***
out of ****
This
feels like it's going to be one of the more tortured reviews I've
ever written because of the terribly mixed emotions I have about the
film. But I suppose my feelings could most easily be summed up with one
statement: while “Rogue One” is a very good movie, it isn't a
very good “Star Wars” movie.
In
(very) short, the film tells the story leading up to the very first
moment of the original “Star Wars” (1977), where Darth Vadar's
star destroyer is chasing Princess Leia's small ship across the
screen. The pursuit was due to the knowledge that the plans for the
Death Star were somewhere on board. “Rogue One” tells the tale
of how they came to be on board – specifically how a rebel detail
led by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), who is the daughter of the Death
Star's creator, stole the plans to deliver to the rebellion.
Sounded
like a pretty interesting plot to me, and in many ways it is. It's
action-packed, has some interesting characters and dialogue, and even
a few chuckles. But there were a myriad of problems with it that
made it, for me, a failure as a Star Wars story.
In
the best of the Star Wars films (the original trilogy and “The
Force Awakens”) the story and objectives are very clear, the lines
between good and evil plainly defined, and we deal with a controlled
set of characters who are very nicely developed. ALL of those things
are missing in “Rogue One”. The first half of the movie is
almost hopelessly convoluted, following several different story-lines
that seem to go in countless directions. We're introduced to about
fifteen key characters (instead of the 6 or 7 that were crucial to
the plot of those better films), and often you can't even remember
what their names are of what their supposed to be doing. One of
these characters, Saw Gerrerra (Forrest Whitaker) is one of the worst
“heroes” in the galaxy – he was apparently supposed to be
heroic but I found him so awful that I was happy when (spoiler alert)
he was blasted into oblivion by a giant shockwave.
Another
thing that bothered me might be my own perceptions, as it seemed to
me that a successful infiltration of the Empire's data store to steal the plans would
have been far better served by a small force working under the radar
– in “Rogue One” it's a battle as big as the Death Star
engagement in “Return of the Jedi” (1983). There is just soooooo
much going on all the time that it's hard to be really engaged by the
story. And since so many of the characters are involved in the
battle, you lose any tension that the small incursion
would have delivered. Why was it so tense when Luke, Han, Leia and Ben Kenobi were sneaking around the original Death Star? Because we cared about all of them and they were being stealthy and trying not to be noticed. "Rogue One"s infiltrators, with similar goals, attack the empire base like a pack of hungry wolves on an unsuspecting deer.
But even with all that, “Rogue
One” is a great action movie. For a generation brought up on Halo
and Call of Duty, it's probably cinematic ambrosia. But for those of us that
were children when the original three films were on the big screen,
where we found magic and fun and love and laughter and heroes that we
pretended to be during play with our friends, this is really little more
than a very good action movie. And it is simply greatly lacking in the
tremendous fun that “Star Wars” is supposed to be.
