This review contains several spoilers, please read carefully.
Summary: All in all, it's a worthwhile war story for everyone not involved with the franchise, and a highly successful spin off for the fans. This is not a bad film, you should see it. The Force is with this one :)
Pros:
the finale, it's ridiculously good; cast is good, acting is OK; great atmosphere of a real war movie; alternative to legends, skywalkers and lightsabers is a success; visuals are fantastic by default; it's far from a giant flop, for the hype these movies get this is a success in itself.
Cons:
weak first half of the film; vast majority of new characters are empty, undeveloped; new planets, their number and visual style choice, their numerosity; the way they explained the "Rogue One" name, it's simply atrocious; dialogue is clunky at times; musical score is sadly underwhelming.
Grade: 7 / 10
Elaboration:
Being a Star Wars fanboy I had no choice but to go see the movie at midnight in the middle of the week. Happy to say that I was not disappointed and I sure didn't feel I wasted my sleep and money over this. If you are a neutral person, you'd probably give it a 6 or even a 5, but this one is far from being a disgrace that some people may call it. For us fans, just seeing our favorite Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia is reason enough to rate it a bit higher, surely you understand.
This brings us to the first hotly controversial subject: the use of computer-rendered deceased or aged actors. Yeah it looks a bit weird and may be off-putting, but I still think that this was required and needed for such a film. When your entire set of visuals is carefully modeled after the original 1977 film, it only makes sense to adjust the entire lot of all you've got to that visual style. And the visuals are great, to say the least. The film follows closely to what they had in Episode IV and each costume and starship is as exactly as you'd imagine it to be, or remember it to be from the first film. The only smudge on the visuals is the red-dish hue on Vader at times, he is best kept entirely black, with no colors involved. Other than that, all is fine with the picture, its somewhat bleak in the first half, but this seems to be a mood-setter, it gets better as the film goes on.
Speaking of Tarkin, I really got confused by the Krennic character. Of course, there was a novel released for this, describing the events that happened with the characters before the film, but even being a fan I didn't get a chance to read it yet and few people who will go to see the film will. I like one opinion where it should have been just the Tarkin as the chief bad guy - it makes total sense, too: he terorrizes the poor rebels in the prequel, survives, semi-victorious, and then the superheroes put him in his place in the original film. Unfortunately, Krennic is not the only character who can and will perplex you, the entire poster-cast could have been successfully cut in half and it would still be a good story. They all just seem superfluous to the straight-line script that has only one major plot driver: get the plans to the Death Star. As a result of all of them sharing the screen time, the characters feel shallow and underdeveloped, only Jyn gets nearly enough attention. With the baggage that the franchise has, Vader alone esily eclipses any other character even with the short screen time he gets. It felt like Mon Mothma was more valuable to the story than some of the main characters, come on, this is not good.
Though the characters are victims of a poor script, the actors themselves are good and deliver a good performance. Still, unfortunately, nothing spectacular to see here, even if you consider a great droid by Alan Tudyk, he's essentially a funnier, more mature C3PO. And speaking of mature 16+, the idea for the film is gorgeous and the atmosphere is executed really well. You really feel scared and disgusted at times, this is REAL WAR, where people die, betray and do all kinds of grisly stuff. Considering Star Wars films traditionally were kiddie space operas, and this is still a kiddy space opera, the style of this one is still a major breakthrough for the franchise: it's literally never been that dark, even with Han Solo getting murdered by his son. The only blemish on all of this is a very long and tedious first half of the film, my girlfriend literally fell asleep for a dozen of minutes because the first half is really poor, has a lot of un-needed characters and scenes could have been done differently. I really can't explain this, it's just bad and boring, this is a fault of the writers, to the point of: Saw Gerrera who? Just cut him out entirely and it will be better if you just mention him in dialogue, that's it. As noted above, the fanservice scenes are used heavily but they don't distract you from the story, much rather add to it. When we watched Episode IV and its opening crawl we all wanted to learn how did actually many agents die to bring Luke Skywalker these plans to the Death Star. When comparing a carbon-copy Episode 7 to Rogue One, the latter does it better. For technically a spin off, that is a huge success. It has its rightful and well-deserved place between the original film and the final official prequel, even though the script is flawed in some areas.
