Could not agree more, for me it was one of the worst movies I watched in 2016. Need to keep reminding myself that for franchises with loyal fanbases, critic review (Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic) are basically worthless.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/mr-plinkett-responds-to-comments-on-his-rogue-one-review

because i gather he got a bunch of shit from people about this video.i don't know why i posted his response video prior to his original.

guess i am just a weirdo.
*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, January 9th, 2017 4:42pm PST - promote requested by enoch.

mr plinkett responds to comments on his rogue one review has been added as a related post - related requested by enoch.

Mr. Plinckett is right as usual. I watched it in IMAX 3D yesterday, but didn't feel immersed into the story all that much. While watching it I couldn't help but think that a panel of Disney marketing geniuses meticulously thought out what we wanted to see, to guess our expectations, more than the brain child of someone with a vision, with a true story to tell. The girl-that-every-girl-wants-to-be with great athletic prowess and wit as the main character to try and get women to go and see it. The two popular Chinese actors were obviously there to appeal to the ever more important Chinese market. Nostalgic re-enactment (or pre-enactment?) of the ROTJ final battle. Darth Vader! Tarkin! The Death Star! There's someone and/or something for everybody in this movie. Maximum appeal to go and see it.

I think all characters did have potential, but there wasn't any time for them to really come alive, as we were introduced to too many locations and too many people. On the topic of coming alive, resurrected Peter Cushing was very clearly stuck deep into uncanny valley, and watching him was a little... morbid I think.

Like with the Force Awakens, I left the cinema not really unsatisfied, but not really happy either. Just kind of... okay. That was something all pre-Disney SW films did way better for me.

Huh, this criticism feels more like a Zero Punctuation-type review to me in that it grossly exaggerates actual flaws to make them sound far more problematic than they actually are. He's asking us to view the movie from the perspective of someone who has never heard of Star Wars and that's just so preposterously stupid that I had a hard time getting through to the end of his video. The whole point of this movie is that the lore and the world has already been established--there's no need to re-tread everything and explain every connection. It's not meant to be a "stand-alone" film--nor were Empire or Return of the Jedi, which also rightly assumed that people watching the movie had seen (or at least understood the major plot points) of the previous films.

Personally, I find his criticism of the characters wholly lacking as well. Why did he not like the characters? Why did he not find them compelling? I personally loved them all. One flaw in the movie is that there are so many things going on that most of the characters don't get enough screen time for us to get really deeply attached to them, but then again none of the characters are meant to survive the movie so that could be intentional? Certainly a few of the characters (Baze, Chirrut, and Bodhi) suffer from being one-dimensional as a result of this.

Fair enough if he doesn't want to check the character box because of that, but he never explained why the story and emotion boxes weren't checked. I mean, my wife cried both at Jin's father's death and Jin and Cassian's deaths. They were the three characters that were the most fleshed out of the cast. We understood their motivations and their internal conflicts (Jin's father between protecting his family and helping the Empire, Jin's struggles with trust after the feeling of betrayal at being left behind by both her father and Saw Gerrera, Cassian's struggles with duty and morality further complicated by his growing feelings for Jin). And their deaths were meant to underscore the harsh reality of the rebellion for the common foot soldier.

For me, this movie is probably the 4th best Star Wars movie to date after the original trilogy--much better than The Force Awakens, in my book. It's fine if Plinkett disagrees, but his video is completely disappointing as it doesn't really explain or give examples of how he came to this opinion. He just makes a blanket statement and then proceeds to monologue as if we should take his opinion as fact without him offering any evidence.

I'll bite too. I liked Rogue One.

The three checkboxes thing (characters / story / emotion) seems a bit oversimplified. I think it is possible to have a *great* movie if any ONE of those things is great, and it is possible to have a very good movie without any of them being fantastic.

Beyond that, it seemed like his biggest complaint was that Rogue One requires you to have some basic level of familiarity with the Star Wars universe in order to enjoy it; that it doesn't stand up particularly well on its own. ...Well, duh. Any time a setting / universe is used for more than one film, you're going to have to spend much more time on the exposition and getting people familiar with how things work in the first film (A New Hope) than in later films. Actually, I thought that Rogue One would have been very watchable and enjoyable even for people that are familiar with Star Wars even in only the broadest strokes.

I'm with @SDGundamX. The original trilogy stand as my favorite 3, but I liked Rogue One more than The Force Awakens (and TFA was *way* better than any/all of the prequels).

Fucking heretic should be fed to Sarlac.

I felt like the movie was a bit of a structural mess.

So Cassian rescues Jyn so she can persuade Gerrera to hand over Bodhi so he can give her the message from her father who can tell them about the weakness in the death star.... that just feels like one step too many.

And what was with the Gerrera's weird mind squid thing? That scene felt completely unnecessary and was also the worst looking part of the movie (almost exactly like the tentacle ball things scene in TFA).

That said, the last third was great, and seeing the death star destroy part of a planet from the surface really brought home the horror of the weapon.

I'd put it very slightly behind TFA in terms of ranking it (Empire, New Hope, Jedi, TFA, Rogue One). While I admire that they tried something different and didn't just retread old plots like TFA, I just didn't enjoy it as much as TFA. The characters in TFA were just better and it was just more fun.

Oh certainly, there are definitely glaring flaws with Rogue One.

The biggest problem for me was how every character conveniently dies IMMEDIATELY as soon as their narrative purpose is done with. And strangely, every character seems completely ready to die in a way that makes the deaths fairly laughable.

Saw: "I'm gonna stare out this window and not even try to escape."

Bodhi: "I'm gonna close my eyes and not even try to toss that thermal detonator back out of the shuttle."

Baze: "Welp, my best friend is dead so I'm just going to Leroy Jenkins those Deathtroopers."

They missed major dramatic opportunities for each character death. Think "Saving Private Ryan" where each character death is meaningful. Caparzo disobeys a command to do something decent and gets himself killed. Wade dies because Tom Hanks wanted to do the right thing and clear the machine gun nest. Fish dies because Upham is too cowardly to climb the steps and fight. And none of those guys resigned themselves to death--they all wanted desperately to live.

A couple of other things that bothered me about Rogue One:

Why did Admiral Raddus take Princess Leia--a Galactic Senators daughter--into a major battle with the Empire, one which most Rebels were convinced was a trap designed to draw out the fleet?

Why didn't Vader just Force pull the Death Star plans out of the escaping rebels before massacring them all?

Why did the Death Star "miss" Scarif base and hit the ocean instead despite them showing it had pinpoint accuracy when blowing up Jedha?

All that being said, TFA disappointed me big time. It was just trying waaaaaaaay too hard to evoke the original trilogy. If I wanted to watch the original trilogy again I'd, you know, watch the original trilogy. And don't even get me started on Kylo Ren. I haven't wanted to punch a character in the face so hard since whiny Anakin from Attack of the Clones.

EDIT: To keep this on topic, I'm annoyed that Plinket didn't point out the actual flaws in the movie and instead focused on the "they didn't explain the Force" bullshit.

I could only make it half way through the film. An absolute turd and a complete bore. That is all.