ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY - A Newer Hope

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Gareth Edwards
Writers: Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, John Knoll, Gary Whitta
Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, James Earl Jones
Runtime: 133 mins.
2016

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the second of Disney's new era of Star Wars films to be successful despite near fatal flaws. The difference between the two is that every time I reconsider Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it gets worse in my memory, to the point that I regret the relatively high marks I gave it. Rogue One, on the other hand, holds up well to scrutiny even as its messiness becomes clear.

Of course, this is far from a universal perspective. Rogue One has turned out to be one of the more divisive blockbusters in recent memory for a whole slew of reasons. I've been a cheerleader of director Gareth Edwards for a few years now, so it's no surprise that I come out on the positive side of the divide. Edwards himself is divisive, as previously manifested in the 2014 Godzilla reboot. His trademark directorial style involves framing and composition far more grandiose and sophisticated than any of his peers, coupled with character work that is apathetic at worst, functional at best.

Lo and behold, Rogue One is a Gareth Edwards movie through and through, which I consider to be something of a triumph. The movie underwent some serious reshoots, and composer Alexandre Desplat got swapped out for the more crowdpleasing Michael Giacchino; folks took this as a sign of Disney trying to neuter Edwards' approach to the material. Those fears are mostly unfounded, although the reshoots have left their grubby fingerprints all over the film.


To get into the meat of it, Rogue One is a prequel that expounds upon the first couple sentences in the opening crawl of Star Wars. The Empire has control of the galaxy, the Jedi are extinguished, and hope is an unorganized, unattainable, sputtering spark. Through many sequences of somewhat tortured exposition, our hero Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a wandering miscreant just trying to survive, finds herself in the company of a ragtag group of militant rebels and aimless misfits. Their goals align for a while: they must find her father, disloyal imperial designer of the Death Star, the long lost Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). Unbeknownst to Jyn, captain of the crew Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) has a different agenda concerning what must be done with him. This twisty path ultimately leads said ragtag group into direct conflict with the Empire, in what is to become the fledgling Rebellion's first victory--but at what cost?

Everything about the concept of Rogue One sounds like textbook prequel wankery, but Edwards and his crew of writers (including Tony Gilroy of the Bourne trilogy fame) pull off the miracle of making Rogue One feel fresh, relevant, and incisive despite living in the shadow of A New Hope. These are exactly the qualities that The Force Awakens tried so desperately to pull off, to middling effect, but Edwards makes it seem effortless. My favorite example of the elegant way this film integrates itself with the larger franchise narrative involves one of the lumpiest plot moments of A New Hope: the egregiously vulnerable exhaust port. Rogue One recontextualizes this weakness by having Galen purposefully design it as a vulnerability. Hence, what was previously a sloppy plot mechanism becomes a gesture of love from father to daughter, as well as a symbol of hope and defiance, as well as a crucially resonant macguffin within the plot of Rogue One. It's the rare narrative device that actually showcases the usefulness of prequels as a creative endeavor.

The story is at all points buoyed by Doug Chiang and Neil Lamont's stellar production design. Taking place a negligible amount of time before A New Hope, Rogue One hits that design sweet spot between familiar and innovative. The array of planets we see are realized more effectively than any Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back. As such, Chiang and Lamont are able to design niche locations, ships, armor, and creatures that feel of a kind with the original trilogy, but sensibly obscure enough that their absence from those movies makes sense. The film is a parade of ingenious, instantly iconic visuals. It's a sci-fi fan buffet.

Gareth Edwards does his part to build the iconography. In film you must have the observed object, and the observing subject. Edwards' observing camera is constantly awestruck. His greatest strength as a filmmaker is what you could call instant visual mythologizing. His worlds are grand and immediately iconic. As far as I'm concerned, this is the ideal skillset for one of these Star Wars offshoots. Rogue One is able to present a culturally oversaturated world with a visual language that makes it relevant again. The Death Star, a doomsday device that has been featured variously in three films now (Starkiller counts), to diminishing returns, is suddenly evocative once more. After decades of looking at the thing, we are again considering exactly what it means to control a weapon of mass destruction. Vader is another great example. Probably the greatest film villain of all time, subsequently neutered by the prequels, Rogue One makes him threatening in a whole new way.

That's twice already that I've fawned about Edwards in this review. Here's the thing--I have a suspicion that his flaws as a creative actually make him perfect for the studio system. His focus is clearly not on characterization, but rather visual storytelling. So when the higher-ups impose restrictions, or cut his movies to hell, they can survive on the backbone of spectacle as storytelling.

But the problems cannot be ignored. The beginning of the film is a flurry of cross-cutting to characters that we aren't given enough of a reason to care about. There's an absolutely baffling sequence with a brain-sucking tentacle monster that is set up to be important, but is immediately forgotten. The character arcs are thinly sketched throughout. Some folks only get one scene to shine, if that. Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), the defecting pilot, is underutilized throughout, then has a climactic hero moment that has to do with... running cable? And a "master switch" whose importance gets backhandedly established only moments before? When characters die it's baseline effective, but it doesn't rock us like it ought to.

Much of that baseline effectiveness comes from the various strengths of the performers. Felicity Jones and Diego Luna are serviceable as Jyn and Cassian, though they have the most prominent arcs to prop them up. Alan Tudyk is immediately likable as the wire-crossed reprogrammed imperial murder droid K-2SO. Donnie Yen steals the show as blind force-sensitive monk Chirrut. He's incredibly endearing, and boasts a tighter and more impressive combat sequence than anything I ever expected to see in a Star Wars movie.

The tangential characters are perhaps the most interesting. Mads Mikkelsen is characteristically excellent as Galen despite only appearing at the edges of the story. His wrangler Director Krennic may be a bit undercooked on the page, but Ben Mendelsohn wills a compelling psychology into existence. I even enjoyed Forest Whitaker's shrieking, unmodulated performance as guerilla rebel offshoot Saw Guerrera. It's jarring, which is exactly what the character calls for.

Speaking of jarring... the CGI zombie of Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin. This was a flat out miscalculation. The ethics of putting a dead performer into your film are still being navigated, but you could call it tasteless at best. At worst, it's the violation of an artist's right to maintain agency over their career and likeness. Not to mention that any way you split it, the technology is not quite there, at least not for a character featured so heavily. Tarkin plays an effectively interesting role in the plot, but for god's sake it looks like Krennic has stepped into a video game cutscene every time they talk. There is absolutely no reason Tarkin shouldn't have been recast. You know, the exact thing they did with Mon Mothma.

When it comes to the bottom line, this is the first Star Wars movie released in my lifetime that I can feel good about. Unlike those other movies, there are moments here that will stick with me. The missteps are frequent, but none of them break the experience. Just when I was feeling burnt out on Star Wars, Rogue One provides the sliver of hope that lets me... I don't know. Keep buying tickets to these movies, I guess.

3 / 5  BLOBS