Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

[hotsake]

This is a hard movie to rate. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped but at the same time it wasn't as bad as I expected. The side characters were great and fun as was the robot for the most part, I also liked the CGI cameos from previous movies mainly because they weren't over used. The action was relatively well done and the CGI was really good, I did watch this 2D and noticed a lot of softness but that usually happens when watching 2D versions of 3D movie, I'll watch the 3D version to see the difference. The downsides to this is the fact that the main two characters are fairly lame and unremarkable. I didn't care about Felicity Jones' character at all. I also found that most of the side characters as fun as they were to watch were severely under used. Wen Jiang, Mads Mikkelsen, and Donnie Yen in particular were some of the best characters in the film and easily out shone the main stars. The story also took a long time to get going which wouldn't have been so bad if the main characters were more interesting, I'm not sure if that is the script writers, directors, or actors fault. I also felt that they tried hard to make sure that this didn't outshine the official "Episode" films and made this a bit more muted such as with the lame title sequence. I actually liked this better than any of the Star Wars movies aside for IV & V. The ending was awesome and I really liked seeing Vader be more active here.

[Velvet Crowe]

I honestly thought the movie was really boring. The side characters were all one-dimensional quirks that hardly had any personality. Hell, even the quirky Robot is really just a lame and tame version of HK-47 from the Old Republic series.

The problem I have with this movie and Ep.VII(and likely future movies) is how incredibly safe they play it. I watched Rogue One and all I could keep thinking to myself is "I've seen this movie before." You could seriously make a drinking game out of how many generic cliches that movie has. I feel these movies are following the same mold of the Marvel movies of being generally similar to one another in order to rake in a profit, which is a contrast to both how Marvel's comics and Star War's EU functions in reality. Being as I'm fond of both of those things, I can't say I'm particularly thrilled about future Star Wars films.

[livelove]

The problem I have with this movie and Ep.VII(and likely future movies) is how incredibly safe they play it.

Seeing how quickly the old characters were killed off, I wouldn't say they were playing it safe.
But even if for argument's sake we could agree on them playing it safe, what ideas could you offer as examples for when they could have left the beaten track?

I watched Rogue One and all I could keep thinking to myself is "I've seen this movie before." […] being generally similar to one another in order to rake in a profit, which is a contrast to both how Marvel's comics and Star War's EU functions in reality.

Me too, I was hoping for more. But I don't think this critique is jusitified, as the filmmakers are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" spot here: If the films don't have a lot in common, critics would say "it's not the good, old Star Wars any longer". And if the films have enough in common, apparently other critics say "I have seen this before" ... So how could they ever make it right?