I'm pretty sure there are plenty of Star Wars fans on these boards.

And though Disney really doesn't need much plugging, much less from me, I saw the movie last night and it exceeded my (high) expectations. I thought it was the best Star Wars movie they have done since they released Empire Strikes Back at the dawn of the 80s. And stands with the Matrix, the Fellowship of the Ring and Inception as more recent powerful action movies.

If you don't profess to hate Star Wars then you really need to see this movie. Portland is semi-locked down cause there is snow on the ground (and no one here really knows how to drive in it). So I got into a 10:45 showing last night.

I don't want to drop a lot of spoilers. I was pleasantly surprise to discover that a solid third of the trailers aren't in the movie ... and thus everything isn't already told shown or explained. For me - that's very Nice! I wonder if that's intentional or a result of (the controversial at the time) reshoots. I will say the entire third act is kinda what you'd expect if Star Wars and the Dirty Dozen has a big budget love child in orbit. I'm not too proud to admit I'm still swooning a little over it.

Ben Mendelson plays the main villain called Krennic and his performance (consuming ambition, ego, meanace, false solicitude, rivalries, & manipulativeness) is awesome. And probably makes the movie. Felicity Jones is solid as Jyn. Alan Tudyk steals scenes (no surprise) as the droid K2SO. Everyone else is highly watchable. Donnie Yen & Wen Jiang in particular.

There are plenty of Easter Eggs for long time fans. But they tend to be fast and sometimes sly. And they aren't cheap gags. Nice.

It's not quite a perfect movie. The script could have been tightened in the first third. After a great opening sequence, I thought it's starts off feeling rushed as they bring everyone together. Maybe could have saved some time starting in media res. ::shrug:: But the movie finds it footing on the planet of Jeddah. From there the external action and the internal emotions synch to deliver the emotional beats of the movie.

Last thought: Darth Vader has what might be his best action scene ever in this movie. And he's scary. I had the thought that facing him as a grunt was exactly like trying to stand up against Leonydas.

First movie that I've seen in 2016 that I give a full 5 out of 5 stars.

If you are referring to Saw Guerra's death I think the issue there was the realization that there was simply no time to evacuate. The rebels already had a ship inbound. It's also possible that the Partisans had no ships. Either way I see his death as a passing of the torch to Jyn. "Save the Rebellion, save the dream!" was the line as I recall it.

As for explosions, well....the first time I saw a real grenade go off in the Army I thought "that's it?!" Didn't look like that on the A-Team! We've been conditioned by Hollywood to see a certain style of explosion as cinematic reality.

As for continuity I thought they did a pretty fine job of evoking the 1970s version of Star Wars. There may have been some differences but nothing that struck me as a problem.

One thing I REALLY liked was the gritty realism of the movie. We finally moved away from Jedi/Sith mysticism into the world most people of the Star Wars universe lived in. To paraphrase Obi-Wan we finally got to experience a larger world. I can only hope the new Han Solo movie does for scum and villainy what Rogue One did for the war movie.

The two biggest continuity problems I saw with respect to the original movies were no Bothans ("many Bothan spies died to bring us these plans")

and having ships, weapons, and tech in Rogue One (because they were cool) that did not appear anywhere in the original trilogy. Probably the biggest problematic one was the shield gate - if those existed, they certainly would have used them in other places in the "later" movies