Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One opens on remote planet where Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is impressed back into Imperial Service by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn).  Erso's wife is killed and young daughter flees.  Soon thereafter, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) arrives to takeover as young Jyn Erso's guardian.  Next we see Jyn (Felicity Jones), she is in an Imperial jail.  She is rescued by the Rebellion and used as a means of contacting Gerrera, who has broken with the more formal Rebels, and hopefully access to her missing father.  There is a rumor that he is working on a super weapon that could destroy a planet.

 

Jyn soon finds herself in the company of a ragtag group, most of whom are not rebels when she meets them but are by the movie's climactic battle.  There is Rebel Captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), reprogrammed Imperial Droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), blind force-user Chirrut, his machinegun-wielding partner Baze Malbus, and a defector Imperial Pilot named Bodhi Rook.  K-2SO was a bit too reminiscent of C3PO with his offering of odds (maybe that is something droids do), but in other respects I thought he was a great character.  Yes, the droid was the comic relief.

 

Though many characters from the original series return, this doesn't feel like a Star Wars movie.  It is much grittier.  Our Rebel heroes are more in the anti-hero vein and not in a charming way like Han Solo.  In a standard Star Wars movie, all these characters would be extras running around to get shot.  They do that here too but they have a lot more development before getting shot.  Speaking of those return characters, we see Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, Grand Moff Tarkin, Princess Leia, Red Leader, Gold Leader, and, of course, Darth Vader.  With Tarkin and Leia, CGI was used to change the face of the stand-in actor to look like Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher from A New Hope.  This was not as effective as one might have hoped.  There was something unsettling about the CGI faces.  They were wrong but it is hard to pin down exactly how they were wrong.

 

I think the heroes needed an alien, their Chewy.  Rather than species diversity, we had racial diversity.  There was a Mexican, a Pakistani, and a couple of Chinese.  With Star Wars names being ethnically neutral, I doubt this was accidental.  With Daisy Ridley as the lead character in the current run of trilogies, it seems a bit overkill to have another woman lead.  In fact, if not a single line was changed - except maybe some pronouns - the role of Jyn is written entirely non-gendered.  Put a male actor in there with the same lines and the same actions and it would make no difference.  Is that also intentional?

 

Overall, I enjoyed it.  Seeing the classic X-wings back in action was awesome.  I far prefer them to the new delicate split-engine model.  It was a better movie than The Force Awakens but it plays mostly as a prologue to A New Hope.  Thumbs up.  Get out to the theater and see it on the big screen.