Rogue One is the first Star Wars feature released outside the main continuum of Episode films. In Hollywood parlance, it’s a prequel/spinoff, but in truth Rogue One is merely the highest profile work in a vast “expanded universe” of Star Wars novels, comics, TV series, and video games. Devotees of the nameless galaxy Far, Far Away will be pleased to discover that Rogue One fulfills the cinematic storytelling potential of George Lucas’s vivid setting by portraying a different kind of Star Wars story: murkier, bloodier, and more forlorn. Rogue One is the gritty ensemble war picture to the core Episodes’ wondrous space adventure serial, although the new film is embedded so deeply in cinematic clichés and Star Wars plot traditions that it never feels entirely unfamiliar (or ground-breaking).
Wartime sabotage thrillers like The Guns of Navarone and Operation Crossbow provide the model for Rogue One, although there’s a bit of a Dirty Dozen-style “ragtag band of misfits” to it as well. Taking place just prior to the events of the original A New Hope, the film concerns one Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a survival-minded criminal who happens to be the daughter of Imperial engineering officer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). Springing her from one of the Empire’s prison camps, the Rebel Alliance teams her with cold-blooded intelligence agent Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his acerbic reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). In return for her freedom, she is persuaded to help the Rebels contact radical anti-Imperial terrorist Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who raised Jyn after her father was press-ganged back into the Empire’s fold.
Saw, in turn, is holding Imperial pilot and deserter Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), who carries a secret message from Galen: The Empire is about to complete a new planet-annihilating superweapon, but the master engineer has secretly built a tiny, fatal weakness into its design. There are all manner of complications and tangents, but ultimately it comes down to a seemingly impossible Hail Mary mission. Jyn, Cassian, and their motley squad—including the blind, Force-sensitive warrior Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and grizzled assassin Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang)—must steal the plans for this “Death Star.”
Where Rogue One succeeds, it does so smashingly, bringing the Star War universe into fresh territory and providing a captivating perspective on the Empire at the height of its power and on the Rebel Alliance’s more shadowy wetwork. Ben Mendelsohn is aptly repugnant as the film’s villain, Orson Krennic, an ambitious officer who considers the Death Star his personal fiefdom. Rogue One’s most enthralling feat, however, is its rehabilitation of the superweapon itself and Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones), both of which seem freshly menacing. Perhaps for the first time, the Death Star resembles a truly terrifying apocalyptic force, while Vader is an ebon dragon who reduces Rebel and Imperial alike to stammering terror. (Although one groaner line almost breaks the spell.)
Such escapist pleasures are diluted by Rogue One’s determination to shoehorn in jokes and references designed to elicit squeals from fans, and by its fussy, forced efforts to end exactly where Episode IV begins. Combined with its creepy digital humans—original trilogy actors are resurrected and de-aged unnecessarily, when recasting would have worked just fine—this pandering to nostalgia is distracting and off-putting, just as it was in Episode VII and the new Ghostbusters. Rogue One doesn’t seem to trust the strength of its own setting, a fear that is belied by how well the film functions when it simply unfolds as a bleak, thrilling war movie that just happens to take place a Long Time Ago.
Rogue One opens Friday, December 19 in wide release.
