Then there’s the movie’s last act, which takes the movie’s pros and cons up to that point, rolls them up in a little ball, and fires them out into space. Buy all of your Star Wars boxsets, books, comics, and merch right here! Rogue One shows you brief glimpses of sights that you’ve never seen before in a Star Wars movie, and the effect of that – along with the emergence of a couple of familiar faces from the past – is to make fans a little giddy.
Yet leaving that idea mostly unexplored and the characters largely thin on the ground doesn’t have the adverse effect it could potentially have, because the rest of the movie is so darn entertaining. Yes, Rogue One is a war movie: an early and quite violent confrontation in an outdoor market where even the innocent bystanders get hurt, is perhaps deliberately meant to cast even the vaunted Rebel Alliance in shades of gray.
Join Amazon Prime – Watch Thousands of Movies & TV Shows Anytime – Start Free Trial Now Plus it builds to one of the best third acts in the entire franchise, a 40-minute rollercoaster that twists from sheer excitement to grief to victory to hope. But it’s also a fascinating look at this enormously popular and detailed universe from a slightly different angle, its humor is tinged with bitterness and cynicism, and it’s also – as promised by director Gareth Edwards ( Godzilla) – a war film, even if some of the themes associated with that don’t get anything more than a passing look.
If it’s not a great movie – perhaps not even a great Star Wars movie, but a very good one – it’s because it still relies to some degree on fan service and because it lets down its characters in a fundamental way. In any case, Star Wars: Rogue One is a prequel – not necessarily a well-liked word around certain quarters of Star Wars fandom – and a story that rather boldly introduces a cast of almost entirely new faces, telling a tale that we’ve heard mentioned in a few lines of dialogue in the original Star Wars/ A New Hope.Īnd it’s largely a success, a solid, enjoyable film that takes some risks with the Star Wars universe while also remaining, to an extent, on familiar ground. Following Episode VII of the Skywalker saga last year, The Force Awakens, this year’s offering is Rogue One, the first of the much-discussed standalone films that will operate alongside the main storyline (although whether that goes past Episode IX is a matter of some speculation). Disney promised a Star Wars movie every year when it purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, and so far the company is staying right on schedule.