My only gripe is the lack of an opening crawl. I can even slap one together, willy-nilly-like, so no excuses for that:
STAR WARS
ROGUE ONE
A Star Wars story
The REPUBLIC has fallen and the Jedi are no more. What remains of their light has scattered across the far reaches of the galaxy.
DARTH VADER and his master SIDIOUS now rule the GALACTIC EMPIRE through fear. The dark side of the force reigns supreme, but is resisted by a small band of REBELS.
Intent on crushing the fledgling REBEL ALLIANCE before it gains any ground, the Emporer sends his sinister agents to find rogue scientist GALEN ERSO in order to complete his ultimate weapon...
the entire point of not having an opening crawl was because it wasn't a numbered star wars movie. it was left out for unique-ness, not because of them being lazy
Gareth Edwards addressed this in a recent interview. He said, this movie was based on the crawl from ANH.. (in a way, this IS the crawl from ANH)..
..and he didn't want to have a situation where his crawl needed another movie, to explain the crawl-before-the-crawl, (and so on, and so on).
it had to begin somewhere.
--> the lack of a crawl places this one "first" in the running order. (for people who watch 4,5,6,1,2,3).
we now have a place to "start" the saga -- with NO crawl to explain 'what comes before' (because nothing comes before :p this is where the saga starts).
at least, that was the director's intention, anyway -- go back to 1976 and write the 'first chapter' with no hint at 'what comes before' (as if this was the very first SW movie, directly before the 1977 movie).