It’s been said a hundred times by now, but it truly is an amazing time to be a Star Wars fan; a new film every year, consistently great TV shows, books and video games, endless amounts of toys and the sheer prospect of this already beloved universe expanding further and further. Audiences were blown away by The Force Awakens, and we wait in anticipation for The Last Jedi, but in between those films, we got something else entirely.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a prequel/spin off is the newly planned series of anthology flicks set within the universe. Set in between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it’s set against the backdrop of a galaxy ruled by the Empire. Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a young girl with a troubled past, is approached by the Rebellion to help them get information on the Empire’s latest weapon, due to her personal connection to one it’s creators. She’s joined on her adventure by pilot Cassian Andor (Diego Lunar) and his sassy droid companion K2-SO (Alan Tudyk), force sensitive Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and his loyal friend Baze (Wen Jiang), and defected Imperial pilot Bodhi (Riz Ahmed). Together, they’ll face against Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) and the Empire, and restore hope to the galaxy.
Rogue One is a fairly divisive film; a huge success when it came out (though being a Star Wars film, that was expected regardless), but many have been outspoken in their disdain for the film. Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle. Rogue One is far from a bad film, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s start with the positives, because there genuinely are many: The visuals are phenomenal. This film is completely breathtaking to look at, and Gareth Edwards most certainly knows how to shoot battle sequences. The entire third act of the film is very exciting and completely badass, especially one scene in particular….Yeah, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There plenty of new and interesting worlds introduced, all of the performances are great (Especially Felicity Jones and Ben Menelsohn), K-2SO is a delight, and, ultimately, the film is a great experience.
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly lacking in the characters department; the characters are enjoyable and well acted, but they’re very hard to buy into. Almost all of them feel rather shallow and uninteresting. The best character in the film (Excluding pre-existing characters) is Krennic, and that’s largely because his story has a certain amount of depth to it. His constant degradation by his superiors and his desire for recognition adds some great levels to the character. Truthfully, Jyn’s story has some depth too, what with her father’s involvement in the Empire and the way she was raised, brought up by Clone Wars hero Sol Guerrera (Forrest Whittaker), but we don’t really get to see any of that. Even just a 15 minute segment to the film would’ve been nice just to give us an insight into that time and add more to the characters, especially Sol, who feels very out of place in the film, and Whittaker’s performance is near impossible to take seriously. What’s also impossible to take seriously is the incredibly random inclusion of a weird squid monster that tortures people for information and adds nothing to the film, but I digress. Beyond that, the characters sort of get a sentence here and there with a little backstory to it, but ultimately, they become nothing. Now I’m not insisting that every character in this film needs drawn out back stories with flashbacks and everything, because I appreciate that this isn’t a trilogy, and we’re not dealing with characters as important as Han, Luke or Leia, but just a little bit more than what we got would’ve been enough to make us care and root for these heroes.
And where certain characters didn’t feel developed enough, there others who got far more time than they needed. I am of course referring to Grand Moff Tarkin, brought back to life with the use of motion capture, who gets a hefty amount of screen time in this film. His first scene is genuinely great; realising he’s in it at all was an amazing moment, and at first, the effects aren’t that bad. But the more he talks and the more he appears, the more jarring they become, to the point where having him on screen is a problem. He’s not the only character to have these motion capture effects done to him, and in all cases of it, it didn’t feel right. I appreciate the respect shown to the late Peter Cushing in not recasting him, but we didn’t need that much screen time for him. If anything, it might’ve been better to have him as more of a shadowy figure behind the scenes, while Krennic takes the position that Tarkin played in this film, as he truly deserved that screen time more than Tarkin did. Tarkin isn’t the film’s only throwback to the originals, and that’s also kind of a problem. There are other cameos in the film, such as Darth Vader, an appearance that everyone knew about and was used to perfection, and then others that I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but they’re ultimately fan service and completely shoe horned in. The Force Awakens was a little guilty of this too, but somehow it just feels more out of place in this one. There is a way to do fan service correctly – the final scene involving Vader is maybe some of the best fan service of all time – but these additions just felt pointless.
Still, Rogue One achieves a fair bit of poignancy in it’s climax, and overall, achieves it’s goal of being an exciting war film. The visuals are great, the action is immense, and the performances are fine, and ultimately, that’s all we can ask for from a film that set out to put the Wars in Star Wars. It’s heavily lacking in character and other areas, and that’s very disappointing, but at the end of the day, this is A Star Wars Story, not a Star Wars Film. It doesn’t have to stand up to what’s already come before and defined the series, it’s a perfectly fine stand alone film.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is out on DVD & Blu-Ray now!