Rogue One:A Well-Thought But Poorly Executed Story

Rating: 4/10 (31 January 2017)

Rogue One is a first spin off in a Star Wars franchise and a first movie in Star Wars Anthology series. It's set right before "A New Hope" and shows how the rebels stole the Death Star plans. It's directed by Gareth Edwards, the director of Godzilla (2014), which I loved, bit still I didn't feel a lot of excitement going into this, but I did expect it to be pretty good. And it actually managed to disappoint me.
It's not entirely bad, I will say what I liked about it first. Darth Vader, he shows up in only two scenes, but boy does he make an impact in those two scenes. We are reminded of why he is one of the best villains ever and the scene near the end, shows us the Vader we all missed since episode VI, but never got. Well, we've got it now and that scene at the end may quite possibly be the best in the series. The movie has some visually wonderful moments and the action is well- handled. The story helps close a plot-hole about Death Star from a New Hope, I really appreciated that. And now I have a new favorite droid in the series - K-2SO. That guy is brilliant. If you love sarcastic and sassy characters like I do, you will love K-2SO.
The sad part is, those are probably the only good parts. Darth Vader is great, yes, but he's barely in the movie at all. Instead we get an extremely uninteresting and paper-thin villain. And why waste such a good opportunity? I'm not asking for Vader to be a main villain, but if you have a chance to put him in the movie, use it a bit more. That's too good of an opportunity to miss. And yet they miss. I just talked about uninteresting villain, and the rest of the characters aren't much better. Some of them may actually end up being interesting if they aren't immediately killed and we're moved to the next plot point. I didn't even care about the main character. We barely knew who she was too. We're just watching things happen before eyes, but we don't feel it. At least I didn't. And how could I? The story itself is good, but it's so poorly executed and fails to grab any interest. Except if you only want to see action. The movie also had re-shoots. And it shows. It really does show. Everyone complained about Suicide Squad for that, and no one complains about this. I'm not a DC fanboy, so if I sound like one, I apologize. But I liked Suicide Squad. It was choppy, yes, but it wasn't terrible. It had the charisma, it had the appeal and it was a lot more fun. Here, nah. There is barely anything interesting about this movie and how this story was executed. We just jump from a plot point to a plot point like nothing happened.
The movie just doesn't have any soul. It has a few highlights that don't stop it from being a disappointment. If you just like expensive action sci-fi movies, let alone the quality, sure, enjoy. But this was not my cup of tea.