie about characters, it is a movie about the state of the galaxy and how that affects the characters living in it, and to that end, I feel like the characters were kinda meant to blend into the backdrop a bit, because the real characters of the film are the Rebellion and the Empire. It’s just not a character film, and I don’t think it was meant to be one.
I don’t feel like the character writing was especially weak: was Han any more developed at the end of Star Wars than Cassian? Ignore Empire and Jedi and Awakens. Leaving the theater, I felt like I knew each character’s archetype and story as much as I do at the end of Star Wars. And I felt the story writing was very strong and all worked and made sense.
Rogue One isn’t about heroes or romantic ideas of daring escapes. It’s about normal people defined by off-screen events (mostly) who sacrifice themselves to further a larger cause. It’s a war movie (well, war movie lite) in that way. They just straight up die, and it’s not heroic or romanticized or pretty or glorious. It’s (mostly) quick and ugly. Rogue One is more Black Hawk Down than Saving Private Ryan: a dramatized telling of “real” events, almost a documentary.
The point of Rogue One was to expand and flesh out the universe we know, not give us a bunch of new characters to love who we’ll never see again. They served their purpose and did their duty. And I think the movie did an incredible job showing us different sides of the universe we know without shrinking it or blowing the chance (the infrastructure and politics of the Empire, the seedy underbelly and politics of the Rebellion, the badass fighter side of Vader), it showed us a lot of things we had always assumed, but had never been seen and they pulled it all off while tying it all into the OT and did it without a hitch, which is an amazing feat in and of itself.
A great movie, I think. I’ll post more once I see it again.