Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

I finally got around to watching this last night. From the start, I thought it was a dumb idea. It's a gap in the (Disney version of) the lore, sure, but was it one that needed to be filled? Especially by a full-length film? I didn't think so then, and I don't think so now.

This movie knows that any new character it introduces cannot be in the movie that directly takes place after it, and, as such, decides to kill everybody off. This handily explains why whatsherface isn't there to destroy the Death Star, but feels really cheap with some of the more minor characters.
The only named survivors in this movie are:
-Darth Vader
-Grand Moff Tarkin
-Princess Leia
-R2-D2
-C-3PO
Everyone else dies, without exception.

Darth Vader's appearance in the movie wasn't bad, honestly. He manages to retain what made him the greatest film villain ever, and I'm happy with that. There were some voice direction issues, though. It seems like James Earl Jones only got one take for his lines.
Leia's appearance was just a cameo in the ending, with made sense, but C-3PO and R2-D2's appearance was COMPLETELY pointless.

Here's a run-down of the principal cast:
-The main girl (caucasian)
Bland and forgettable, but not in an offensive way. Greatly preferred her to the heroine of TFA.

-The main guy (hispanic)
Kind of unlikable. The main girl falls in love with him, but I just didn't like him at all.

-The robot
A sarcastic asshole robot. I feel like more could have been done with him, but I liked him well enough.

-The blind guy (Asian)
The best character not named Darth Vader. He's basically just the "blind ninja" character, but he was just great.

-The big guy (American Indian)
Kind of a non-character, really. He and the Asian guy are BFFs, and that did come across well enough that his reaction to the Asian guy's death made sense.

-The MacGuffin holder (French?)
Another near non-character. He existed, and that's about it.

And, of course, while the heroes were an ethnically-diverse group, the villains were all white.


One thing that I noticed that didn't sit well with me was the lack of an opening text crawl. It's Star Wars for fuck's sake, you can't just NOT have an opening crawl.
In its place was a scene set fifteen years before the meat of the film, which was far too slow and plodded along way too much. It may have been to set up the villain, but it did a bad job of that. The villain was a non-character to the highest degree. I will not remember him at the end of the day.


Overall, I liked Rogue One far more than The Force Awakens, and also The Phantom Menace. I'll have to rewatch Attack of the Clones before giving a good comparison between those two.
This is a movie that didn't need to exist, but just kind of does. The movie doesn't matter at all, since every named character died.