Star Wars:Rogue One is a spin-off of the wildly successful Star Wars Cinematic Universe, and the second of several planned Disney movies. Rogue One was directed by Gareth Edwards of "Godzilla" 2014 fame and was written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (both of which have several movies to their names). The film stars Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso and has a whole cavalcade of love-able cannon fodder side characters.
Of course you've probably already seen Rogue One, I'm more than a year late on riding the review coat-tails, so I'm going to keep this one relatively short. Rogue One will be the first of my Disney Star Wars reviews, so I'll get to The Force Awakens and Last Jedi later. I grew up loving Star Wars when I was younger, and I read A LOT of the Extended Universe books. However, when Disney bought Star Wars I was a little worried. I'll get to my thoughts on TFA later, but I was mostly upset that most of my beloved stories were now considered "Legends". Basically that means that none of the stories ever happened if they're not sanctioned by Disney. Which I was alright with it overall, it was going to be impossible for Disney to make all the books work in line with their story. Okay now lets jump into this quicky.
Side note, I did see Rogue One in theaters a year ago. I sat down and watched it again earlier for this review.
THE PLOT:
The daughter of a successful weapon engineer must find her father before the Empire can use their super powered Death Star to cement an iron grip on the galaxy.
OVERALL THOUGHTS:
When I first saw Rogue One, I was jarred by the lack of a title crawl. I know now that its supposed to create a different tone for the intro, to make it different from the trilogies. Like I said, I was a little surprised but in the end it doesn't make too much of a difference. We already know the story, and you'd be lying if you said you didn't watch the trailer for the movie (or at least have an idea of what's going to happen).
Another thing I noticed is that the movie jumps around a lot in the beginning. Its very unfocused, and we'll be planets apart within the drop of a hat. They're beautiful planets with their own unique looks, but they were all jammed in there. The movie is absolutely gorgeous but the movie doesn't ever really do anything with the scenery. All of the Imperial imagery is absolutely bad-ass. If I had any friends they would tell you that I am an Imperial sympathizer. I have a weakness for the cool uniforms and powerful weapons in films. Star Destroyers were always my favorite Star Wars ship and you get to see plenty throughout Rogue One.
Like I said before, the movie is rather unfocused early on. Characters sort of just start to tag along, are killed off, or just written out of the movie. Forest Whitaker as Saw was interesting, but underused and completely useless. Most of the characters in the movie are interesting, which is honestly a weakness for the movie. You want these guys to be doing something awesome or epic. Its Star Wars, a giant space epic. But these characters honestly don't do much. They're likeable and we want to see them do well, at least the good guys. Most of the villains are cartoonishly evil, which honestly works for a Star Wars film. Ben Mendelson is great as Krennic, truly outshining the main Rebel stars (here's looking at you Felicity). Darth Vader + Tarkin (hokey CGI included) are always treats to see, with Darth Vader getting some awesome fan service towards the end.
Felicity Jones as Jyn works, but I feel like her character was mishandled. With a better actress I feel like I might've liked her character more. She has plenty of corny lines still, not all of them were cut like the "I Rebel" line from the trailers. Her character was pretty flat too. Its bad when a robot has more personality than your lead actress. Diego Luna plays Cassian Andor, a welcome dark character that shows the Rebels aren't all good guys. With Cassian though, I always called him "Discount Javi Pena". You know the guy from Game of Thrones and Narcos. Its like the role was written for Pedro Pascal but they couldn't lock him down. So Disney did the next best thing and got someone that looks like him. If you don't think of that, it might never bother you. But its just something that stuck out to me.
The real strength starts to show when the movie is restricted to one set piece. The battle for the Death Star plans in orbit and on the beach is when the movie really starts to shine. The movie shifts tones from an adventure movie straight into a war movie. Rogue One isn't afraid to be dark, so you will see plenty of death on both sides. I'll admit, was hard to watch some guys not make it.The entire last half of this movie completely redeems almost everything that the first half did wrong. You could watch that second half on its own and you wouldn't be missing anything from the first.
FINAL SCORE:
B+
If you haven't seen Rogue One yet, what are you even doing?
STRAY NOTES (SPOILERS):
- Holy shit that scene with Vader was awesome
- Holy shit that CGI with Leia and Tarkin was pretty bad
- Did that Corvette just push a Star Destroyer into another Star Destroyer? Awesome
- Krennic's storm troopers in black armor were pretty cool, their radio sounds were cool too
- Aw man, K-2SO
- If the first half was like the second half, this movie would be at least an A
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