7.0/10. *A New Hope*, *The Empire Strikes Back*, and *Return of the Jedi* are the sacred texts of the *Star Wars* universe. Every story and every piece of the universe that has emerged in the wake of those first three films – sequels, prequels, midquels, comics, T.V. shows, video games, trading cards, action figures, and commemorative plates – are indebted to the franchise’s holy trinity. Each of them, no matter what claim to originality or expansion they may make, echoes, references, or “rhymes” with those instigating incidents. For as wide and wooly as the famed distant galaxy has become over the years, the creators and collaborators behind *Star Wars* are forever filling in the gaps left by those all-important lodestones of the franchise.
*Rogue One: A Star Wars Story* is the peak of this gap-filling mentality brought to bear. It is inexorably tied to the original *Star Wars*, taking great pains to connect the events of the film to those of its hallowed predecessor, even when it gets in the way of telling *Rogue One*’s own story. In that way, it feels closer to pandering than to a novel extension of the *Star Wars* universe, like a film desperate to remind you what comes next in the story, without regard for whether any of the harbingers it presents truly add anything to the story we already know.
It’s a shame, because beneath the frantic attempts to show the audience where the film fits into the franchise’s timeline is a solid if unspectacular standalone tale. *Rogue One* tells the story of the assorted individuals responsible for stealing the plans for the Death Star, and taken apart from the ways in which that narrative is relegated to being mere setup for what’s to come, it’s an interesting, hardscrabble slice of the larger *Star Wars* story.
For all its strengths, so much of *Star Wars* inevitably comes down to two warring factions: the Rebels and the Empire, the Republic and the Separatists, the Jedi and the Sith. What makes *Rogue One* unique is its focus on those who are outside of that dichotomy and its inescapable conflicts. Most of the individuals we meet are ready to buck up against the Empire when it suits them, but not so eager to thumb their noses at this overwhelming force in pursuit of truth, justice, and the midi-chlorian way.
There’s merit in that tack. The problem is that the film stumbles considerably in telling these people’s story, or any sort of complete story for that matter. *Rogue One* is less a full and robust narrative – one that, ideally, builds and progresses and culminates at the right time – than it is a mere series of moments which bear only a mild relation to one another. Some of those moments are cool. A handful of them are even thrilling. But they don’t amount to something cohesive and complete, and the film suffers for it.
The effort’s also hampered by the uninspiring qualities of the film’s major characters. Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), *Rogue One*’s protagonist, is mostly a cipher, whose informed attributes overwhelm any actual personality from the character. We learn her backstory – she’s a de facto orphan (why is it always orphans in *Star Wars*?); she has abandonment issues that have driven her to apathy; and she’s a survivor – but her emotional journey in the film is underdeveloped and Jones fails to breathe enough life into the role to overcome that fact.
Jyn reconnects, however briefly or ephemerally, with those she lost, and seems to learn something about a commitment and a love that transcends separation or apparent abandonment. But the connection between that mild revelation and her sudden commitment to the greater good is thin at best, and mostly serves as light texture for the major fireworks at the end of the film. It keeps *Rogue One* playing from behind from the beginning.
The same goes for other lead in the film, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a hardened Rebel fighter. As written, Andor should be an interesting character, occupying a moral gray area that’s rare in this universe. In contrast to the purity exhibited by the members of the Rebel Alliance in *A New Hope*, Cassian is not above killing allies and bystanders when it suits his purposes. Early in the film, he blows away an informant who grows too panicky, as it was for his scruffy cinematic predecessor, the character’s introduction leaves no ambiguity as to who shot first.
But Luna gives a flat performance as Andor, to the point that the character comes off as a lifeless drone, lurching about simply to move the narrative along, but only feigning some deeper emotional drive. This type of performance can work for this type of character, who’s seen too much and grown detached and jaded. But *Rogue One* never really does the heavy lifting to sell his story in a way that makes this characterization meaningful.
Which makes the side characters the only genuinely compelling personalities in the film. Chief among these are Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang), a pair of force-worshipping monks, and K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) a reprogrammed imperial droid with a dry wit.
The former make for a particularly interesting pair. Îmwe makes an impression as a blind but true believer, who trusts in the force and demonstrates the strength of that belief in his effective use of a bow and in his acts of faith. Baze compliments his partner well as the lapsed adherent who’s quick with a futuristic chain gun. He’s a reluctant combatant, but a protective friend. And K2 is practically the exclusive source of the film’s humor, providing unexpected bits of heart as well. It may be the character quirks or the performances, but these individuals stand out as the only new personalities involved to make the audience invest in the results of this little escapade.
