Star wars: rogue one is overrated

Thanks, Percy. I love a good Star Wars debate. "It's overrated. " Meaning that critics valued Rogue One more highly than the movie deserved. Well, the most popular way to summarize and quantify the critical take is to examine a movie"s metascore on metacritic.com: http://www.metacritic.com... Rogue One"s aggregate score is 65 on a scale of 1-100 which is in the green zone or "generally favorable review" rating but definitely on the low side. Since most of the ratings aggregated use a more limited scale (5 stars, 1-10, thumbs up, etc), Rogue One is only one or two bad reviews short of dropping into the dreaded yellow zone or "average review" rating. That"s not where Percy would place Rogue One, though. Percy says Rogue One is "still a good movie," which means that Percy would probably give Rogue One no less than 61 (the bottom metascore for a favorable review). At most, Percy is quibbling about about a 4% deviation between his opinion and the critics" aggregate rating. On a 5 star scale, the critics" metascore would translate to 3 stars. To remain consistent with Percy"s "good" review, the lowest star rating he could give is also 3 stars, since 2 " stars translates to "mixed" or "average" quality. We can see, therefore, that Percy rates Rogue One about the same as the critics do, perhaps a bit more or less but by no more than a half star (or a simple rounding error). Percy"s thesis stands quantifiably disproved. Now let's shoot down Percy"s minor quibbles: "for a start, there are so many references to darth sidious, but he never once appears." Also true of Episode IV - A New Hope. Grand Moff Tarkin says: "The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away". Would Percy maintain that Episode IV is also a lesser movie because the Emperor never appears? This is a common fantasy trope: Sauron never appeared in the Lord of the Rings books, Voldemort was unresolved in the first two movies and didn't appear at all in "The Prisoner of Azkaban." [1] Not showing the monster in the first act is a fairly common way to build suspense in a narrative: think about the alien in "The Thing," or " Alien" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or "Predator." We"re meant to be imagining darker potentials that our heroes can't plan for, much less overcome. "you are introduced to so many new characters, but they all die at the end." Is Star Wars IV weaker because Obi Wan dies at the end? Or because Han Solo dies at the end of Force Awakens? Self-sacrifice is one of the most common themes in storytelling- the stakes wouldn't be that interesting if the heroes didn't croak off now & again. The point of the story is how the Death Star schematics were stolen and handed off to Princess Leia. If these characters survived, we"d be left wondering where they are in the main narrative, why Tarkin and Vader stopped pursuing them, whether they still factor in the story to come. The heroes" deaths here make R2D2"s mission all the more desperate & Luke"s destruction of the Death Star all the more just. "There's no opening crawl at the start of the movie, like there is for EVERY other star wars movie." Every other Star Wars movie is an episode is a single story- the story of the Skywalker family. Rogue One is a sidebar, an excursion, and need not be burdened with a cheesy optical effect from the mid-70"s. Calling it "EPISODE III.V" would have been weird. And besides, if they had explained everybody"s backstory in the opening, the characters would not have had much to talk about in between battle scenes. "There's no lightsaber duel. I know, there was a lightsaber scene(which was epic) but it felt wedged in, like Disney knew they had to have one appear in the movie, because wouldn't Darth Vader get his Stormtroopers to kill all the rebels instead?" Make up your mind, Percy. Was it epic or overrated? Wasn"t it kind of cool to show Vader fast on Princess Leia"s trail & create a stylistic transition to 40 year old film styles? Keep in mind that narratively, the Jedi order is destroyed and lightsabers are outlawed. There are no lightsaber duels because there are no Jedi characters in this movie- setting up the desperate, lonely, iconic re-appearance of Obi-Wan in New Hope. If you think Vader"s attack felt wedged how much more wedged in would a second lightsaber feel, wielded by some surprise or random Jedi for the purposes of some superfluous duel. One of the particular problems for a franchise suffering from an overly indulged fan base such as Star Wars, is the fear of of original storytelling. Some fans are so insistent upon re-living their favorite moments from previous films, re-visiting their favorite characters that they reject new narratives and demand stagnation, choking the franchise to death. I, for one, don't need a lightsaber duel in every Star Wars movie. I"m tired of watching Death Stars blow up. I want Kylo Ren to be more than just a Darth Vader repeat. The New Order stormtroopers are just re-hashes of Imperial stormtroopers and Supreme Leader Snokes is just another Darth Sidious- Boring. To Percy and all those who would judge a franchise by how perfectly it mimics the most popular elements over & over again, I would suggest that storytelling is best when the audience gives the story a chance to breathe and evolve over time. Too much of Star Wars is already trying to be cute and to please every demographic. I"d be interested in seeing aliens who live nothing like humans or to explore the seeming sentience of droids. If the Star Wars franchise is really going to continue, I"d like to look around the Galaxy a little, rather than loop through the same old story. I look forward to Percy"s responses in the 2nd round. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org...