When news first began trickling out of the Disney/Lucasfilm camp about a series of stand-alone Star Wars films whose stories would play out at the edges of the core saga, it was met with an understandable mix of hopefulness and skepticism—the Star Wars universe is an incredibly rich one that can reward expansion and exploration, but it wasn’t until the release of last year’s The Force Awakens that the ratio of good Star Wars movies to bad ones finally tipped in fans’ favor.
Now that the first installment of what would eventually be dubbed the Star Wars Anthology Series is out, we can defer our concerns until the as-yet-untitled Han Solo movie draws closer to its planned May 2018 release. By design, Rogue One doesn’t aspire to the mythic scope of its predecessors; it’s a geeky refraction of a single familiar plot point, centering almost entirely on the types of characters usually given little more to do than delivering exposition, providing comic relief, or dying nobly in service of the hero’s quest. It’s the Star Wars equivalent of giving the Howling Commandos their own movie while ignoring guys like Nick Fury or Captain America. And while it’s far from perfect, it’s satisfying in ways that are wholly different from other Star Wars entries.
From the get-go, Rogue One is a smaller, more contained film that borrows as much from paranoid war thrillers as soaring space fantasies. Set just before the opening scenes of Episode IV, the story concerns the previously unnamed rebel spies who famously stole the Death Star plans. These include Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a cynical young woman whose father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), is the planet-killer’s main architect, and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a rebel captain who has essentially sold his soul to fight the Empire.
The two of them are forced together by plot machinations that I’d rather not go into, partly to keep the story’s surprises intact but mostly because Rogue One’s first half is meandering and unnecessarily convoluted. A dizzying array of new characters are introduced: Besides Jyn and Cassian, there’s reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO (voiced by cast standout Alan Tudyk); blind warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and his battle-hardened companion, Baze Malbus (Wen Jian); radical resistance fighter Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker); and defected Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed).
If it sounds like a lot to take in, it is. On their own, none of these characters are all that compelling—they’re likeable enough, but it isn’t until they begin to care about each other that we begin to care about them. To Rogue One’s detriment, this takes a long time and involves some dodgy plot contrivances, leaving the first half to rely more on its stellar (pun intended) production design and visual FX than on story and character.
Ultimately, what makes Rogue One so appealing is the very thing that holds it back for so long. It’s a movie about the sort of people who don’t really carry movies—it’s all Wedges and no Lukes. (If you don’t get that reference, be forewarned that many of Rogue One’s most robust pleasures will fly over your head in less than 12 parsecs. It’s not exclusively tailored to the faithful, but it certainly rewards them.) And its status as a stand-alone story means these are probably not characters who are being groomed for sequels and spin-offs; the story takes a few surprising turns that wouldn’t be on the table in a Star Wars movie with a roman numeral baked into its title.
But if the first half feels sterile and noisy, the second half is a rousing, frenetic thriller that makes good on promises you didn’t even know the movie had made. Director Gareth Edwards, whose only previous theatrical features were 2010’s Monsters and 2014’s underrated Godzilla reboot, knows his way around an action scene and has an eye for stunning visuals, shooting AT-ATs like monstrous kaiju emerging from fog banks and TIE fighters like menacing, insectile swarms. Rogue One has imagination to spare and looks as good as any Star Wars film to date.
My favorite thing about it, though, is that it contains something so old-fashioned that it seems quaint in today’s world of big-budget genre films: an ending. We’d like to know more about some of the scruffy characters introduced here, but by the time the credits roll, there’s a definite sense that they’ve served their purpose. I had all but forgotten how it feels to walk out of a $200 million movie that’s gutsy enough to tell a story rather than simply set one in motion.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Share this Post