clichéd as hell, cheesy as hell, good as hell

Rating: 7/10 (17 December 2016)

So yeah I really liked rogue one, even though it somehow manages to hit almost all the things I hate in big budget action movies today. This film has some sh**ty characters and cheesy speeches about heroics and yadda yadda yadda. It has jokes that fall flat. It has so many moments that just are not good at all. But if you can get through all of that, this is a really great movie, especially visually. The action scenes are all well shot and exciting, preferring to use practical effects mixed with CGI rather than solely using CG. Honestly, besides one of those "bad guy gets caught monologuing for no reason and dies because of it" and the over the top and sappy character deaths, I pretty much love all the battle scenes/fight scenes from this movie. The costume and alien designs also work really well , just like every other Star Wars movie.
The characters in this movie I found overall more compelling and funny than in episode 7 (although many of them are still very underdeveloped, I personally enjoyed them), and many of them even existed in a morally gray area, which is unexplored territory for this franchise. In fact, this movie does a good job showing that not ever rebel is good, as well as the civilian casualties that are usually cast aside in movies of this nature. "Rogue One" is also very funny at times, where only a few jokes fell flat. Compare that to "The Force Awakens", where I think I actually laughed only a single time throughout the entire movie no matter how hard they forced jokes into it. The "easter eggs" and callbacks in this movie are pretty obviously thrown in your face, but I still enjoyed them and am sure other fans of the series will spend hours jerking off to them, unlike me who only pleasures myself to the soft tears of orphans. The ending of this movie is also very good, and without spoilers I'll just say is a fantastic lead in to "A New Hope". Heck, even the CGI characters this movie "resurrects" from the original trilogy look amazing (although not perfect just yet). Overall I actually love Rogue One, but its glaring flaws hold it back from being anything other than a solidly good movie. Oh, and this is probably a given at this point considering even the prequels did this right, but the movie's score is pretty phenomenal I'll give it an 8/10 or maybe a 7.5/10 I'm not sure yet why am I so indecisive.