Movie Review: Rogue One
Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars
This is going to be the favorite Star Wars film of some. That’s due to style preference. Rogue One took the Star Wars universe and presented it at an unseen angle in all of the previous installments.
Rogue One reminds me very fondly of the same thematic elements seen in the Jason Bourne series: the array of set pieces we quickly pass through, the commentary full of chippy and witty remarks, and the gritty mission driven characters all with personal motivations where their trust will be tested.
Rogue One, like Bourne, does a lot of good things, but never really anything great. What many Star Wars fans will take away is an action-packed war movie. But Rogue One has a lot of classic spy story elements.
Our hero, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), is used as a bargaining chip to get to a guy who might know the location of another guy who happens to be Erso’s father. Erso’s father is credited with the creation of the Death Star, but is also the same person with a conscious to create the seminal trap in the Death Star that leads to its demise in A New Hope. Why he has a conscious that all of his Imperial comrades lack is unknown.
Erso is the focus, and probably should’ve been to save confusion in the film’s opening sequences where the movie goes from planet to planet setting the scene in a fragmented fashion. Rogue One nonetheless is effective at a slow build raising the tension and dire stakes for Erso’s cause.
There’s a lot of white old guys who play Admirals for the Imperials whom are, as expected, attempting to coup the entire galaxy with a super-weapon that can destroy planets. While it’s easy to believe that old scowling white men with white hair are easily casted villains, their act tends to become stale rather quickly. This is especially true when Darth Vader makes his eventual appearance to show that he’s a vastly more potent danger to anyone or anything that stands in his way.
Meanwhile, Erso has a dilemma as the daughter of an Imperial scientist. It’s hard for her to earn the trust of the rebels that save her. She’s being used as a bargaining chip to find her father which can certainly flare tempers and suspicions as Erso struggles to acquire the trust of her new rebel comrades.
Erso is accompanied by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and his wisecracking hipster-3PO robot “K-2SO”. K-2SO is the type of person, or err robot, that can’t finish a conversation without making the last statement, which is fair because this is explained by Andor when we’re formally introduced to him or it. The onslaught of wisecracks from K-2SO becomes tiresome in the films latter stages when lasers really start flying.
Our two most endearing characters are Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen, the guy that plays Ip Man), and Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang). Andor and Erso’s dynamic of hesitance to eventual trust is nice, but Malbus’s journey of coming to terms with Imwe’s faith in the force came off as much more genuine despite the lack of time we had to get to know each character. We meet Imwe and Malbus on an easily glossed over scene where Erso meets Forrest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera to deliver her father’s message. Gerrera is yet another character we don’t get a chance to build any base of in our short encounter with him.
Malbus and Imwe effectively piece together one of the most dramatic and emotionally wrenching scenes in Rogue One’s final act. The rest of the film’s characters outside of occasional moments from Erso lack the same heart.
The heart of Star Wars films is typified in the form of love versus hate, and Rogue One sacrifices most of that to tell a story closer to the confines of reality. Rogue One’s final battle scene where Erso and Andor lead a rogue Rebellion team straight into the heart of the Empire to steal the death star plans is the closest Star Wars may ever come to the gritty realism of war flicks.
(SPOILER ALERT) Not only do heroes die in this film, all of them die. This is uncharted territory not only for a Star Wars film, but for just about any film under the Disney name. There’s no easy way out in this film which deserves its props for not relying on campy methods of the invincible hero. In fact, Erso and Andor portray themselves to be invincible, but they embark on a suicide mission that was never really sold well. Erso treats stealing the death star plans as anything else she does in the movie and just goes with it. She’s a figure it out as she goes type of rebel.
There was great potential in the character of Cassian Andor whom really lacked development. Andor teases us by wearing his emotions on his sleeve and speaking about the losses in life he’s taken, but never actually explaining them. He, like Gerrera, is a complicated and mysterious character which makes the story writing disappointing that he never got more time devoted to his past he spoke so darkly of. Gerrera was put in a similar predicament. There seemed to be a lot of imagination behind the ideas of the characters, but it never panned out in the film.
There’s plenty of armchair psychology that can be played with when it comes to Rogue One but the overall film is effective for what it sets out to do. It’s easy to be harsh on the Star Wars universe much the same as it is with the Marvel Universe because the standards are high and the source material and lore is so vast. That being said, Rogue One can be applauded for taking chances, but in the end feels more like the best prequel than a lead in for the original trilogy.
If anything is really missing from Rogue One that was so beloved in other Star Wars films, it’s the element of imagination. Rogue One is beautifully filmed and the set pieces never fail to disappoint. But once immersed in the world, there’s not many memorable moments to behold that really evoke our sense of being there. Most will walk away from this film and remember Darth Vader, and he had less than five minutes of screen time.
One of my favorite moments in The Force Awakens is when the rebels come to the rescue of Rey, Finn, and Solo on the forest planet. The X-Wings fly in just in time to turn the tables of a dire situation. There’s the orchestra following the action, the poetic irony in the dialogue, the hilarious chatter between Solo and Chewbacca, and Rey amidst a desperate situation. The Force Awakens had many scenes that evoked wonder and awe.
Rogue One’s strongest moment as I mentioned earlier with Imwe and Malbus was good, but doesn’t carry the weight of a film predicated on spy movie cliche and war movie set pieces.