Summary: All in all, it's a worthwhile war story for everyone not involved with the franchise, and a highly successful spin off for the fans. This is not a bad film, you should see it. The Force is with this one :)
Pros:
the finale, it's ridiculously good; cast is good, acting is OK; great atmosphere of a real war movie; alternative to legends, skywalkers and lightsabers is a success; visuals are fantastic by default; it's far from a giant flop, for the hype these movies get this is a success in itself.
Cons:
weak first half of the film; vast majority of new characters are empty, undeveloped; new planets, their number and visual style choice, their numerosity; the way they explained the "Rogue One" name, it's simply atrocious; dialogue is clunky at times; musical score is sadly underwhelming.
Grade: 7 / 10
Elaboration:
Being a Star Wars fanboy I had no choice but to go see the movie at midnight in the middle of the week. Happy to say that I was not disappointed and I sure didn't feel I wasted my sleep and money over this. If you are a neutral person, you'd probably give it a 6 or even a 5, but this one is far from being a disgrace that some people may call it. For us fans, just seeing our favorite Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia is reason enough to rate it a bit higher, surely you understand.
This brings us to the first hotly controversial subject: the use of computer-rendered deceased or aged actors. Yeah it looks a bit weird and may be off-putting, but I still think that this was required and needed for such a film. When your entire set of visuals is carefully modeled after the original 1977 film, it only makes sense to adjust the entire lot of all you've got to that visual style. And the visuals are great, to say the least. The film follows closely to what they had in Episode IV and each costume and starship is as exactly as you'd imagine it to be, or remember it to be from the first film. The only smudge on the visuals is the red-dish hue on Vader at times, he is best kept entirely black, with no colors involved. Other than that, all is fine with the picture, its somewhat bleak in the first half, but this seems to be a mood-setter, it gets better as the film goes on.
Speaking of Tarkin, I really got confused by the Krennic character. Of course, there was a novel released for this, describing the events that happened with the characters before the film, but even being a fan I didn't get a chance to read it yet and few people who will go to see the film will. I like one opinion where it should have been just the Tarkin as the chief bad guy - it makes total sense, too: he terorrizes the poor rebels in the prequel, survives, semi-victorious, and then the superheroes put him in his place in the original film. Unfortunately, Krennic is not the only character who can and will perplex you, the entire poster-cast could have been successfully cut in half and it would still be a good story. They all just seem superfluous to the straight-line script that has only one major plot driver: get the plans to the Death Star. As a result of all of them sharing the screen time, the characters feel shallow and underdeveloped, only Jyn gets nearly enough attention. With the baggage that the franchise has, Vader alone esily eclipses any other character even with the short screen time he gets. It felt like Mon Mothma was more valuable to the story than some of the main characters, come on, this is not good.
Though the characters are victims of a poor script, the actors themselves are good and deliver a good performance. Still, unfortunately, nothing spectacular to see here, even if you consider a great droid by Alan Tudyk, he's essentially a funnier, more mature C3PO. And speaking of mature 16+, the idea for the film is gorgeous and the atmosphere is executed really well. You really feel scared and disgusted at times, this is REAL WAR, where people die, betray and do all kinds of grisly stuff. Considering Star Wars films traditionally were kiddie space operas, and this is still a kiddy space opera, the style of this one is still a major breakthrough for the franchise: it's literally never been that dark, even with Han Solo getting murdered by his son. The only blemish on all of this is a very long and tedious first half of the film, my girlfriend literally fell asleep for a dozen of minutes because the first half is really poor, has a lot of un-needed characters and scenes could have been done differently. I really can't explain this, it's just bad and boring, this is a fault of the writers, to the point of: Saw Gerrera who? Just cut him out entirely and it will be better if you just mention him in dialogue, that's it. As noted above, the fanservice scenes are used heavily but they don't distract you from the story, much rather add to it. When we watched Episode IV and its opening crawl we all wanted to learn how did actually many agents die to bring Luke Skywalker these plans to the Death Star. When comparing a carbon-copy Episode 7 to Rogue One, the latter does it better. For technically a spin off, that is a huge success. It has its rightful and well-deserved place between the original film and the final official prequel, even though the script is flawed in some areas.
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