Review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) by Fulle — 20 Dec 2016

It might be unpopular opinion with some Star Wars fans, but I hate this movie. I'll explain.

Firstly, a lot of what makes Star Wars, Star Wars, is absent. No Jedi vs Sith light saber fights here. No Jedi at all actually. Vader is a fun presence in the movie, while he's on screen for all of 5 minutes in a 2 hour movie, but he's only in it for 5 minutes. There's a lot of little references to A New Hope, that I'm sure fans enjoyed, but they're pretty forced.

Jedi aside, one of my favorite things about the original trilogy was the banter between Leia and Han. Nothing really resembling that here. Or the daring getaways in the millennium falcon.... again, not really.

What there is here, is a by the numbers simple rebel rebellion war movie, crippled by a need to give constant nostalgic nods to better movies of the past, and a PG-13 rating. I hear people calling this one "gritty". Compared to what exactly? Certainly not compared to an actual war movie, like this is doing a poor job of trying to mimic. Gritty compared to a Disney cartoon? Well, maybe not even that. No cussing, no blood, no dark references of any kind... This is a wannabe war movie sanitized for little kids.

That's a problem, however, since the first 2 thirds of the movie involves a LOT of standing around talking, nothing happening, with boring characters. Children will be bored. Very bored. Adults who aren't huge Star Wars fans should be bored. It's a stupid predictable plot, with paper thin characters, and bad dialogue. Trying to end on a positive note.... There was a good scene with Vader (about 3 minutes long), that I enjoyed, and K-2SO can be pretty funny sometimes. So, about maybe 10 minutes of good stuff in this 2 hour movie for this guy. What do I have this at? A 4? Thinking about this better, lets lower that down a notch. A 3. For the 3 good minutes that had Vader doing cool stuff.