I mean, you have the main character who is directly tied to the Death Star by an prominent engineer father who was forced against his will and she saw her mother get shot. Father was in close ties with a known rebel extremist who trained her until she was 16, all the -keyword- extremist knowing she was the daughter of the prominent engineer.. Saw tries to part ways for her safety alone, because, you know, Extremists?
You have a Imperial cargo pilot who defects to be a better person, who wants to do right, and is essentially under the command the girls father to find who is last known contact bridge between father/daughter; Saw. Sure the tentacle torture is a little campy, but its a fun little notch to torture tactics employed by a vast galaxy of creatures, which doesn't imply immediate death. He finds himself relatively useless until they have to break through high imperial security, and having his know about on imperial info/tech. He commands troopers in succeeding in this plan, he lives out an unsung hero.
edit; idk, this is more having recently watching rebels on my commute.. but around this time after the whole clone wars incident.. jedi's/sith were legends/jokes/myths/ect... I think the same applies, so people who believe in the force are how atheist view christians.
You have Chirrut and Baze. It's said as if they're those sermon crazed fanatics, more specifically Chirrut. We as the audience knew the immediate connection in the force and his ability to pick up something like the kyber crystal on Jyn neck; for all we know the force is with him. He is granted a sense of vision through the force, implied time and time again. We also, from what Cassian says, learn that he was the guardian of a Jedi temple*or Whills, which i'm still not sure the difference completely, thats beyond me) in which the Empire was farming kyber crystals from. He was out of a job at that point, and again, a few times over, we find that he can sense feelings and understand them to a level no one else can, which gives us the reason he follows Jyn; the whole purity/innocence bullshit. I will give you little is said about Baze, but it's easy to cast him as the deductive reasoning for Chirruts cooky monk behavior, hes the parrot to a pirate. He is the one who translates to the other characters in the cast, and is heavily implied long time friend.
Cassian is pretty straight forward, and it all gets laid out more specificly than the rest. For the most part he is the reflection of Jyn, but he is the guy that instead of running justifies everything he does for the sake of the rebellion. We see the conflict of action and decision throughout the film.
There isn't much to be said abotu K2, other than hes a reconfigured imperial droid.. so he has to be filled with dialog.
I mean sure, they honestly could have gone crazy in depth with backstory and fleshing out the characters entire history, shit they could probably run off and make movies about them if they really wanted to.. cliche as they all are, it'd probably been a waste because ultimately the film is still about the death star, and thats it. It's from the rebellions perspective of how to attack a colossal monstrosity. The disagreement between the alliance, and the -hope- we all know. It's fitting that theyre all dead, because its the cost of war, its the heroic sacrifice. I mean, we cant exactly expect the rebellion to do some dday shit on the archives when its made up of a counsel of people who are arguably against the rebellion, but aren't fully dedicated to repersent the loss that is involved w/ going against them.
I can understand most of TFA characterization hate; being that it is suppose to be a trilogy of sorts.. and being modern day, so much fleshy left out bits that keep us scratching our heads for no good reason and without proper direction other than the -obvious- goodbadsithjedi
I don't expect an indepth detail of why you think so, but honestly you sound like my dad when trying to show him movies(he liked the first starwars, and thought the rest were stupid given at the time groundbreakingness), and barely watching anything outside of black and white films. Extremely harsh critic when it comes to vietnam films, to the point he won't even watch em. If I put a computer infront of him and try to teach him, he'd rather learn how to use it with a hammer. I just openly accept the idea that he says anything cgi related gets him sick as the plausible answer.