Just got back from the midnight screening.
Do yourself a favour and WATCH THIS MOVIE.
To sum up, it’s the perfect story behind A New Hope. That’s all I’ll say for now 
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I absolutely backup @selbie .
This is one the first time in many years I feel the script is well-paced for an action AAA film.
What I mean is: it takes time to settle down context and does not rush to the goal. Inconsistencies are close to inexistant because the film does settle to a well-framed script.
Just a small warning: don’t expect your first encounter of Darth Vader to be grandiose. He receives an unexpected visitor in his “bathrobe” 
Your second encouter, however, will be… imperially slashing and breath taking 
(pun intended !).
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Just got back to seeing it, I also absolutely backup @selbie .
It is interesting to see how making a (great) Star Wars film in 2016 made it different from a 1977 one with the choices of imagery and themes.
Particularly with the first big action scene, and more generally that part of the film.
Note that while it is a good film by itself, it is first and foremost a film by fans for fans of the original one. Then again, I can assume we all are here to some degree.
Google “Gary Whitta writer” and the first pic you see is him in a rebel pilot helmet 
Him and John Knoll did an excellent job.
So did you like the last Star Wars movie? Titled “I saw that coming from the other side of the galaxy”?
I want to hear from people who hated the last movie and liked this one.
And the original movies weren’t predictable?? I liked TFA as much as I liked the original series. None of the SW movies are perfect by any means, but the originals are deeply embedded in my childhood so I can’t help but feel fondness for new stories that bring me back into that world.
Force Awakens was a good reset button for the stillborn cringe-fest of the prequels and Rogue One was a well crafted story that respected the mood and setting of ANH.
TFA was too much like the originals in a bad way: they didn’t go in as inventive of directions.
“Hated” is too strong a term, but I was quite disappointed by VII. It wasn’t the old prequels, but it downplayed its strengths in an attempt to superficially copy the original and highlighted the weaknesses of its director as a storyteller.
This one, though, got the balance right. I could nitpick here and there (the aforementioned imagery may be a tasteless choice, honestly) and some of the fanservice is a bit too heavy-handedly presented, but those are minor details.
You are on something that comparing both films and seeing why this one does such a good job at being a fan-film where the previous one fails at pandering to fans would be interesting.
I read bad things about it:
“Is It Time to Abandon the Star Wars Franchise?” -New Yorker
“A laughable parody of itself” -Philadelphia Inquirer
“A couple of 9-year-olds on a screen-free rainy afternoon would come up with better adventures, and probably also better dialogue.” - New York Times
"…about as exciting as a long drive down the Florida Turnpike. " Miami Herald
so I’m not going to watch it
The last new star wars was a soulless piece of cgi crap, total waste of money.
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It was so bad because they didn’t keep what made the originals so good.
The bad guy was bad because he is a baddy. The female lead got jedi powers and its mastery “just because”.
The links between the characters were weak and predictable. The visuals were mostly very obviously cgi.
There was no mystery, no deeper sense in it all.
Almost as bad as the superpower montages in suicide squad.
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I liked the three prequels much better then the last Star Wars movie.
I’ll expect nothing better then TFA 
It’s supposedly better than TFA.
I can guarantee you it doesn’t have any of the JJ Abrams style of TFA.
Put it this way, if you like WW2 / military style underdog movies then Rogue One leans heavily in that direction rather than the “Jedi focused” main-sequence movies. In Rogue One, all of the Jedi have been purged from the galaxy so it involves normal everyday people holding on to what is left of the republic.
To expand on that, it is a film where the bad guys (on both sides) are the one who make the easy choices, while the good guys take the hard choices and often pay the price for it.
It is also a cautionary tale about great powers with hypertrophied military occupying desert cities with ancient cultural heritage to pillage their raw energy resources and solve their problems by heavy-handed military action, mass-arrests (and using prisoners as workforce), torture, lying to legislative instances, using high-altitude bombings and with a centralised organism that literally record every single transmission of the internet - there lies only darkness.
Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it…
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Well, there a lot of “Rogue One” dilemnas that can be related to modern problems: how far would you go in your actions to win victory and also uphold your ideals? Does the end justify the means?
In fact, they are intemporeal philosophical problems.
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So I’m one of those fans who didn’t even dislike 1-3 that much (I actually like 3 apart from Anakin ), and I really enjoyed Rogue One! So another 
from me to go and watch it.
I was quite disappointed in Force Awakens and liked Rogue One a lot better. I will say that I was considerably let down by the final act, though. It seemed to me to be a 10-minute plot stretched over a half hour, and not a very interesting 10-minute plot at that, as the movie was trying to get us excited about characters doing the most mundane of things. Looking back on the trailer, a LOT of the footage from that act was missing in the final movie and it must have been drastically overhauled. I would really like to know what the original structure of it was going to be.
But still, to me it was better than Force Awakens, even if still not on the order of the OT. Characters were original and fresh, it did a much better job of paying homage while still being it’s own movie, and it definitely provided an entirely new and interesting perspective on the Star Wars universe.
Are you sure we’re speaking about the same final act, stealing the plans from the secure planet? 
If yes, I wouldn’t call a “suicide” mission with little to no chance of getting back alive a “mundane” trip to Ibiza.
Frankly speaking, even though I knew that, in the end, the plans were going to be stolen, I still felt anxious for the characters to get the job done.
However, there are a few plot sides to be polished, agreed.
I was pleasantly surprised. After “7: The total remake of Star Wars including ditching the story line but its ok people will throw money at it anyway” I liked it.
It felt like Star Wars.
With a few points of lazy writing (for the kids at X-mass time) WARNING: something from the first movie that might want to be seen and not read. “A New Hope”: Han: you can’t go into star drive this close to a gravity well.
Yeah that was a stretch and a half
Plus that same sequence also had a lot of “Oh no! the thing is coming closer!” (5mins later) “It’s still coming closer but looks like the same position it was before even though it’s closer!”