Nearly everyone else, from Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker, making some deliberate but odd choices in his performance) to Galen Ersa (Mads Mikkelsen who, for the second time this summer, elevates the shallow material his character receives) is lost in a sea of heavily underlined cameos and ham-fisted hints at what comes next.
**CAUTION: The remainder of this review contains significant spoilers for Rogue One.**
While it’s fun (if contrived) to see minor characters like Ponda Baba and Evazan pop up here and there, *Rogue One* is awash in nigh-pointless appearances from better known characters. C-3PO and R2-D2 pop up for a moment to deliver a quick dose of their usual banter. A scene with Darth Vader and the film’s antagonist, Director Krennic, serves little purpose beyond allowing the Sith Lord to show off his standard parlor trick and deliver a corny pun. Bail Organa (the only significant presence from the Prequels), also appears in order to participate in awkwardly-worded exchanges about Obi Wan Kenobi. Of all these cameos, only Grand Moff Tarkin (an impressively compu-revivified Peter Cushing) feels at all significant to the plot of *this film* and not just some sop to fans hoping to see their old favorites.
So the film putters along through clumsy exposition-ridden exchanges; stolid, eye roll-worthy scenes; and convenient but uninspiring developments. Little of it descends to the level of being outright bad. Everything is competent. Almost everyone has a clear motivation. *Rogue One * just offers little reason to be invested in any of it.
Then, however, comes the finale. It’s an epic battle that spans three settings – a raucous dogfight in space, a guerilla-esque battle on the ground, and a race against time to recover the death star plans inside an empire facility – and the film picks up considerably once it hits. In fact, that last gasp of the film, its extraordinary race to the finish, nearly justifies all the stumbles and flaws on the way to that point. There is a vibrancy and an urgency to the rigors of war, the thrill of the fight, and the weight of the sacrifice in the film’s final frame that is all but missing in the first two-thirds of the movie.
Those orbital dogfights live up to the best in the franchise’s history. While far busier than the famous run on the Death Star in *A New Hope* and more varied than the fight in *Return of the Jedi*, the interplanetary combat portion of *Rogue One* brings creativity and visual flair to the fore. The “hammerhead corvette” move to ram one star destroyer into another is not only a stunning image in and of itself, but represents the sort of desperation and lateral thinking that gives the Rebel Alliance a legitimate chance to overthrow the adversaries who’ll otherwise overwhelm and outmatch them.
Similarly, the efforts on the ground among the former monks and defecting imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed, who is fine but, again, feels underdeveloped and lacking in personality relative to his robotic and Jedi Temple-defending counterparts) against the invading stormtrooper army are unique among *Star Wars* action sequences. The beachside setting alone makes the battle feel distinct from any others in the franchise.
And it’s in that setting that *Rogue One* starts to feel like a war movie in a way that no other *Star Wars* film has. The images of the troopers storming the beaches, of firefights back and forth and explosions happening all around, create a visceral sense of the struggle here, in a film more committed to the realities and casualties of conflict than the high space fantasy of the original trilogy.
But, as with the rest of the film, the part focusing on Jyn and Cassian is the weakest facet of the finale. Their effort to obtain the Death Star plans amounts to a souped-up take on the claw machine and devolves into a standard cat and mouse game that lacks the immediacy or excitement of the other two elements of the battle. But even that segment of the film’s climax is saved by a cohesiveness and common purpose among the three distinct battle zones that makes each individual fight feel a part of the larger struggle.
In contrast to even George Lucas’s films, *Rogue One* does a superior job at weaving the various conflicts in the film’s climax into one unified whole. The quest to transmit the Death Star plans involves combatants at all levels. K2 seals the doors and holds off stormtroopers. Jyn and Cassian nab the data tapes and upload them to the Empire’s transmitter. Bodhi connects the comms-line; the monks throw the master switch, and the spaceships in the sky break the Empire’s big honkin’ shield, thereby allowing the transmission through. Everyone has a part to play, with a clear progression in how their actions impact the larger goal, creating a sense of place that’s missing elsewhere, in the film and occasionally in the franchise writ large.
But it’s what happens next that offers *Rogue One*’s boldest stroke, and which also shows its limitations as a spinoff. *Rogue One* is the first *Star Wars* anthology film, the first movie set in this universe not to be a part of the larger saga, not to carry an episode designation, and not to focus on the Skywalkers and their assorted offspring and hangers on. That gives it a unique opportunity to take stories in this expansive and wide open universe and tell them without the larger world- and franchise-building constraints that come with the main saga.
