The Shrine

Just got back from seeing this one. No spoilers, I think this is far and away the best Star Wars movie to date.

The depiction of the Rebel Alliance for the first time actually made me care about them. I never liked the Rebels, I always thought they sucked but holy shit this movie put them in a brand new light, the weight of what they're fighting against and how it shaped them to this point is on full display here. I hope episodes VIII & IX can make them as relevant as they are here and not forget how hard it is to fight against what they're fighting.

This is far and away the darkest Star Wars story, go see it!

That's good to hear. I think it may be a few weeks before I go to the theater to see it.

I've always found Star Wars movies to be fairly "meh"
The game series, particularly Tie Fighter and X-Wing vs Tigh Fighter interested me much more than any of the films ever did.

Rogue One is very very different from any of the other films, which in my opinion are glaringly structured with a generic formula. I love how it just drops you into it, ditches the typical Act 1 exposition, and you sort of figure out where you are in the timeline over the first 20-30 minutes, and piece together what's happening. You don't lose anything, because the focus is establishing the characters. Then you're in for a wild ride that doesn't rely on cliche formulaic plot mechanics.

Personally speaking, I found this movie more better than all other Star Wars films combined. One of the very best blockbusters in years.

I am a Star Wars < Star Trek guy, but you guys are making Rogue One sound pretty good. I might have to actually pay to see it.

I think Star Wars is easier to connect to when you're exposed to it young. It ignites the imagination in a way that makes it special and a big part of that appeal has a larger chance of happening when you're a kid. This is why I don't bother with the "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN STAR WARS?" people who are in there 20s or older. The boat sailed. It's just like the Goonies and other movies that are difficult to impossible to connect with once you pass an age threshold. I get the impression from what people say that Rogue One is more of a movie set in the Star Wars movie universe as opposed to the past movies which are all Star Wars movies through and through, which even Lucas admits he borrowed from other filmmakers and whatnot.

Star Trek (not the modern movies) has a cerebral quality to it. Its very nature kind of requires that the person have some years on them. It isn't really something you can't like if you're young, but I think it's the kind of thing you appreciate more as you grow older.

I watched a few videos, and I have seen a few people complaining that they couldn't connect with the characters. I think this is because they're looking for the good guys they want to vicariously live through, but Rogue One isn't about good guys.
As far as connecting with the films as a child, I think that's probably true. It has all the makings of a children's fairy tale: Luke Skywalker is your King Arthur, the ward who is secretly the son of a great figure, given to his caretakers by a wizard. And he story is basically your slay the dragon story, which for me was the Hobbit, and the weak point being the missing scale above Smaug's heart.

Finally got to see this and I thought it was great. I still like/connect with A New Hope more but this movie is arguably better in a lot of ways.

Pleasantly surprised that Disney isn't running the franchise into the ground (yet).

It was also a nice surprise to see, what, absolutely no merchandising in this movie? I mean I'm sure they'll manage something, but it's hard not to watch Star Wars and remember the "MERCHANDISING , MERCHANDISING, MERCHANDISING" stuff from Spaceballs.

For the sake of levity:

Haha, that Spaceballs clip perfectly describes how I felt about The Empire Strikes Back; which for the first 80% seemed to be mostly a string of commercials for merch. You could probably skip right to Cloud City at the end and not lose anything important to the story; yeah there's Yoda, but you could cut him out of 5 and 6, and it wouldn't make a difference - you already had Obi-Wan's ghost to say "use the force!"

I realize Empire Strikes Back is the general favourite among Star Wars fans; it's got the reputation for being the darkest one and therefore the best. Even if that were true, being the darkest isn't a singular quality to make it the best. The other part is that it's not true: Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith are both clearly darker films. Even in the original trilogy A New Hope was considerably darker: An entire planet getting massacred, Luke's friend and mentor getting beheaded, and there's the scene where he sees the burned corpses of his aunt and uncle lying in front of his burned down homestead. The Land Before Time was darker than Empire Strikes Back. The part that people point to is the ending, but I've seen enough Maury and Springer paternity test episodes to know that James Dean style tantrum when he yells out "NOOOOOOOO!" when he finds out Darth Vader is his father is just a BIT of an overreaction. =D

I ended up rewatching all of the Star Wars movies, and I didn't find the next 5, Empire Strikes Back through Revenge of the Sith, to be of vastly different in quality. I'm not going to lump A New Hope into that mix, because I'm incredibly biased toward that one after Rogue One. Why are the prequels seen as worse? The Internet. And the originals would have suffered the same negativity had the Internet been around in the 70s and 80s. But they were shielded from the sorts of criticisms the later films got, and managed to maintain it long enough for them to become established as great movies with all flaws forgivable.

Remember when Phantom Menace came out and all the Star Wars fans that loved it? Then they went on the Internet, and adopted new opinions instead.

I was pretty displeased by Phantom Menace even before encountering other people's opinions. It just failed to meet expectations. It had some decent moments though. Watched in a vacuum without the expectations that got built up for so many years, newcomers to the series seem to like it just fine. I'll just never be able to watch the first two prequel movies and feel anything but disgust. The third one is tolerable though. Ewan McGregor carried the prequel trilogy HARD. I think Hayden Christensen is fine (let's not lie here, I fucking love Hamill as Luke but he's not exactly killing it in the original trilogy) but McGregor was the only real highlight. The original trilogy just has so much going for it in comparison. The world building was just so good. The prequels just failed to meet that standard, in my opinion.

I remember being truly distraught when I watched Empire Strikes Back as a kid and I could not get my dad to rent The Return of the Jedi quickly enough. In retrospect it is INSANE that he didn't just rent them both. As a teenager I could not have given less of a fuck about the betrayal in the new trilogy and it still doesn't hit me at all now that I may not be less quick to be harsh about it. The performances and story just do not draw you in enough to care about the characters in the new trilogy. I guess Ewan McGregor is the exception here once again.

Not to mention the choreography was superior in the original trilogy. Everything felt so practiced in the way that a master swordsman wouldn't have to jump and twirl around like a maniac in order to fight. I mean come on now lol. This gif basically sums up the new trilogy for me in comparison to the original trilogy. Eh, the fight was cool in general but I can't get over how lacking I found the new trilogy and it had nothing to do with the opinions of others.

Meh, say what you want about the Prequels, the Lightsaber battles were significantly more entertaining then anything in the original trilogy or even TFA.

Entertaining I can agree with but they basically made it cartoonish. It just isn't what I prefer.

You know, I watched this and liked it...but I totally can't remember anything about it now.... I think that says something about whether the movie did an actual good job with characters (they didn't).

I'm still waiting on a good copy to be made available online

Also, I so badly wanna see Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money