Rogue One: The Return of the Market Research Based Movie-making

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2016)

Good things first. Compared to "The Force Awakens" - which I, as many, perceived as a giant slap in the face - this does most of the things better. The storyline is no longer reduced to a borderline plagiaristic "homage" of Lucas's work, the screenplay does not feel like it is only being held together by duct tape and chewing gum, the characters come across as actual human (or whatever the respective case may be) beings rather than comic figures and the Force is not degraded to being just another useful superpower. The bad news: the storyline is thin and predictable, the screenplay chaotic in places (especially in the beginning), the characters still unrelatable and badly lacking development and the Force only an afterthought.
The ultimate reason I cannot recommend this as a good movie to watch - and in my view the root of much of the above evil - is that I see the cardinal flaw of "TFA" largely repeated: the notion that you can make a good movie not by setting out to tell an authentic story, but by trying to guess what people might want to see and then showing them just that. In this case, the main guiding principle seems to have been: "Let's just find out what people did not like about TFA and avoid that". Take for instance the way that the movie desperately tries being "dark" - in my view an obvious response to one of TFA's major criticisms being that it was perceived by many as childish and shallow. One character after another is killed off on screen in pursuit of demonstrating to us how dark the movie is. Unfortunately, because of the lack of real character development, the wooden acting and the apparent fear to loose focus groups by wading too far into the tragic, what could have had a true dramatic impact instead turns into a monotonous march of unrelatable and unlikable figures from their mostly forgettable introductions to their very predictable and inconsequential deaths. Maybe it's just me, but after watching the movie I honestly could not immediately recall the name of a single one of them.
Like so many other recent Hollywood products, this movie leaves me feeling reminded of an old episode of "The Simpsons" where executives come up with the idea of creating the perfect kids show by basing it on what the children themselves say they would enjoy watching. The end result is a self-contradicting unoriginal mess that most likely none of the children would watch. Now I agree that this is a stark simplification that is not universally applicable, but it hopefully at least illustrates my point. At a minimum, Lucas understood that in the end of the day, movie-making is all about the art of telling a good story. Unless Disney remembers this simple truth, movie theaters will start to stay empty sooner or later, no matter the amount of market research.