Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Director: Gareth Edwards (technically)
Writer: Chris Weltz, Tony Gilroy, John Knoll, Gary Whitta, George Lucas (creator)
Starring: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna Alan Tudyk, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen
Reason for watching: Showing Jane all the Star Wars movies
Number of times I’ve watched it: twice
***
Now this….is a beautiful movie to look at it and the reason The Mandalorian exists. Without something like to show us that a story could be told about something other than born-of-a-virgin Hayden Christensen or his kids in a galaxy far, far away.
Right to the core here, this story is about a single sentence in the opening crawl of the original Star Wars movie. If that isn’t a metaphor for Rogue One’s place in Star Wars as a whole, I don’t know what is. All of the other entries in this franchise covers some vast and important topic. A galactic civil war. The clash between Jedi and Sith. The fate of a force-wielding family. All told the three main trilogies cover some 65+ years. And this movie primarily takes place over a weekend or so. It takes a while to get there, but our merry band of misfit rebels have only one job in this movie. Get those death star plans. That’s an incredible elevator pitch for a movie.
To be clear though, this movie’s plot comes and goes with our main rebel, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), as she decides whether or not she’s truly in the fight against the Empire. Aside from a beautiful and tragic prologue where Erso’s father (Mads Mikkelsen) is recruited to be an engineer on the death star, the first hour or so is very slow. The movie is getting its feet under itself. The worst example of this is the use of Forrest Whitaker’s talents for less than five minutes max (please don’t go back and actually track this, but know that he was not in this movie for long at all). The humor feels incredibly 2010’s, which almost seems out of place for a Star Wars movie until you remember that Disney owns this and the MCU. So of course they’re both gonna have quips in them. And honestly it’s still funny.
But honestly, after Jyn’s get her purpose in this movie everything falls into place and we have a spectacular final battle to the movie. The action is thrilling and the cinematography really strikes you well. The tension really fits nice as well. Watching our heroes sacrifice themselves for the greater good is awesome to watch. Seeing the courage and reward that comes over Jyn’s face as she completes her mission and gets the plans to the rebels. And if you haven’t seen that Death Vader hallway scene already, you are missing out on the GREATEST STAR WARS SCENE EVER. No cap. No lie. That scene is amazing. It’s the best fan service ever.
There’s some other flaws like the weird CGI versions of Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia. But honestly, that battle and final hallways scene with Darth Vader makes up for all of it.
7/10
Until I see another one.