Trite, mind numbingly boring, and hard to sit through

Rating: 2/10 (21 December 2016)

I have to start by admitting, I am not a star wars fan. I have only seen a few of them. Also, I have to admit I am not a comic book fan either. So, that makes it hard to sit through a movie like this. There were some decent characters. And some of the creatures or aliens were kind of cool. But, somehow with a film like this, you expect that. And more. It just did not deliver. It was boring, trite, ineffective, and somehow very, very unexciting.
Let's break it down: dull, repetitive, unsurprising, under-characterized. This tale, placed chronologically between episodes three and four, has no reason to exist. We know the rebels will get plans that let them destroy the Death Star. So, who cares how they did it, when the storytelling is so uninteresting and pathetically boring.
The series cannibalizes its own mythology. A child with incipient Jedi powers (Felicity Jones) loses her parents and gets raised by a surrogate the Empire brands for death. She teams up with a freewheeling fighter pilot (Diego Luna) and a comical droid with an English voice (Alan Tudyk) to go against the Empire; she's advised by an older Jedi with amazing gifts (Donnie Yen); she learns her father (Mads Mikkelsen) is highly placed in the Empire himself. The main twist is that he built the Death Star against his will and installed a flaw that will blow it up, if his daughter finds the designs after his death. So, I guess he is not so bad after all. Redemption. Oh my.
It's as if the whole cast had been culled from understudies. Jones, so good in dramatic roles, looks like a last-minute substitute for Daisy Ridley. Luna's a lightweight Oscar Isaac. Mikkelsen scarcely works up a passion, yet he is such a terrific actor, in films like the Salvation, The legend of Michael Koolhaus, and many others. Yen, star of the "Iron Monkey" and "Ip Man" series, pulls off deft martial arts moves but lacks Alec Guinness' charisma. The main villain (Ben Mendelsohn) remains whiny and ineffectual, and other than the diabolical acts he commits, he just does not have much oomph. And as far as Darth Vader goes, he just need to be retired, once and for all. How long can the darkness last?