Went to see Rogue One last night.
I'm not a Star Wars fan. I've watched all the movies, most more than once, but I saw them too late really to get into them, but I don't dislike the series and the original trilogy has that classic charm it's hard to dislike.
So we come to Rogue One. An experiment for the new Disney fueled franchise, the first in a planned series of 'Star Wars Stories' spin off movies that sort of 'Marvel' the franchise and let them play with the wider universe that only has really been mentioned with other media (the now defunct Extended Universe books etc). And also an attempt at making a proper prequel that isn't shit.
Gareth Edwards, alumni of a Godzilla film that split audiences and Monsters which might be the best bedroom movie ever, took the helm and lead what was rumoured to be a fairly convoluted shoot that was dogged with rumours and reports of apparently extensive reshoots, other senior names parachuting in to help out and discussions of the story being fiddled with to make it 'more Star Wars'. Edwards himself had actually been rumoured to be uncomfortable with such big blockbuster fare during the shoot and pulled out of doing the Godzilla sequel during filming. You'd be forgiven for spotting the warning signs of a disappointing movie coming in fast.
Rogue One deals with the plot immediately before the opening of A New Hope, with the Rebels stealing the plans for the Death Star that ultimately lead to its destruction in that first movie, and fixes a notorious 'hole' in that movie - why would the Empire build something like the Death Star and include a really obvious and easily exploited flaw to destroy it?
We open with an Empire shuttle approaching a desolate planet. Mads Mikkelson's Galen Erso tells his daughter and wife to flee, whilst he goes out to meet the shuttle. His wife takes their daughter away from the house, explains what she must do, and heads back. Empire forces leave the shuttle, with Ben Mendelsohn leading in a pristine white cape. He explains to Galen his family will be taken whilst his expertise is needed... A time jump later, we start a journey that will lead to war, with the undercurrent of a heist.
Rogue One is a different kind of Star Wars movie. It tells you from the opening. There is no opening crawl, the Lucasfilm logo fades and it throws you into things. We don't have key familiar characters propping up the movie - there is no Skywalker family member front and centre, no Solo, no Kenobi. The key players are all new. Around the periphery there are familiar faces, not unexpected given this is a direct prequel to the first movie, but the film can't rely on established characters to gloss over its flaws with the good will to a Han or Chewie.
It's also a little darker, with main characters ever so slightly grey in their actions, and more than a little ruthless. This is a movie where one of our heroes murders an informant within a minute of screentime, and where another finishes off a trooper with a headshot as they lie on the ground. This slight darkness might sit uneasy with some, who inherently think of Star Wars as a goofy property, but it does work and adds a little extra bite to proceedings, even if only slightly.
With that slight grittiness comes a return to a grimier look for Star Wars. The prequels had that shiny look to everything and Force Awakens had its Jonny Ive troopers and slick look. This is a return to a mechanical, oily angular Star Wars, and it feels immediately more fitting. Where there are new designs they fit - K2-SO mixes a more modern style with old school Star Wars, the new U Wing fits the Rebel fleet (although of course both create a continuity error since they both disappear entirely from the universe in the next movie...). And with the grimier art style comes beautiful cinematography. This is a gorgeous movie filled with stunning images. You could easily make a 15 minute supercut of iconic images from the film that immediately feel like they belong in the Star Wars photo album. Whole shots feel like they were pondered over for quite some time to make maximum impact visually, which is unusual to actively feel in a movie. You can see it in Edwards incredible ability to show scale, shots are careful to passively imply the sheer size of things - an AT-AT looms over our heroes with the shot perfectly judged to increase the impact and heft of the sheer size of the thing, and it's power, a Star Destroyer emerges from shadow and just keeps coming into the light, it's size emphasising its menace. Locations are gorgeous, opening with the now standard Icelandic landscape filling in for an alien world and jumping from desert to tropical atoll. This movie is a feast the eyes in every second.
