FWIW I was a Star Wars nerd and read all the books and played the games (even the obscure ones—Yoda Stories rocked) and my Windows cursor was a lightsaber and 70% of my Christmas toys were Star Wars (the rest were Lego, and those two things didn’t yet have any overlap) and all that, until the prequels put me off it (and thank god, as really I’d had quite enough of that in my life)
So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).
I'm not a Star Wars nerd (but I watched Episode 7-9 nevertheless). I think the main weakness of the "Disney trilogy" is that the plot is basically the same as the "original trilogy": powerful evil forces with a death star/planet, commanded by a truly despicable bad guy with a slightly more nuanced henchman, valiant heroes fighting them and winning against all odds - been there, seen that. And the plot twist at the end (let's not reveal it, although everyone probably knows what I mean) makes it even more similar.
Interesting, everybody I ever talked to about this, Rogue one is considered to be by far the best movie of them all. Mature, dark stuff, no cheesy stupid stuff for small children, dicey characters, and of course epic hopeless battles.
I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.
Rogue One has immense promise, but only partly delivers.
It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)
We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.
Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.
A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.
It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.
Fair enough. There were a number of things that didn't jive with me about the film as I watched it: the fight choreography was meh, Luke's behavior given his previous characterization, Rey's almost complete lack of actual character development, and of course Admiral Holdo being portrayed as a wise leader by the filmmakers, but when you look at her actual actions and the consequences of them, it's unclear if a leader could be less competent.
The Luke thing was the only one of those that really bugged me though.
However, the moment I walked out of the cinema and the spectacle faded and I thought about the implications of certain other things in the film, the less happy I was.
For example, a ship going lightspeed was used as a weapon in TLJ. The implications of this are pretty huge. Shooting lasers around in a universe where you can apparently have kinetic lightspeed weapons is dumb. If treated as canon, TLJ makes every other space battle in Star Wars nonsense.
Similarly, I would say in Star Wars up until TLJ, it was somewhat clear (to me at least) that space in Star Wars is not a vacuum, but more of an "ether". People get out of their spaceships on small asteroids without any sort of vac-suit and breathe fine. Sound propagates during space battles. Spaceships (their engines, their ability to open/close, etc) seem to operate in approximately the same way on a planet as they do in space. So when they used Leia's first onscreen usage of the Force (which is actually a whole 'nother thing) to totally break that system and treat outer space in Star Wars as if it's what we experience in our universe, it kinda sucked. And all for the sake of a "she's dead, actually she's not" gotcha thing.
In summary, Rian Johnson explicitly said one of his goals when making the film was to "subvert expectations". But I think there is a huge difference between "subverting expectations" and "indiscriminately shitting on existing canon", and he was definitely just doing more of the latter. Yes, it is very easy to "surprise" people when you make characters do things that they have no reason to do from previous character development and when you ignore the laws of physics (or lack thereof) that had previously been established.
In summary: Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I would save from a fire. Though I also greatly enjoyed "Andor".
So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).