Wow...makes Ep. I, II, & III look good by comparison

Rating: 2/10 (8 January 2017)

The reasons that Rogue One tanked:
1) Any Star Wars movie that does not have Jedi, the Force, and light sabers is going to be, by definition, boring.
2) The music sounded similar, but not nearly as good as, the original soundtrack. It was plain uninspiring, and mostly just helped to muddle all of the terrible dialog. In Rogue One the music was just lots of unending white noise, a distraction that wouldn't stop. Easy to tell that John Williams had nothing to do with it.
3) Once again, the characters in the movie were not likable (except Jyn, she's beautiful). Casting was mostly terrible, with few exceptions. It didn't bother me at all when they died off--just like Episodes I, II, & III. I didn't care what happened to any of them.
4) The dialog was God-awful; who wrote this droll s**t?
5) Oh, the dialog--it went on, and on, and on, and on, and I've never seen an action movie before that had so much stale talking. It made me just wish the movie would end soon. The dialog became an audio version of Chinese water torture.
6) Oh, the action--even the action was, incredibly, slow-paced. It seemed to take forever for anything to happen during what were supposed to be action scenes. Things and actions that should have taken 10-to-60 seconds in the movie were drawn out to 5 minutes or more. Awful pacing.
7) The cinematography was, almost completely, awful, as most movies are nowadays. The camera would not hold still, for even a fraction of a second, in nearly any scene in the movie (real or computer-generated). (Don't believe me?--compare this movie to the original Star Wars and it will quickly become evident.) This made it difficult to follow the action, or to even care after a while. (At least this movie lacked JJ Abrams' epilepsy-inducing, and continuous, lens flares and light flashes, thank God.)
8) Even though the human characters were speaking English, most had accents so heavy that it was difficult for me to understand them (and the terrible and ever-present soundtrack made matters worse). What were the character's names? I couldn't tell, so I gave up caring who-was-whom.
9) Where were all of the aliens? They showed in an occasional scene, but infrequently. Almost all humans, in a Star Wars universe. What gives? Especially the last 3/4 of the movie.
10) In the final battle scene, the rebels that were fighting on the ground didn't look like rebels; most of them looked exactly like the troopers in Aliens. Wrong movie.
11) This movie entirely skipped the great opening sequence musical score and moving text of all other Star Wars movies; I know that this is an offshoot movie, but this distanced itself too far from the originals. If they had used the moving text to explain the story line, as the rest of the Star Wars movies have, then maybe they could have removed half of the awful dialog that was in the movie. Bad storytelling. Suddenly, I miss George Lucas behind the wheel.
12) And the missing opening, dramatic, musical score by John Williams left a huge gaping hole in the Star Wars experience from the very beginning of the movie--this was just a taste, and perhaps a warning, of what was to follow.
13) Every scene featuring long, excessive, boring, dialog had to be done with close-up facial shots; there are so few scenes that show actors and their surroundings, making the visuals too claustrophobic. Wasted sets and environments. Bad cinematography. Lost chances to enrich the storytelling experience.
14) The droid main character had lots of funny lines, but they were not funny. The words were funny, but the delivery was done as bad as it possibly could have been done. A real shame. C3P0 could do a funny delivery, but this POS couldn't.
15) When the rebel fleet was trying to break though the force field gate, and couldn't, why didn't they destroy the circular spaceship that generated the shield gate? Eventually they did by forcing a Star Destroyer into it, but it seemed they didn't think to shoot at the damn thing for the previous 15 or 20 minutes!
16) Why were the rebels (and the main story line of the movie) trying to kill the designer of the Death Star, after it had already been built? What's the point? So the main story arc was a waste of time, and pointless. Soap operas have more believable and cohesive stories.
17) The computer-generated face of (the late) Grand Moff Tarkin was uncannily realistic, but his face had too many and almost-constant odd facial movements that just looked weird, and unnatural. He looked normal, but his face didn't act normal. And, of course, every shot of him was a close-up facial shot (like everyone else's). In this instance, they just had to prove how good they were at bringing the dead back to life. Lots of times. And the recreation of Princess Leia's face was done the very same way--so close up, just to prove how good the CG artists are--that you could count the hairs in her nostrils. Not pretty.
18) All of the characters in the movie--except the main characters, Jyn and Cassian--had so little reason to be in the movie at all; everyone else had minor parts that lasted hours on end. They became story line clutter.
A huge disappointment. I'll save my money in the future.