Rogue One was honestly the best Star Wars movie, or at least, the best Disney Star Wars movie.
Am I the only one who just doesn't get the Rogue One love? It felt like a whole lot of unoriginal nostalgia, and not in the fun and silly "Trials and Tribble-ations" way. It was just character after character in monochromatic outfits with names I couldn't be bothered to remember, and a plan that I couldn't care about worrying over because we know how it ends and there was nothing dramatically interesting in the execution of that plan.
It should have been more of an Ocean's Eleven thing. A fun heist movie where the Rebel Alliance hatches a crazy scheme to hire a couple of thieves-with-hearts-of-gold to steal the Death Star plans. Make it clear from the start that the tone is "This plan is crazy, we are crazy, I can't believe we're actually getting away with it!" Like on a solid Farscape episode.
There's a fantastic built-in-dramatic-tension thing you could do with a mix of Alliance partisans and the hired thieves in one crew. Who will betray who? Who's going to turn out to be surprisingly trustworthy and honourable? Who might even end up joining the Alliance after the experience of doing the right thing? The actual heist isn't nearly as important as the tension between the characters. And when you already know the outcome of a heist, the fun part is bouncing characters off each other. An over-the-top heist movie with fun banter is way better suited to the Star Wars universe than any other genre because that's what most of the original trilogy was. And it worked.
But I guess Darth Vader and laser gun battles and spaceship battles do more for the dopamine levels of some.
Rogue One felt like they took a script for the most generic action move of all time and had everyone put on star wars costumes. It's also a total snoozer up until they start having spaceships crash into each other. I watched it in theaters twice, and both times at least one person in my group was asleep for the scene where her dad died. They didn't miss anything.
I think that's reasonable - I kinda enjoyed it for being a grittier contrast to the spectacular and fun OT adventures. With Rogue One and Andor I get the vibe of what the resistance to the empire could look like to average grunts without fancy space swords and magic destinies. I definitely wouldn't want all the SW films to be like them (in the hypothetical universe where SW films were good anymore) but I still enjoyed em for what they were.
Solo is much more like the over the top heist movie you mention but it has its own host of problems, not the smallest of which is the ridiculous "lol sjw" droid's rights activist character.
I can see how some people didn't enjoy them for being too much fanservice but I just sort of excuse the OT references (aside from the dumb out of place bit character cameos) as what the ground level war would look like during the same time period as the other movies. Red Letter Media was going off about "ATST ATST! STAR DESTROYERS!!!" and I'm just sitting there like, yeah, they'd have those in the empire's military lol. It's established world material that I didn't find too egregious.
The Vader scene though? 100% fanservice and I'll cop to that. I can enjoy little a fanservice as a treat tho, but just as an occasional hint of flavor on top.
i used to play the old West End Star Wars tabletop RPG with friends as a teenager and Rouge One felt like one of our many games we set in the early Rebellion period
I GM a lot of the newer FFG SWRPG and my friends & I joked about it and the Mandalorian straight up stealing characters and setpieces from my campaigns lol
Edit: the early rebellion might be my favorite setting for the rpgs for the reasons I said above. It's a lot of fun to play the no-glamour no-glory agents of the revolution ngl.
thought the same about Rouge One and a bit of Andor!
best campaign i ever did, just 1 on 1 with my good friend, was him raising a single rebel cell on a isolated and heavily exploited planet (similiar to the Scottish Highlands bank robbing world from Andor) .
then going to a general uprising, destruction of the Imperial garrison, and him betraying the entire movement, looting anything not tied down including a CR90, and escaping to become an asshole capitalist.
i let him drive the whole plot we just did it as a sandbox it was fun as hell. all took place in the first years of the Rebellion
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
