Star Wars: Rogue One (or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or just Rogue One as the movie calls itself) is a pretty great movie and possibly an even better Star Wars movie. If the first half was as strong as the amazing final act, it’d be a phenomenal movie.
That first act though… a little not great. The whole movie doesn’t have the fun spirit of (for example) The Force Awakens so when the amazing final act hasn’t happened yet, it’s kind of a dour adventure story that’s full of a lot of plot, locations, planet names, and characters that may baffle on first viewing. It also feels a little jumpy/erratic and paced too quickly. It’s not, by any means, bad… I am judging on a harsher curve than most flicks here.
But its the awesome final act of the movie with a series of great action set pieces that feels SO Much more like A New Hope and Return of the Jedi than anything in Force Awakens (or, good lord, the Prequels) pulled off. These desperate fleet (and ground) battles felt so much like it was 1977 or 1983 that it informed my opinion of the whole movie. It wasn’t that they studied the New Hope and Jedi, they surely did, but they also knew how to film and edit it so it was more than just aping moments. It’s really great.
In fact, this Star Wars movie – a prequel to A New Hope – informs events of A New Hope in ways that it’s unlikely George Lucas even thought of. There are two major elements… one that kind of fills a plot hole that I really don’t think needed filled and the other explains something that you could only previously explain away by 1977’s budget and FX technology available to Lucas at the time. It has smart connective tissue (though not universally so, to be fair).
In case you aren’t aware, this is the story of how the Death Star plans were stolen and sent to Princess Leia. It’s a spy story and a battle movie that follows Jyn Erso, the new female hero/rogue and her interactions with the young Rebellion as they try to find her father, a man who helped build the Death Star. It includes a lot of lavishly designed sets, costumes, droids, and ships purposely designed to remind you of A New Hope and it does it well. There are a few cheeky in-jokes but mainly it plays it straight and doesn’t feel like, “Look at me! I’m a prequel!”
This is also kind of a surprisingly emotional movie at various points but I won’t say why (spoilers!). I was pleased by that because, in many ways, this isn’t a copy of a Star Wars movie, this is its own movie. It’s in how the movie feels, how it handles its good and bad guys, and even how it handles its opening credits.
Because we get LucasArts Ltd… we get ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away’ but we don’t get a open crawl and we don’t get a “STAR WARS” logo… we get an opening sequence, a smash cut to ROGUE ONE title and then into the movie. It feels, on the one hand, irrationally wrong but these Star Wars Story movies are trying to distance themselves from the main episode stories so I guess they have that right.
Oddly, and as an aside, for a movie that those going in blind might not realize is a prequel to 1977 Star Wars, having an opening crawl explaining when we are in the story would probably have helped out immensely. You’d think maybe having a Death Star would be a clue, but there’s a Death Star in a lot of Star Wars movies. Or maybe talk of a Rebellion but Force Awakens had a Resistance so I would have expected the studio to get nervous about confusing the average movie goer. But if I was in charge of movies, I wouldn’t be writing this silly review.
So, yeah, I really liked this movie and only wish the first act had been stronger. But given the quality of the whole movie on a production level and how great the final action scenes were, it makes up for it. There’s no reason not to see this movie (unless, you know, you hate Star Wars… and America!!!).
Score: 90