So, there's this new indie film you might not have heard about called Rogue One.

Anyways, yeah, you've heard of it. Have you seen it yet? What were your thoughts?

As far as movies go, okay. Lots of action, lots of Star Wars. Wasn't pleased with the ending, it seemed to be set up just to explain two paragraphs at the opening of Episode 4. I don't kill characters just for that.

Donnie Yen is always cool.

Copy Domici. I mean, it was a beautiful movie, I adored the characters. Like Force Awakens, it was a solid return to the classic elements of Star Wars that were missing in the newer trilogy.

...I was... not okay with the end. XD

This is not your mama's Star Wars.

But that's exactly as it should be.

As I see it, The Force Awakens was a throwback movie. You almost could call it a remake--hence why it had nearly the same plot as Ep.IV. It had all the classic characters, followed the classic storyline, and had all the classic tropes. It was a last "hoorah" for the old franchise, a movie for the aging fanboys. It was meant to look and feel like a classic, original Star Wars movie. That's also why they called it an "episode."

Rogue One, however, is a modern Star Wars movie. It does not try to mimic the old movies and instead follows the modern rules of filmmaking. It had the modern archetypes, the modern plot, the modern tropes. It fit right in with the likes of The Hunger Games and The Martian.

Of course, the modern rules of filmmaking have their own problems, and in a couple decades they'll seem just as cliched as movies from the 80s do today. But the point is, the modern rules exist because that's what works, and that's what modern audiences want. If the Star Wars franchise is to survive, they can't keep remaking Ep.IV. They have to allow the franchise to evolve to appeal to a new generation of audiences and follow a new set of rules. If they let it evolve, the franchise itself could easily see another 30 years of strong popularity.

The other reason I like this movie is that it opens up the possibility for so many stories. There's is a ton of good movie material in the Star Wars EU, not to mention all the original tales they could come up with. I think it would be a great idea if they deviate from the Skywalker storyline and let us explore other areas of the universe, and Rogue One is a good gateway film for that.

Also, people complained this film was feminist propaganda--well, this is the kind of feminist "propaganda" we should have had all along. Gyn is a strong female, yes, but she doesn't have to beat up her male partner just to prove it. No one questions why she's in battle, and the male characters don't have to be stupid to compensate. She just owns who she is, and the film doesn't bend over backwards to remind us that she's a strong female. She just leads by example. That's the kind of strong female character we need.

Overall I thought it was very well-done. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Amen.

I haven't seen all the Star Wars movies--I've seen Rogue One, A New Hope, and Force Awakens. Rogue One is by far my favorite, and I feel like it adds a lot of weight to the events of A New Hope, showing the price paid to get the plans to the Death Star in the first place. This is the kind of thing I found lacking in ANH. Amazingly well done--I actually want to watch it again already.

My main complaint is, I think they shouldn't have tried animating Leia's face at the end--I thought they were going to keep it hidden, and I would have loved that.

I have heard so many mixed reviews of this film. I haven't seen it yet, but my Dad really wants to see it, so we may take a cinema trip together. A lot of my friends and work colleagues were disappointed with it, though, so I am not sure what to expect.

What I would really like to see (and I'm sure someone somewhere will compile at some point) is a demographic-based analysis of the general audience reaction to the film. Are there certain age brackets that liked the film better than others? I have a suspicion that it is flying better with the younger demographic (the ones who have been raised on films from the 90s and 2000s) than those who were around when the original Star Wars was cutting-edge. Or it could just be that people are really opinionated about Star Wars because it's so nostalgic, and you just can't win, except to get good box office numbers, which they absolutely did.