(3 / 5)
 
With the release of The Force Awakens Star Wars is currently experiencing one of it’s greatest resurgences in popularity. Now as we wait for episode eight we are given Rogue One which serves as the bridge between the prequels and the originals.
This movies main goal is to finally establish who it was that got the Death Star plans to Princess Leia and how. In many different video games and other mediums there have been multiple people that have done this so this whole movies purpose is to set it in stone.
I feel the same way about this movie as I do about Jurassic World and that is that on the asthetic level of being apart of a previously established franchise it succeeds greatly and it never really clicks except in the last ten minutes. The last ten minutes of this movie is where you really feel the impact and has it’s best moments. However this raises the question, does this make it worth it? As a simple piece of information to the franchise as a whole not really, did we need to know all these details, no we can live without them. As a movie, to have to sit through something that is just OK but never really resonating until the finale?

Everything about this production says that the people working on the visuals know their material and are passionate to be here. Star Wars is a world of technology far beyond what we have now but is worn and dusty from it’s time being used and environment. Very few things are clean or at least have a few scratches on them and there are details that tie it in with the original film, like when a giant screen changes there’s a half second of static, remember static?
Our characters to perform this task are Jyn (Felicity Jones) the daughter of a scientist, the one that designed the Death Star, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). Also they have Orson Kennrick (Ben Mendelson) as their position that hunts them and opposes everything they stand for. They also have a converted Imperialist droid named K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk). My favourite character, wise cracking but in the way that is believable a robot would be, displeased with illogical course of action the humans are taking.
The writing for this movie is way too on-the-nose. The dialog is all about “hope” and “rebellion” and “fight” and “chance.” This is obvious writing that is easy to see through and too corny to get invested in. There are times when it settles down and has the characters talk more human-like but it’s these moments you’ll remember.
Being that the plot is set before A New Hope there are two faces that come back, literally! I wont spoil the second one but Peter Cushing is facially recreated and voiced by another actor. This is, frankly, creepy. I know that what I am seeing is a real person that is long since dead and has been facially re-created to deliver another performance. Recreating a young Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy is one thing, but this feels very disrespectful. There is an episode of The Critic where they have a millionaire say that using C.G.I. he can have old, long dead actors do what he wants. This was intended as a joke, now it’s a disturbing reality.
There are moments of fan-service in this movie that is the most detrimental to any movie. They are the types that come, non-subtly state themselves and then moves on. These are moments for the fans, others will just be slightly detoured by characters moving by or a lot of emphasis on a certain name. It’s not the worst I’ve seen but that doesn’t make this any better.
Star Wars fans are some of the most dedicated and obsessive fans ever (this can be either a good or bad thing). I imagine the hardcore fans will take this movie and really focus in on its prose and not care about its problems. For others, it will be a serviceable science fiction movie that has an ending that makes it all worth it