Short form: Really Good.
Longer form: it’s a very different Star Wars movie. It is indeed quite it’s own thing; it’s a one-shot, and there will be no sequel to this. And under the circumstances… that’s good and proper. There is no “opening crawl,” it launches right into the show (with a shot of a ship passing over the ring plane of a terrestrial world with a decent set of rings… for those who care, it looks a *lot* like the Asgard from my own yarns). There is no John Williams music, a first for a Star Wars movie. There are no Jedi (unless you count Vader), “force powers” are not employed, there is no “chosen one” or “child of destiny” or any of that sort of crap.
So, some largely spoiler-free observations:
One of the “good guy” characters is, like Han, a straight up murderer. But unlike Han who shot Greedo, in this case, the hero shoots dead a non-bad-guy. It’s a “yeah, I guess that makes sense” in terms of this being a war and espionage situation but still… dayum.
Tarkin appears, thanks to CGI. He *mostly* works. But whoever they got to do Peter Cushings voice… well, I don’t think he was all that close.
Princess Leia is in the movie for precisely the right amount of time.
I *think* they recycled a lot of snippets of X-Wing pilot shots and dialogue from the original Star Wars. There is a substantial space battle at the end featuring a lot of the same rebel fighters that would take on the Death Star a few days/weeks later in Star Wars…
Darth Vader hired Saurons architect.
For nearly forty years there’s been the question of “how could the Empire have been so stupid as to design that flaw into the Death Star,” coupled with “how could the rebels analyze the blueprints and find the flaw *that* *fast.*” Rogue One answers both of these in a perfectly cromulent fashion.
Death Star on full power? Planet goes “bang,” as we’ve seen before, and really not that impressive of a visual, just an explosion. Death Star firing on just one reactor? Freakin’ *spectacular” imagery. Think “best parts of ‘Trinity and Beyond’ on the big screen and on methamphetamines.”
Tarkin doesn’t just cameo, he’s an important character… and he’s the vicious badass he was in “Star Wars” and the supposedly kids show “Rebels” (where he had two of his men beheaded and nuked a communications tower just to shut down a broadcast). Still… “We want to send a message, not a manifesto” is a damn good line.
Speaking of “Rebels,” there are at least three “Easter Eggs” that hearken to “Rebels” and the prior “Clone Wars” shows. Forest Whitakers character Saw Gerrara is taken straight from “Clone Wars.” The main ship “Ghost” from “Rebels” or at least one of the same class, is seen briefly and at some distance in the space battle at the end. And the rebels make good use of a “Hammerhead” cruiser… which is also from “Rebels.”
Best use of kinetic energy as a destructive force so far in “Star Wars.” The rebels shove something into other stuff. Something you really don’t want to get shoved into you.
When you reprogram a droid, sometimes you remove all its filters. And it becomes *awesome.* The droid K-2SO will tell you exactly what it thinks, and then it will shoot you in the head. And it becomes the best character in the movie.
On another matter: I’ve heard people claim that the writers said they’d inserted anti-Trump stuff into the movie. If they did, I sure didn’t catch it. I was expecting some villain to spout something about “making the galaxy great again,” but, nope.