It's difficult to explain how I felt coming away from the movie. At various points, I wanted to like it, but I'm still not sure if I did. I'm conflicted in my opinion.
They're were a lot of individual parts that I thought were really cool. Some of the encounters would be interesting to play through in Edge of the Empire. I plan to use them as inspiration.
Somehow, even though I liked individual parts, those parts weren't woven together in a way that made it easy for me to enjoy the whole. The first 30 minutes were a bit of a mess. It was a sobering moment of self-reflection which made me realize that I need to be more organized and have a clearer message when I introduce my own stories. It motivated me to rethink how I do things both as a writer and as a GM for campaigns.
Also, even by cliche Storm Trooper standards, the Empire seemed too incompetent to be believable. "We have rifles, so let's move our whole squad into melee range of the guy hitting us with a stick." To be fair, my own military training might unfairly color my perception of that situation. I still think it was poorly choreographed though. In a weird way, it hurt the credibility of the Rebels as a movement.
I understand the idea of staying true to genre and franchise expectations, but -in my opinion- things were pushed a little too far. I feel that the borderline silliness of the Empire's incompetence undercut the serious moments of what could have otherwise been a heartfelt war story. Maybe the time restraints of a movie made certain story decisions unavoidable, but that could have been made better by making the first 30 minutes more coherent and structured to set up later parts of the story.
I don't want to come across as a hater. I do not regret seeing the movie. Like I said, I did enjoy many of the individual pieces and characters in a vacuum. All put together, I'd venture to say that it's one of the weaker films in the franchise, and I'm not sure if I feel the price of a movie ticket was well spent.
For me, the last scenes with Vader managed to be more engaging within 5-10 minutes than other characters and situations which were given over an hour.
For me, all of the hope and excitement that Force Awakens gave me when looking forward to more movies was brutally force choked into near oblivion by Rogue One. The combination of being let down by both the recent Battlefront game and Rogue One has critically wounded my enthusiasm for future products.
