I will never understand how anyone can put R1 so high.
At best its the 3rd worst, Id argue second. I don't know what people enjoy so much about it, the first two acts are confused, boring and have mostly unlikeable characters.
People rank it highly because it's jerking off their fan desires. They want to see Vader be "a bad ass " on screen (even if it amounts to a poorly shot stupid looking scene where he kills some random rebels), people want to see space battles that look cool with the original trilogy ships , they want to see the death star blow shit up and they want a dark brooding mood /tone that reminds them heavily of the unanimous fave entry in the series - Empire Strikes Back. If you care about nothing else, Rogue One delivers in spades. It's all style with zero substance or weight. It's the very type of movie many view marvel films as - likeable but empty. (I actually love marvel movies though because the casting is phenomenal and I just love watching those characters do shit on screen, just as R1 lovers can enjoy their soulless entertainment , so can I).
I mean, the fact that most people love the robot in R1 says all it needs to - he was the most obviously punched up character, and what I mean by that is - they had someone come in to write extra dialog during reshoots to make the robot funnier because the movie was devoid of any sense of humor at all.
I really REALLY wanted to like R1 , truly I did. Just before it's release I was sad it was getting so many middling reviews , the trailers were fantastic. It looked like a better movie than Force Awakens because it wasn't saddled by 10 years of "please don't suck" thoughts. It's been 4 months since I left the theater though and ... 16 months since I sat through TFA yet I can remember everything in TFA but I recall little of R1.
Someone replied to my earlier post with "yeah well all movies are made to be enjoyable" and that's emphatically untrue. Certainly most big blockbuster type films are.. to a degree anyway. Thing is , some studios still at least allow a director to give a film an identity and I didn't see an identity in R1, it felt like there was one at some point but it was erased to add more fan service (clapping and cheering). Anyone could have directed it , anyone could have written it. It's just "a star wars story" set up to be as safe an easy a way as any to earn Disney another billion dollars. Nothing more. Even the Marvel films , although themselves victims of this (mostly Avengers 2, Iron Man 2) have some substance and identity.
A film having an identity isn't always a good thing because it tends to make it harder for a general audience to get into it and this leads to a smaller box office. Sometimes a film can have a strong identity but it's a bad one - look no further then Zack Snyders DC comics movies thus far for a great example of that. At the end of the day though, I remember both man of steel and batman v superman. They were bad movies but memorably bad.
I suppose putting it another way - Suicide Squad was trash , one of the worst films put out last year. A much worse movie then even Batman V Superman for all of it's own problems and the biggest thing that made it worse ? it's identity was scrubbed. Low and behold , it made a ton of money at the box office. On a more personal level - I ended up enjoying it more than BvS - it was shorter and punchier but BUT , if I had to watch either of those movies again I'd watch BvS because I feel like there's still something there to explore in some way. Suicide squad meanwhile , was about as meaty as a bad music video.
Rogue One is a helluva lot better than either of those obviously but it still feels like a "product" instead of a film. TFA felt like a film.
