Generic Action Flick with Star Wars branding

Rating: 3/10 (26 December 2016)

Rogue One is the story of the Rebels who fight to acquire the plans to the Death Star that Princess Leia has at the start of Episode IV. The cast includes a Rebel assassin, a wise-cracking robot, and a girl whose farming family is invaded by Stormtroopers and her mother killed while her father is drug off. Fifteen years later, she's back, trying to get the plans to the Death Star from her father so that the Rebellion can destroy the superweapon.
This is a generic modern action movie with the Star Wars branding on it. The first third or so is disjointed. While unlike The Force Awakens it feels like it is telling its own story, and it feels like it fits into the verse, it also feels like it is disconnected from it - a bunch of people fight and die, all to set up a plot point at the start of Episode 4.
There are two real problems:
1) The movie is poorly plotted. The start of the movie is disjointed; there's a bunch of scenes awkwardly stuck together that don't really end up feeling like they properly stick to each other. Later on, there's literally an entire planet that the group goes to in the middle of the film which serves no purpose whatsoever. It could have been cut and they wouldn't have had a problem – indeed, one of the characters in the movie even specifically suggests not going to that planet, instead suggesting first going to the final planet where the climax of the movie ultimately happens.
Even the final battle sequence doesn't feel particularly well tied- together. In the original Star Wars, every death in the final sequence felt like it was directed towards the goal of defeating the Death Star – and every death made it feel like the rebels were that much closer to failure. In the climactic battle at the end of this movie, however, many of the good guys who die are nearly faceless, and even the named characters' deaths feel like they're extraneous to the plot – simply being killed off after they complete some task, both obviously and arbitrarily. And frankly, one of them simply dies pointlessly, with no actual purpose to his death, while doing something that didn't matter at all to the climax of the movie.
This results in the ending of the movie feeling like it is kind of a generic action sequence where only a small portion of what we're seeing actually matters. Only one death there actually felt at all tragic, and that was the one character who was actually directly contributing to their success at the time of their death. There's little coherence to the final scene.
2) The characters aren't particularly memorable. K-2SO, the reprogrammed imperial droid, is amusing and is the most memorable character in the movie. Almost all of the movie's laugh lines are directed at him. Chirrut Imwe, the blind monk with faith in the force, has some memorability, and there's at least one good laugh line directed at him. Saw Gerra, the rebel extremist at the start of the movie, seems like he might be vaguely interesting, but ultimately very little is done with him before he is unceremoniously killed off towards the end of the first act.
Everyone else – including the two leading characters, were pretty non-memorable. I could barely even remember their names after I left the theater. And that's never a really good sign. Not caring about your main cast, and them feeling like they're kind of generic action movie heroes, just makes it hard to care about anything else in the movie.
Ultimately, this isn't really something you need to watch. There are better action movies and movies with better plots. There isn't even a light saber battle in this movie. In the end, it feels like a bunch of references to the original Star Wars trilogy, particularly A New Hope, all stuck together in an attempt to make Disney lots of money with the brand name.
It will work. But it shouldn't. There are better movies for you to spend your time and money on.