just came from my third time watching the movie.
The first half has serious narrative issues, it jumps around soooo much, constantly references Saw Gerera, builds him up, just to tear him down ...
The second half is still great imho, except for the SUPER CONTRIVED issue of:
"To get the plans to the rebels,
we must first acquire them,
then get to the top of the comms tower and transmit them.
To be able to transmit them,
we need to tell the Rebels to take down the shield.
To be able to tell them that they should take down the shield,
we need to first plug the shuttle into a communications tower via wire(!)
and then flip a switch at an entirely different location"
It's a contrived chain of dependencies that's just there to give everyone (especially those on the ground) something they can sacrifice their lives for. Could've been done better, imho.
Also what else,
beyond trying to take down the shield, would the fleet in orbit do anyways. It clearly blocks comms and it clearly prevents any of their ships from escaping.
the fact that the dish needed to be re-aligned (from a console 30 feet further down along a narrow walkway) just to create some extra tension was just the icing on the cake.
Still loved it
Also, all 3 times i watched it in the english non-dubbed version, and while i consider myself perfectly fluent in english, i had a bit of a harder time the first time around that i watched the movie, because most of the exposition is done by a character who swallows syllables and kinda mumbles (Bhodi), one with a spanish accent (Cassian), one with a danish accent (Mikkelsen) and Krennic, who also doesn't do textbook pronounciation of words. (he sounds like he's wearing braces, kinda)
Of course, none of those are issues of the actors / characters / roles - i just feel it makes it a bit harder for people to parse all those Alien names, names of planets and locations, names of 'Space' characters etc. - especially when you're not all that familiar with Star Wars.
