Huh. We quite enjoyed Rogue 1. Not enough to buy it or anything. It was an interesting backstory to what sounded like a throwaway reference in the movie. Haven't seen Solo.
To the naysayers of the original Star Wars. Yeah, it was simplistic, even awkward. In simple movie-making standards, Empire was superior.
And I hate to say this, but you had to be there. When Star Wars came out, we had never seen anything like it. Those effects of dogfighting craft, the jump to lightspeed, the lightsabers, the speedster skimming over the desert - you take all that for granted now. But it was a quantum shift for us at the time. We were flat blown away. Up until then, it was models, or photographs of them, moving their stately way across the screen, e.g., 2001 and Star Trek.
And the score. Of course, the score.
In its mediocre writing and reasonable acting way, it begat the stuff we like so much still. There's a reason that Star Wars exists as an enduring franchise on its own. I can sit back and MST3K the original as much as anyone. But I also remember that Grandma and I saw it four times - four times - in the first month that it was out, as we kept dragging along friends to see it too.
It was a movie spectacle the likes of which had not occurred since Hitchcock's Psycho. Like that, it brought a new paradigm to cinema, and the movie world has not been the same since.