What if they made a great Star Wars movie and nobody noticed or cared?

That is how I felt watching Rogue One, which the audience seemed largely indifferent to.  But contrary to what many of the reviews suggest, the plot is not especially muddled, the drama is legitimate, and the ending more than satisfactory.  The visuals are spectacular, with the digital work supplemented by on-site filming in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Iceland, and the Maldives.  If you have a good memory for visual images, you will notice many parallels, including homages to Kurosawa and a number of classic war movies.  From the Star Wars franchise itself, episodes 1-3 are treated as iconic as are 4-6.  It’s much more of a Star Wars movie than the marketing has been letting on, and indeed this is the real Star Wars movie that many of you have been waiting for.  (Maybe the worse the “sequence” movies get, the better the “knock-offs” become, a’la Frank Ramsey, a nice trick they are playing here.)  It’s not perfect, but had they made this instead of Return of the Jedi, at the time I would have been “happy enough.”