As Misguided As It Is Redunant

Rating: 3/10 (1 January 2017)

Following a motley gang of rebels on the hunt for the plans to a planet-destroying super- weapon, Rogue One, the fist "stand-alone" Star Wars story, finally lands with a loud thud on our screens. Two films in and Disney's management of this golden franchise is already showing very troubling signs of laziness and risk-aversion. If you've come looking for something a bit more original than The Force Awakens, this will be a a very strange disappointment.
By now the consensus is in that Episode VII, while entertaining, is basically a soft reboot of Episode IV, weighed down a bit by a Mary Sue heroin (despite a personable and able actress in the role). What that installment did do right, however, was nail the tone, and perform at its best when offering new ingredients. Its original characters were, for the most part, interesting and fun to be around, and you wish there were less fan-service to distract you. I mention all this because, strangely enough, Rogue One has the exact opposite problem.
After a title that enigmatically promised X-Wing action, then a trailer campaign implying a kind of Dirty Dozen meets Star Wars, the resulting film is more a limp, flavorless war in space movie with bland, under-cooked characters embarking us on a mission we all know the ending to, and them peppering it very heavy-handedly with enough fan service to handicap any attempt at an original story.
An intriguing new villain is introduced... but the fans want to see Darth Vader (and, supposedly Grand Moff Tarkin from episode IV), even though they have nothing to do beyond look cool and menacing and defang the main villain. Each new character stumbles in and has to be introduced with words: so much for the visual fluency of the original saga. Everyone kinda pouts their way through this, and the mood varies through different grey shades of "subdued" in an effort to be edgy and dark... and instead coming across as completely joyless, a real first for the Star Wars saga.
Unlike Episode VII, the fan service moments will be the only ones to quicken your pulse, never mind their narrative redundancy or lack of sense. Cool! That's Vader's castle... but wait, why are we here? Wasn't Vader established as kinda subordinate to Tarkin in Episode IV? Yeah! We get to see the Death Star fire the big gun up close... Except wasn't Alderaan in Episode IV meant to be a huge surprise? Hey, there's Vader again... dispatching people nobody cares about... And on, and on... Everything "new" in between barely registers, with the exception of Alan Tudyk as K-2SO as a welcome but underused touch of vague humor.
On the strength or these two films, we can expect much of the same coming up. More of the same with fan service coming at the expense of a satisfying narrative. This isn't as inept or ghastly as the prequels by any stretch of the imagination, but boy is it just bland.
See it if you must, but if it's Star Wars in war mode you want, you'd be better off getting a used copy of the Battlefront video game, which probably has more character development and narrative cohesion. At least that will spare you the horrific site of dreadfully CGIed Carrie Fischer and Peter Cushing.