Went in with low expectations and thank goodness for that

Rating: 5/10 (3 January 2017)

After the alright, but a bit disappointing episode VII The Force Awakens I heard they were making another prequel while we wait for episode VIII. When I heard what the story was about my expectations were really bad, and it became even worse when I saw the final trailer, it looked so bad I didn't even want to watch the movie. It felt like a quick cash grab of a movie, but my brother and cousin said it was far better than it looked like on the trailers. Heck, my cousin said it was better than VII, so naturally I had to watch it, if mostly that was to get to have my own opinion.
The story takes place between episode III and IV, and it serves as a prequel to the latter rather than a sequel to the former. Basically the entire story is about making sense of a 39 year old plot hole from the first Star Wars movie (which retroactively became episode IV). It was never explained how such a flawless looking station like the Death Star could even be destroyed, however here they retcon that to make it so that the fatal flaw was planned out by the builder of it who was charged to work on it against his will, and it's now up to his rebel daughter to get this information and send it to the rebel alliance.
To sum up the rest of the movie, I thought it was in the bad to meh range. Didn't care about a single one of the characters, the dialogue was mostly bad, thought a lot of the acting was also pretty bad, some of the fighting scenes were alright, but most of them were laughably clichéd. Especially the final climax which included pretty much every single action movie cliché that exists and by that point I just wanted the movie to be over as soon as possible. (Spoiler warning) The Darth Vader portions at the end were decent, but it sadly lasted only a couple of minutes.
I feel like I also have to address the retcon. (this might be considered a spoiler depending on your perspective) I have to suspend my disbelief by a lot when you consider the fact that Mads Mikkelsen's character had many other co-workers working on the Death Star. All of them seemed very loyal to the empire. It's hard for me to swallow that not a single one of them noticed the flaw he had created in the architecture and informed the bosses of it.
Overall a half hearted movie, with half hearted acting. 5 out of 10.