Rogue One (2016)

Hopefully the final Star Wars film which is centred around the Death Star or its copies, Rogue One turns a tired premise into a solid sci-fi action film which improves in many ways on The Force Awakens, though it lacks the reboot's charm.

Set just days before the beginning of A New Hope, the film is the untold story of how the Rebel Alliance discovered the fatal flaw in the Death Star. What was an unexplained and convenient cliché in the original film is cleverly repurposed as the sacrifice of a rebel scientist, Galen Erso, who leaves behind his family and his ideals to work on the genocidal weapon, knowing only he will be committed enough to sabotage it and give the rebels a chance.

Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla film found a mixed reception for going easy on the monster fights and the spectacle and focusing too much on generic audience stand-ins without any unique personality or characterisation, like the protagonist played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. But it had notable strengths, including wonderful visuals – dramatic contrasts of light and dark - and an awe-inspiring sense of scale. Godzilla never looked more terrifying and elemental than when Edwards used the huge disturbances caused by his passing (the aircraft carriers overturned by waves when he swam underneath them) to suggest unfathomable power.

Edwards brings those talents to Rogue One in spectacular fashion, staging the greatest space battle ever seen in a Star Wars film as well as the greatest land-battles. The traditional three-part finale is pulled off especially well, with the Alliance fighting the Empire in orbit above an imperial planet, while rebel troops re-enact the Normandy landings against Stormtroopers on the ground, and the protagonists infiltrate the imperial complex to find the Death Star plans. The battles are thrilling and unsparingly vicious, with a rawness to the violence that Star Wars previously lacked.

Unfortunately, Rogue One also shares some flaws with Edwards’ previous film, most notably its uninteresting characterisation. Felicity Jones is steely as Jyn Erso, but flips inconsistently from an anti-hero who’s out for herself and doesn’t care about the Rebellion’s ideals to a shining-eyed Joan of Arc who makes stilted speeches about hope and fighting on, seemingly without cause. Rather than an arc, she has two points of personal development with nothing connecting them. Diego Luna is convincingly rugged as Cassian Andor, a ruthless Rebel black ops captain, but he can’t sell the shift his character makes from cold-eyed assassin to sentimentalist because there’s no explanation for it in the script.

The cast is rounded out by bit-part ensemble roles for Donnie Yen (the stereotypical Asian monk with an enigmatic attitude and a Force fixation), Riz Ahmed (as a defected Imperial pilot who spends most of the movie too shellshocked to have a personality), and Forrest Whittaker as a extremist renegade rebel cyborg, used by the script to perfunctorily imply what happens if you go too far for revenge. Ben Mendelsohn plays the villain, Director Krennic, commanding officer of the Death Star, mostly notable for being the least threatening major Star Wars villain – a careerist bureaucrat with big dreams of being noticed by the Emperor. All of these actors could – and have – anchored better films on their own, playing complex and compelling characters. Here, they are each given a quirk or two in place of backstory or independent motivation (except for Mendelsohn, whose motivation is just boring), and sent their separate ways – their performances are appropriately lackluster. Compared to the blazing charisma of Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, the crew of Rogue One is no more eye-catching than the drab earth tones that make up half the film’s colour palette.

The film’s plot can best be summed up as competent. There are no overt contrivances and events follow in a logical chain of cause and effect, straightforwardly moving from the Rebellion’s attempts to contact Galen Erso to the Empire cleaning house once the Death Star has been completed to Rogue One’s assault on the imperial base. If this sounds like grudging praise, it’s because the film never once surprises or shocks you: it just moves linearly towards the climax. Nevertheless, since the plot isn’t copied minute-by-minute from another film (as with The Force Awakens), its predictability is not as much of a blemish. The script has little to recommend it – aside from the wonderfully sarcastic K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid with no tact and a lot of repressed violence, there’s little amusement to be had, and the dialogue lacks the slightly overwritten, dramatic feel that made the original trilogy so quotable.

This is a deliberate choice. The tone of Rogue One is sombre and businesslike, aiming for a war movie more than the pulpy goodness of the original Star Wars films or episode VII. Although the blaring and distracting Michael Giacchino score does its best to replicate John Williams, the film just barely feels like Star Wars – which isn’t all bad. At its best, the emphasis on sacrifice and on the value of living and dying for an ideal makes it as profound as the single strongest moment in the entire series – Luke’s affirmation at the climax of Return of the Jedi (“I am a Jedi, like my father before me”). Rogue One is the rare blockbuster which isn’t afraid to kill off its characters instead of finding contrived ways to let them survive inescapable doom, which gives it weight and a well-earned meaningfulness. Although it has a weak first half and the characters are nothing to write home about, the climax fully redeems it: it’s arguably the strongest Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back.