'Rogue One:A Star Wars story' review
Ever since Disney secured the rights to Star Wars from Lucas Films, its been a well known fact that we are going to be getting Star Wars movies FOREVER. Or at least for a while. Episode 7 last Christmas, and Episode 8 rumoured to be dropping next winter. However, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the franchise getting stale, Disney have started to expand the Star Wars cinematic universe, starting with 'Rogue One'. It's a very welcome idea. Despite how beloved the original trilogy are and how loathed the prequels are, I'm sure you'll agree that the plot of a Star Wars movie can get quite 'same-y'. For example, guess which Star Wars movie I'm describing. 'Here's your good guy, here's your bad guy, these are some robots, he's the good guy because of destiny or something, we've got to steal a thing so we can do another thing, cue a massive space battle and a lightsaber fight.' Exactly, it's impossible to tell. 'Rogue One' however branches out from that framework, whilst still fitting snuggly into the narrative of the world. Overall, it's pretty great.
Set directly before the events of Episode 4 (#RogueOneIsAPrequel), and based upon a few lines from the title crawl of the original movie, a rag-tag team of rebels have to capture the plans to destroy the super weapon that the empire are building. Fortunately, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is the daughter of the guy who designed it and is able to assist the rebel alliance in finding the plans and saving the galaxy. This in its self is remarkable. Gareth Edwards and his writers deserve some serious credit for being able to take a seemingly insignificant group of sentences and flesh it out into a convincing narrative is a real achievement. It's also impressive how Edwards has managed to blend original Star Wars tropes of super weapons and space battles into a more grounded and gritty story. There's a lot more on the ground fighting in 'Rogue One' than any Star Wars movie before. Also, I feel some tension is lost in earlier films as I never really feel like the heroes are in danger. Yet in 'Rogue One' theres a genuine feeling that any protagonist could die at any moment, keeping your eyes glued to the screen.
The new characters are for the most part great. Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), Cacian Andor (Diego Luna) are both really strong in leading roles. Donnie Yen's character is truly incredible. It's never made clear whether he is force sensitive, or that just his years of worshiping the jedi belief have granted him such powers, but what is for certain is that seeing a blind guy armed with just a stick and his faith in the force take down a whole squad of stormtroopers is immensely satisfying. Mads Mickelson's role is comparatively brief to some others, but he knocks it out of the park as always. Ben Mendelsohn is also a convincing and sinister villain. However, in my opinion, there is a slight imbalance of character usage. As mentioned, Mads Mickelson's appearance is short, but I also would have liked to have seen more from Riz Ahmed's character. I also hated K-2SO. I appreciate that in a movie with such a gritty and extreme storyline, it's nice to have the odd moment of levity, but for me all of his jokes felt forced, many of them fell flat and to be honest I would have preferred his screen time to be used on other characters.
The returning faces are also a mixed bag. The inclusions of very familiar faces, such as R2-D2, C3PO and Princess Leia are crafted in perfectly, linking the movie into the wider universe, whilst keeping their inclusions brief enough so that they don't feel forced. They are all pale in comparison to Darth Vader though. This is the best version we've seen of Vader ever put to screen, in particular, one scene towards the end of the movie, which is truly horrifying, he's ruthless, filled with hate and will not hesitate to kill anyone. If anything, I wanted to see more of him and less of the obnoxious robot.
Structurally, the film is interesting. To me, the the first act feeling very scattered and almost chopped together. All the scenes are good, yet they switch in and out of different characters and planets so quickly, you can begin to lose track of who's where. There are, however, some methods in place to combat this, for example the inclusion of title cards for planets for the first time in any Star Wars movie, which i found welcome. However, my initial concerns were gone by Act 3, which is truly spectacular.
Visually, the movie is stunning. The space battles and vehicles have never looked so good. But to me the most impressive thing was how the whole movie was scaled. The Death Star has never been seen to be so big - it genuinely huge, and in particular a scene where some rebels on the ground run into an AT-ACT thats looks ginormous.
Overall, there's a lot to like about 'Rogue One'. It's references to the original films are subtle yet welcome, it's an entirely new take on Star Wars which is very refreshing and Darth Vader is fantastic.
4/5 Stars
4/5 Stars
