Movie critics got their first look at “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” on Monday night. As their reviews spread across the internet on Tuesday, it became clear there was little consensus about the film. The reviews were mostly positive, but there were several notable exceptions.

Let’s start with, oh, to pick one at random, The New York Times. A.O. Scott called it a “thoroughly mediocre movie” with “a surprisingly hackish script.”

“Rogue One,” named for the call sign of an imperial cargo ship appropriated by rebel fighters, is the opposite of that vessel. Masquerading as a heroic tale of rebellion, its true spirit is Empire all the way down.

On MTV, Amy Nicholson said the film’s director, Gareth Edwards, had an opportunity to “explore a never-ending frontier,” but instead, “we’re trapped on a round-trip cruise to the moon.”

Audiences once packed theaters to gawk at the future; now, it’s to soak in the past. The emphasis is on packing in as much nostalgia as possible and tersely editing it together to resemble a film.

The Miami Herald was also underwhelmed. Rene Rodriguez said the end was rousing, but the journey there was “about as exciting as a long drive down the Florida Turnpike.”

Aside from answering the burning question of “Why did the designers of the Death Star leave the station’s exhaust ports so vulnerable to a missile attack?” there’s almost nothing in “Rogue One” that adds substance to the “Star Wars” realm.

In USA Today, Brian Truitt said the movie was undermined by its ties to the original trilogy, and it “misses a real chance to turn the familiar into something remarkable.”

“Rogue One” feels small in scale, even with its signature heroism and sci-fi action, and its main players mostly lack the charm that made Rey, Finn and Poe in last year’s “The Force Awakens” — or Han, Luke and Leia back in the day — so special.

Stephanie Zacharek wrote in Time that it was “almost pedantic in its inoffensiveness.”

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” will not change lives for the worse or for the better, and it will — or ought to — offend no one. Welcome to the Republic of the Just O.K.

The New Yorker was perhaps the most harsh. Calling the film “lobotomized and depersonalized,” Richard Brody wondered: Is it time to abandon the “Star Wars” franchise?

The director of “Rogue One,” Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series’ fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a master, come anywhere close to life.

More critics seemed to love it, though

Several other critics were far more complimentary, and some even considered it among the best of the eight films in the “Star Wars” canon.

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty said the film “gets the obsessive need-to-know curiosity that the most rabid ‘Star Wars’ fans have always had.”

“Rogue One” would have been a very good stand-alone sci-fi movie if it came out under a different name. But what makes it especially exciting is how it perfectly snaps right into the “Star Wars” timeline and connects events we already know by heart with ones that we never even considered.

Richard Lawson wrote in Vanity Fair that it is “a bracing and dizzying marvel, propulsively pitched and even, I dare say, moving.”