Especially in regard to it being the smartest Star Wars film.
Most fun? No.
Most “pop it in on a Saturday afternoon just for the heck of it?” No.
Smartest? I don’t even think it’s a contest.
"It’s not about young people growing up, like essentially all the Skywalker films are, with Luke and Anakin and Padme and Rey and Finn all either coming into their own power or falling out of it. All the primary characters in Rogue One are all already grown up and morally compromised in one way or another. The rebellion is not the simple and clean moral engine for good it was portrayed as before; there’s lots of gray around its edges and in its practices, and its sole moral advantage is that the Empire truly is just plain fascistic evil."
(NOTE: This review of Rogue One is spoiler-free but I will be allowing the conversion in the comment thread to contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to skip the comments for now.) As I walked out of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story last night, the male half of a …