*Rogue One* takes that opportunity to do something that the other films in the *Star Wars* franchise wouldn’t, and in many cases couldn’t do – kill off the entire cast. It is a gutsy move, but one done artfully. One-by-one, every major character receives their moment in the sun, to engage is some act of valor or defiance in pursuit of the larger goal, and then to pay the ultimate price in it. These scenes are the most heart-rending in the film, and the ones that feed into the larger theme of *Rogue One* more than any other – the idea that smaller, harsher, and more personal sacrifices made the epic space opera of *A New Hope* and its successors possible. There is a power in the way that this film follows through on the stakes it lays out; in the way it embraces the hardship and devastation that had to happen for Luke’s triumphant moment to happen; in the way it closes with Jyn and Cassian, locked in a *Watchmen*-esque embrace, in the face of annihilation.
And that’s really where the film should have ended, with our heroes having achieved their goal but suffering the mortal consequences of doing so. It’s admittedly a bit of a down note, but also an equally triumphant one, where yes, people suffer for their cause, but also advance it in an immeasurable way in the process. Instead, *Rogue One* bends over backwards to tie the ending of this film to the beginning of *Episode IV*, messing with the pacing and punch of its closing parry in the process.
In fairness, the ensuing scene where Darth Vader remorselessly slays a room full of rebels, all of them powerless to resist and trying desperately to send the data tapes on, is the coolest and most menacing the character has looked on the silver screen since *The Empire Strikes Back*. There’s an awe-inspiring combination of ruthlessness and effortlessness in the way Vader attacks them, that comes through in the way this tremendous sequence is choreographed, shot, and edited.
The film’s actual closing scene is more of a misstep, with an unnervingly CGI’d young Princess Leia painfully underlining the film’s mantra in a strained attempt to end a dark movie on a positive note. In contrast to the aged Tarkin, whose weathered face hides some of the seams of the computerized facelift, Leia quickly drifts into the uncanny valley, already getting a clunky scene off on the wrong foot.
But that issue aside, her appearance still amounts to another pandering cameo, which speaks more to the other films in the series than this one. And to boot, it features another cheesy line about “hope” in a script that couldn’t be more obvious about sending that message if Director Gareth Edwards personally elbowed each audience-member in the side every time the word was used. It speaks into the ways in which *Rogue One* is constantly tying itself to what came before and what comes next, rather than Edwards and the creative team allowing the movie to stand on its own.
And to be fair, some of the justifications I offered for *The Force Awakens*’s familiarity – a point that’s been held against the film since its release – apply here as well. *Rogue One* is trying something brand new – a spinoff that is not a direct part of the continuing *Star Wars * saga. Maybe Kathleen Kennedy and the powers that be at Disney and Lucasfilm felt that when wading into such uncharted waters, they needed to tie *Rogue One* explicitly and loudly into the main story that even the most casual of casual moviegoers would be familiar with. That way, the film not only works as a recognizable introduction into this brave new world of spinoffs and side stories, but those shout outs also help to demonstrate that these films are still “real *Star Wars*,” as present and vital to the franchise as any movie fronted by a Jedi.
But these anthology films are also a chance for the cinematic side of the *Star Wars* franchise to do what its televised counterparts, *The Clone Wars* and *Rebels* have done – use this familiar backdrop to tell *different types of stories*, to explore characters and settings in ways that would otherwise clash with the spirit of the main saga, and to find corners of the *Star Wars* universe that are not beholden to the adventures of the Skywalker family or the story that started it all.
The core of these aspirations is present in *Rogue One*, with unique elements and bold choices that stand to distinguish this first anthology film from its episodic brethren. But too often, the film gives into fanservice, or shoehorned inter-film connections, or familiar beats, that make the movie feel more like *Episode III and ½* than its own *Star Wars* story.
The galaxy described in that famous opening crawl stretches far and wide. *Rogue One* presents a number of very cool moments within that galaxy – waterside warfare, bow-ridden grace, and merciless Sith brutality – but they never transcend being mere disconnected moments outside of the film’s high-intensity third act. So often *Rogue One* is simply filling in the gaps of the story already told in that galaxy, rather than expanding it. The result is a missed opportunity and a film that, for all its merits, could have been, and almost was, so much more than a pitstop on the way from revenge to hope.
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