Director: Gareth Edwards
Running time: 2 hours and 13 minutes
Despite some glaring flaws, Rogue One is one of the best in the Star Wars series
Rogue One is the first stand alone in the now Disney owned Star Wars franchise, taking place just before the 1977 original.
In a nutshell, the story is about an imperial pilot who defects to the rebellion, bringing with him a message about the whereabouts of the plans to a newly built weapon called the Death Star, from one of its senior designers, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelson). The message ends up in the hands one of the most extreme (but separate from the Rebel Alliance) fighters in the rebellion against the Empire, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker).
To find out what the message is, the Rebel Alliance recruit one of his former associates and Galen Erso's long lost daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones). She is teamed with Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and a reprogrammed imperial droid called K-2SO (who is wonderfully voiced by Alan Tudyk). As the story moves on, another two join the group, blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and mercenary Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang). The main antagonist in the story is Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), who oversees the Death Star, and who was also the one responsible for taking Galen Erso away from his family to help build the planet destroying weapon.
Rogue One is certainly one of the darkest Star Wars movies, the violence while not explicit, feels very physical and alive. Unlike most of the violence in the previous films in the series, every character action seems to have consequence in Rogue One, which builds to a larger scope within the universe.
And there is plenty of scope in this film, far more than I anticipated, with many different locales and planets visited. The cinematography is beautiful, the universe feels like a living and breathing setting, and without doubt it is visually immersive. However, much of what you see is often just backdrop, while the world of Star Wars is widened it often feels shallow and unexplored.
The characters work well as a team, there is clear agency and motivation, the performances are all good at the very least. But it's in the characterisation that Rogue One falls short, because aside from Jyn Erso, none of the characters have any depth, they are all kind of just there to serve the story and nothing much else. Which is a real shame because Star Wars is absolutely at its best not in its fantastic action set-pieces, but in the characters we want to share the universe with.
The pace of the film was slower than I expected, as the first two thirds slowly build up to the wonderful final battle in the last third. The action is far more creative than anything seen in the Force Awakens (which was very conservative in both its creativity and action). The spaceship fights are particularly well choreographed, not only is there a dynamic range of camera angles to show the scale of the fighting, but it's edited in a way that makes sure you know what's actually going on, which was not only a bit of a problem with some of the other films in the series, but a problem with most space battles in film generally.
Another slight negative is the score, it's not noticeably bad or good, it's just passable at best, which shouldn't be the case with a Star Wars film, with its catalogue of wonderful music in its archive.
Familiar characters from the original trilogy do return, some work better than others, some are nothing more than easter eggs. Darth Vader returns in an unimportant but rather imposing role, which I really liked because he isn't the distraction in the film that I feared he would be. One particular scene will remind you of why he's one of the most iconic villains of all time.
Verdict:
While we might already know where the film's ultimate fate is, Rogue One is executed brilliantly, acting as a transition to the very first Star Wars film, while surprisingly giving it added weight and context, rather than disgracing and undercutting it as I originally feared. I would without question recommend you go see Rogue One, even if you are not a Star Wars. I'd rank it joint third in my all time favourite Star Wars movie list.
8/10
B+
