Epic movie.

Rating: 9/10 (15 November 2017)

This is how a Star Wars film should be; an independent free-standing movie and not just a copy/ re shoot/ of older Star Wars movie(s). This movie is obviously a "fan- service" movie, but it is able to stand on its own enough to be a regular, non-Star Wars movie.
As war/ combat action-adventure movie, the pace is very quick, with nary a breath of respite in-between scene and location changes. Things happen so quickly it is easy to miss the details. For example, on Jedha, Cassian tells Jyn that his contact went missing. His contact isn't missing, Cassian kills him in a previous scene when escaping some Storm Troopers.
There are a few sour notes. The use of CGI for Tarkin and young Princess Leia, for example, is absurd and pretentious. Why? It would've been better if they had real life, flesh and blood actors portraying Tarkin and the Princess. Do the filmmakers think audiences are so stupid that they have to be spoon fed a character that looks exactly like Tarkin or Leia? Or did they do it just because they could? That's an Empire-type arrogance, right there.
Another sour note is Diego Luna's performance. He didn't quite gel to the character of a tough, vicious, hard-bitten, cynical, warrior.
All in all, this is a good first step in reviving the franchise. Instead of retreading the old Skywalker story, this movie begins to open up the Star Wars universe to a broader feature film world, not just comic books and novelizations