It is no exaggeration to say that this movie has been my most anticipated movie of the year, and it’s been a good year for movies. To name just a few, Warcraft, Batman V Superman, Captain America: Civil War, Suicide Squad, Finding Dory, Deadpool, Doctor Strange, Fantastic Beasts and where to find them. Nothing has made me want to go to the cinemas as much as a new Star Wars though.
So now I’ve seen it, let’s review it.
SPOILER LEVEL: Limited to what was revealed in the trailers. If you haven’t seen the trailers, then this review contains spoilers. If you have seen the trailers, you’re good to go.
TLDR: I enjoyed this movie a lot and will be seeing it again. I’ll definitely buy it on Blu-Ray. The battle scenes are absolutely amazing and the special effects are top-notch. I loved the character banter and especially everything that came out of K-2SO’s mouth. One of the best droids in the Star Wars universe. It also addressed one of my biggest gripes with the Death Star, so props for that. Now, this movie is not without its flaws though. The characterization and character motivations are very much lacking and the movie as a whole is not very surprising. I saw the ending coming a mile away – even before I’d set foot in the theater I knew how it was going to end and, lo and behold, it did. That said the positives far outweighed the negatives for me.
The Light Side of the Force:
On the Light Side we have the things I liked most about the movie.
Special Effects: The special effects in this movie are mind-blowing, there’s really no other way to describe them. The big explosions come to mind as truly beautiful. The only gripe I have is that they had some human characters that were fully CG, and those were a little jarring when you see them. They’re not bad, but you know they are not real.
Battle scenes: The battle scenes are really well choreographed, from the fights on the ground to the space battles with X-Wings and Star Destroyers, they all look amazing and also rather gritty and realistic, which is not something Star Wars is known for. You can watch this movie for the battle scenes alone, they are just that good.
Rebellion: The rebellion is not squeaky clean in this movie. They’ve done some really bad stuff in the name of the greater good. Some of the rebel factions are actually extremists. This is the side of the rebellion that we didn’t get to see in the main Star Wars movies and it’s a welcome addition.
Meatbags: Yes, that’s a reference to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a fantastic game that contains one of my favorite droids ever: HK-47, the smart-mouth assassination droid with a tendency to refer to organic beings as meatbags. In this movie we have a droid that reminds me a lot of HK-47, K-2SO. This droid says whatever comes to mind and it’s almost always disrespectful. Par one, maybe the best character in the movie.
Darth Vader: The best character in the movie, though unfortunately he’s not in a lot of it at all (so don’t get your hopes up). When he is though he rocks those scenes and it becomes clear once again why Darth Vader is one of the best villains in movie history. The prequels did their best to ruin him by giving us Anakin Skywalker, but as Obi-Wan said to Luke in A New Hope and Darth Vader said to Ahsoka in Star Wars: Rebels, Vader killed Anakin. And nothing shows that more than watching Darth Vader at work.
Vader also has the best line in the movie.
Brilliant.
Death Star: One of the biggest gripes I had with the Death Star in episode IV: A New Hope (and I’m far from the only one) is that the empire designed a weapon with such a glaring, easily exploitable, weakness, namely a shaft that leads directly from the outside all the way to the generator inside.
Rogue One addresses that and now that glaring oversight makes perfect sense.
They also make good use of the Death Star in this movie. It is properly threatening while not taking away from the fact that the first real weapon test doesn’t take place until Alderaan gets blown up in Episode IV. Very well done.
Lead in to episode IV: The whole movie basically describes the opening crawl of Episode IV, with the rebels trying to get the Death Star plans. Well, the end of the movie is the most perfect lead-in to Episode IV and makes you just want to pop in that movie after seeing Rogue One. Great job there.
The Dark Side of the Force:
Where there is Light, there is Dark, and where there are positives there are invariably negatives as well. So here we go.
Choppy pacing at the start: At the start Rogue One really goes all over the place introducing a plethora of characters and jumping from character to character and planet to planet. To me that’s just too much, too fast. It’s not the first movie that does this (in fact I think this was one of my gripes for Warcraft as well…let’s look that up…yes, it was!) and it won’t be the last, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to start off a movie. After the first half an hour to an hour though things become a lot more coherent and fun.
Characterization: This is by far the biggest weakness of the movie. There is just about zero characterization in the whole movie. The characters are just there. You know what they’re good at, and that’s just about it. They try a bit of character growth with the main character Jyn Erso as she gets more involved with the rebellion, but that’s about as much characterization as you’re going to get. The other characters are just there, spouting some one-liners, and kicking ass. There is no character growth or change with them and their motivations for doing what they’re doing is flimsy at best in some cases.
Character introductions: For every new character in the movie you get the same introduction. They, or someone nearby, will tell you their name and what they’re good at and what their bad habits are. Here we have criminal, and this is her whole criminal record so we know how badass she is. Here we have a rebel, he’s good at what he does, and he has also done some horrible things in the line of duty. Here we have a droid, he’s a strategic droid and he tells everything like it is, plus some insults. Every new character is introduced like this and while it gets the job done fast it’s really lazy writing.
No surprises: There are no surprises in this movie. You know from the get-go how it’s going to end (well, I did at any rate) and then it does. That doesn’t mean it’s not a fun ride getting there, but there are no twists or turns along the way.
Tentacle Monster: Since this is a spoiler-free(-ish) review and I don’t recall seeing this thing in the trailers I won’t go in too deeply, but once you see it I think you’ll know what I mean. There’s an alien creature that really has no purpose in the movie at all – one character may make a good point about using it, but if you removed the creature the movie would run no different. They should have just removed the creature altogether and given Vader another scene.
Conclusion, All is as the Force wills it:
Rogue One – A Star Wars Story has some flaws that are mostly centered around the start of the movie and the lack of real character growth/change and character motivations. Characters are just there because the movie needs them to be there. If they’d gotten the characterizations right this would be one of the best Star Wars movies to date. As it is it’s still a good movie, just not a great movie. Kind of like the Marvel movies, they’re all really good, but none really stand out as something truly memorable anymore.
But don’t let that bit of negativity stop you from watching this movie. There’s a lot of fun to be had with Rogue One. I loved the character of Jyn Erso and the depth they added to the existing lore of the Star Wars universe, such as with the Death Star. I will be watching this movie again and again, popping in Episode IV after Rogue One because the latter leads so well into the former.