‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ (2016) **/*****
“You do have your moments. Not many, but you have them.”
After George Lucas sold his movie empire to Disney and stepped away from the business, an ambitious scheme was hatched by the new leadership at Lucasfilm — to make and release a new Star Wars movie every year from here to eternity. To start they’d release a numbered entry in their Skywalker Saga every other year, and then, on off years, they’d fill in the gaps with unrelated stories set in the same universe, which would come to us under the label, “A Star Wars Story.” This was a plan that could take the universe is so many different directions than its gone in so far — that could tell so many different kinds of stories than the ones we’ve been given to date. And yet, leadership over at Lucasfilm have for some reason decided to use their first attempt at an out of saga Star Wars story to make yet another prequel to A New Hope. As if fans of genre films aren’t already repressing enough bad memories when they hear the words “Star Wars” and “prequel” said next to each other.
To give it some credit though, Rogue One isn’t nearly as baffling and indulgent as the exposition-filled The Phantom Menace, and it could be seen by many as the Star Wars prequel that always should have been. It comes to us from Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and a script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. To summarize its plot in broad strokes, the film is about a scientist (Mads Mikkelsen) who gets kidnapped by the Empire and is forced into creating a planet-killing weapon, the fatal flaw that he secretly puts into this weapon, and his estranged daughter (Felicity Jones), who reluctantly gathers together a group of ragtag warriors in order to lead them on a mission to steal the plans for this weapon and then deliver them to the Rebel Alliance, so that they can exploit the fatal flaw and destroy the thing, which would then clear her father’s tarnished name. Get it? We’re talking about the Death Star.
The story has potential and the director has a track record at succeeding with franchise blockbusters, but, unfortunately, Rogue One just has too many problems with its script to be a success. It starts off well enough, with a strong opening scene where an ominous outside threat comes into an isolated community and wagons frantically circle. It’s a tense situation and it feels like something out of a classic Western, but after that the rest of the first act just falls apart. We’re jettisoned from planet to planet, where me meet new character after new character, and none of it flows organically from thing to thing in the slightest. The first half of this film is disjointed place setting where too many characters get too little focus and nobody really resonates as being real or having a real life (which was done incredibly well with Rey in The Force Awakens), so you don’t end up caring about the bulk of it. The movie gets better once it finds its footing and eventually ends in a big battle that’s pretty entertaining, but at that point the damage has been done. The dialogue throughout is clunky and generic too, which is a real shame for a Star Wars. These things built their loyal fanbase on how satisfying it is to revisit character-based banter, and Rogue One strikes me as a movie that won’t age well with repeat viewings.
To dig further into the characters, it should be said that there are a few who had real potential to be memorable additions to the Star Wars mythos, but because none of them get fleshed out enough to matter, they’ll likely be forgotten. Donnie Yen’s blind martial artist is intriguing, and it seems like the partnership he has with a gun-toting character played by Wen Jiang could be fertile ground for entertainment, but they just come and go from the film without any explanation of who they are, how they met, what their pasts are, what their future hopes are, why they chose to join this fight, or why we should feel attached to them at all. They’re essentially action figures for the film to move around during battle sequences, as if Edwards were an 8-year-old playing in his bedroom.
Even Diego Luna’s character, a resistance fighter who serves as the secondary protagonist and the primary love interest, is given no backstory and is fleshed out in no way. If you had to describe his personality, all you could say is that he’s a bit prickly. If you had to explain his past, all you could say is that its hinted that he hasn’t had a great life. He’s as thin as cardboard. The bad guys don’t fair much better. The primary villain here is a middle management bureaucrat played by Ben Mendelsohn. His only discernible qualities are that he wears a cape and he’s ambitious. It’s a waste of Mendelsohn, who has played memorable villains before, and it’s a huge downgrade for the Star Wars franchise, which has consistently brought us iconic villains like Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and even Darth Maul. Rogue One has a secondary villain who shouldn’t be named for spoiler reasons, but it should be mentioned that he’s the worst idea for a CG creation that’s ever appeared in any movie. He looks awful. His jarring presence takes you right out of the film every time he shows up. Including him was the most bone-headed decision I’ve seen a movie make in recent memory.
Even Jones’ character, who is unequivocally our lead, is tough to describe when pressed. We see her lose her parents as a young child and then we meet her as an adult, and it’s hard to say what she really stands for. She’s not a part of the rebellion. She’s not a supporter of the empire. We’re told that she has a criminal history, but we never see her do anything illegal. She’s not brash. She’s not stoic. Who is she? What is she? If there’s a thread that holds this mess of a movie together, it’s probably Jones’ expressive eyes, which work as a window into every little emotion she’s feeling in any given moment. Though she’s not given much to work with, character-wise, she’s still able to make you care about her character’s fate, purely based on performance, which helps make the big battle climax matter. What else works in this movie? It’s basically catnip for anyone who’s a geek for all the classic Star Wars fighter designs. The ships get used very well, especially during the big battle at the end, and all of the rebel pilots are appropriately shabby and middle-aged. Very charming, and very A New Hope. Also, there’s a scene featuring Darth Vader late in the film that any longtime fan of Star Wars will go crazy over. It’s the most threatening and evil he’s looked since The Empire Strikes Back.
Beyond that, there just isn’t much here to get excited over. The advertisements for Rogue One (which feature more footage that didn’t make the final film than did) seemed to promise a movie with an infectious rebel spirit — something that would make you stand up and cheer. Something that could inspire young people to stand up to a bully. Instead, what Edwards and company have delivered is a fatalist, dour film that paints even our rebellious heroes as being part of a squabbling, ineffective bureaucracy. There’s so little joy to be found in this film thanks to its miserable characters and all of its depressing analogues for real-life warfare that it not only feels very un-Star Wars, it feels like the last thing audiences looking for a fantasy film escape would want to sit through given the current global reality. It’s probably possible to make a good Star Wars film that wants to take a more realistic look at violent conflict and all of the death and moral compromise that comes with it, but this one isn’t it, and if they were going to stray so far from the tone of classic Star Wars, it would have been nice to see them also stray further away from the types of stories that they’ve already told with this franchise. If I ever see another Death Star in a movie I’m going to spit.
