Not a Star Wars movie and just bad

Rating: 5/10 (28 February 2017)

Rogue One isn't a terrible movie, but in my opinion it is bad. It has very few characters which I cared to learn more about after their initial introduction and in the end, I cared about nobody's death. The pace of the movie was far too quick with an extremely saturated cast of characters. The first 15 minutes I literally laughed out loud as a new planet was introduced on screen every 3-4 minutes with a name I was not interested to remember as it was a place I had no connection to, and never would. I didn't know anybody's name or care at the end because so much was thrown at me in 2 hours and I didn't love any of the humor/backstory of the cast. Jyn was relatable as her parents protected her from the Empire and her mother died to save her. However, I thought her motivations for the rest of the movie as an adult were strange and unexplained other than wanting to find her father for answers. The BEST part about the movie was the spaceship battle in the third act of the movie; I was in awe at how good the action looked and sounded. I thoroughly enjoyed that....then got cut back to characters dying on a beach like Saving Private Ryan.....why? This is not Star Wars, this is terrible.
The most confusing character was Saw Gerrera (I had to Google that name, I didn't hear or remember the name even while I was watching the movie). What was his relationship to Jyn and why should I care about his movement or town or? What? Why is he weezing and Forest Whitaker talking like that? It makes the expositional dialogue even harder to understand as the movie in introducing characters are such a rapid rate, I can't remember anybody's story or why the main characters are moving from one planet quickly to another. This was suuuuch a bad character, I shed no tears as he died and I quickly realized "Ah, everybody is going to die at the end, aren't they. Makes no difference to me."
And here comes, in my opinion, the worst aspect of the movie, in that I feel the movie never had to be made. The whole premise, from how I observed the story, was to explain the engineered weakness of the Death Star by Jyn's father so that Luke and the Resistance have an explanation how they could topple the Empire in A New Hope. Who cares? Because I definitely did not. You are supposed to suspend your disbelief when watching fictional movies and the thermal exhaust port on the Death Star was OBVIOUSLY a deus ex machina for Luke to begin his path towards power and learning to become a Jedi, for Anakin to meet his son and ultimately restore balance to the Force by killing the Emperor. Are we next going to explain why Death Star II had a flight path from the outside to the core, so that Lando could destroy that Death Star now? I don't think so, because the audience bought that such a movie trope needed to be there so that the story could keep moving.
Please do not make more movies like this, with characters rapidly being introduced then dying with little emotional weight, with planets rapidly being cast on screen then forgotten as they are not visited for very long, and please forget about explaining small details in the Star Wars story and instead create new intellectual scenes in the Star Wars galaxy. Create new characters separate from the main conflict or a long ago back story to the Jedi/Sith conflict. People care about Anakin Skywalker and his story, about the Force! Not side stories with ultimately little meaning. Just my thoughts. This movie gets a 5/10, maybe even lower if I would see it again. Oh and I liked the Tarkin CGI and thought he was a good character, however I thought the Leia CGI was unnecessary and almost symbolism for how not needed this film was in the Star Wars saga.