We have a decent cast as well. Our heroine is played by Brummie actress (not that you can tell) Felicity Jones, who adds to the films visual appeal by being supernaturally beautiful, Diego Luna as a Rebel captain with a ruthless streak, Riz Ahmed continuing his breakthrough to America as a Empire deserter, Donnie Yen as a blind Force user, Jiang Wen as his less spiritual buddie, Alan Tudyk stealing the movie as reprogrammed Empire droid K2-SO, and the aforementioned Mikkelson and Mendelsohn. We also get an essentially cameo performance from Forrest Whittaker. This is a really good cast and what problems there are with the film, and there's certainly some, isn't generally the performances. I had worries of Jones being wooden, which are mostly unfounded. The rest of the cast are completely fine and do well with what they have, with the exception of Whittaker, who is awful. His small part is genuinely dreadful. Overacting is one thing, badly overacting is another. He has, perhaps, 3 minutes in total screentime and all of it is some of the worst scene chewing I've ever seen. Star Wars let's you do a bit of that, you can ham things up a little and get away with it, but this is downright silly. Tudyk is, on the other hand, the real star. He's clearly the scripts darling which helps him but the entire role is excellent. His sardonic droid is one of the best things in Star Wars canon full stop, even when lines miss (which they do) the character works.
It's not perfect though. The script is weak. It's clear this is a movie born of one brilliant idea and everything is spun from that and it's not quite there. The shape of the movie is there, the frame, but the depth is a rewrite away. Luna is clearly a ruthless captain but his ruthlessness is token and undeveloped, he's not quite enough of an antihero for him doing a few unpleasant things to matter. Yen has his (slightly irritating) spirituality but Wen is a fun but empty character. Jones plays the part well but the story struggles to give us real reasons why she's the person to develop this team around. Yes her dad and whatnot but it kinda felt to me like there needed to be a little more work on her place in this. Wen and Yen seemingly join up with the Rebels because they can fight a bit and end up in a cell with a Rebel captain. Ahmed has no story at all. His entire plotline 'this bloke told me to give you this. Says if I did I'd be brave'. That he's actually a decent character despite this is testament to Ahmed. Whittaker's character is utterly pointless, making how rubbish he is all the worse. Of course you have to accept that this is a movie introducing an ensemble of new characters and a whole plotline in 2 hours so you're not going to get the most fleshed out characters but you do feel they could have done more than what we get and elevated cool characters to cool and interesting ones. Mendelsohn's villain isn't great as basically the devil's ambitious buerocrat and isn't particularly menacing or threatening.
The opening hour is a further example of a problem script. It's all over the place. We jump from planet to planet to planet, from this character to that character to that at breakneck speed and don't really achieve much in doing so. The first hour is very talky, which is fine, but the dialogue is often dreadful. The film is riddled with absolute clangers, though few worse than
There is a lot of very on the nose exposition - I felt sorry for Mads with his speech early on, a long solioquy in a style never uttered by anyone in the history of ever, a minute of clonkingly hopeless exposition mingled with overwrought and resoundingly false feeling poetic emotion that should probably garner him awards from his ability to do it with a straight face and an ounce of credibility. The script also dearly needed a thesaurus, given the 'hope' is said about a hundred times and loses all impact by 6th utterance.
It's also clear there's been a lot of tinkering. Lots of trailer shots are missing. Characters look different from trailers. Random element are dropped in, bizarre references to movies past that have neon signs above them 'remember this, right?! STAR WARS!'. These changes are almost entirely from the first half and I think might partly hint at how much tinkering was done to the movie and why the first half is so messy.
There's another problem, which is a bit spoiler-y. It's another example of someone having a great idea.
But make no mistake, for all of the above, the second hour is a barnstormer. The film chucks the best moments of the original trilogy at you again with the budget turned up to 11. The space battle is beautiful and filled with brilliant little moments (watch out for a very unlucky jump to lightspeed). The ground battle is awesome, strangely small and contained but with incredible scale. It's basically the end of Return of the Jedi crossed with the Battle of Hoth crossed with a really expensive holiday. Minus the Ewoks. It's fantastic in every facet. Heroic last stands. Last second reprieves. Defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. Redemption. It's brilliant.
And then we get the very best. The final moments of this movie, one thing aside, are the best seconds of film in Star Wars history. I don't care about Star Wars really, or anything in it, but this brief sequence is astoundingly good and I demand more of it. If someone at Disney isn't hastily rifling through every bit of Star Wars media looking for every single morsel of material they can mine to expand what we see in this sequence to a full movie in a similar vein I'll be astonished. It's so good. We've never seen the things we see in the sequence before and it's just brilliantly done.
Rogue One is a very long way from a perfect movie, with a slow messy first hour and underdeveloped characters, weak script and the distinct feeling that, as great as the ideas are out could have been better done. But there's an awful lot of really good stuff in there too. Probably a top half Star Wars movie that threatened to be a top 2 but is undermined by some flaws. Diehards will lap this up all day long though.
