I saw Rogue One last week because I am nothing if not a completest. I’ve seen every single one of the Star Wars movies, so at this point missing one would feel like missing church.

I’d like to say it was as good as Star Wars (or, if you’re going to get pedantic on me, “Star Wars: A New Hope”). I can’t say that, but only because Rogue One and Star Wars are not the same kind of movie. Comparing the two would be like comparing apples to asteroids that end all life on earth. Star Wars was good, rollicking fun, a movie in which the good guys won and the bad guys lost and it was all smiles and sunshine in the end. Nobody in Rogue One was doing any rollicking. The good guys beat the bad guys, but I would hesitate to say they won, exactly. And everything was not all sunshine and smiles in the end. Put in the context of war movies (my brain is full of war movies), Star Wars had the bounce and weight of Operation Petticoat, compared to Rogue One’s gritty Generation Kill vibe. And I think I have to make that distinction because Rogue One is not a movie I would have shown to my four-year-old, but we watched Star Wars together and had a great time.

Not to say I think Rogue One is a bad movie. I enjoyed it for what it was, a reboot of the Star Wars franchise with new characters (and a few old characters) in familiar settings. But I wasn’t completely won over by it, either. It went for realism, sacrificing swashbuckling, and didn’t get a firm grip on either. And I loved Star Wars for its swashbuckling. But I have a feeling this movie wasn’t made for fifty-six-year-old me, so maybe the target audience ate up the gritty rebootedness of Rogue One the same way I ate up the corny swashbuckledness of Star Wars.

A few other minor quibbles:

There were a lot of people coming and going in the first half-hour of this movie, so many that I honestly had more than a little trouble keeping track of them, but I figured out pretty early that almost everybody was talking about the Death Star, and after I twigged to that, I stopped trying to keep track of everyone and just waited for them to mass and attack, because that’s what the rebel forces do when a Death Star shows up.

Almost every character had a completely forgettable name. This is most likely my problem more than the movie’s, but it annoyed and distracted me. I wasn’t sure what the name of the woman was until almost the end of the movie. Sometimes it sounded like Jen, sometimes like Jid (it turned out to be Jyn), and I was sure her family name was Ursal until the credits rolled.

Because the events in Rogue One led up to, and then immediately connected with events in Star Wars: A New Hope, several characters that appeared in Star Wars reappeared in Rogue One. Some were just for fun: C-3P0 and R2D2 made a cameo appearance, and so did the rat-faced guy who bumps into Luke Skywalker in the cantina in Mos Eisley. The rat-faced guy was probably played by a look-alike, which wouldn’t have been hard to pull off because his face was mostly latex and putty. C-3P0 could’ve been played by anybody, for obvious reasons. But Moff Tarkin, the commander of the Death Star, played a major part in Rogue One, and as Peter Cushing is dead twenty-two years last August, the movie’s makers decided to go with a computer-generated Tarkin rather than a look-alike for Cushing.

I am amazed by CGI characters when they can be done convincingly. Rogue One’s Moff Tarkin was not. He hid in the shadows almost constantly, giving me the impression that not even the film’s makers had confidence in his performance, and when he stepped out into the light, he seemed flat and immobile. CGI Princess Leia was even less convincing than Tarkin; she might as well have been a cardboard cutout, and that’s why it made a difference to me. I’m used to seeing CGI characters in video games, but no amount of familiarity is going to make me accept them when they look like cartoons in a live-action movie. I thought that, if they were going for gritty realism, they should’ve found some look-alikes, but then this movie probably wasn’t made for fifty-six-year-old me. I’m guessing its target demographic was more satisfied than I was.