Star Wars hits the big screen with their newest addition, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The movie takes place between Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
To caution all readers, I spoil a few things from the movie.
The Pros:
Hope, in all honesty, lies as the underlying theme of this movie and helps it tie into Episode IV: A New Hope. All of the main characters like Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor and Chirrut Imwe display this feeling of hope throughout the entire movie all the way to the very last line.
Rogue One used CGI to “resurrect” Peter Cushing’s character from the original movies, Grand Moff Tarkin. This caught me by surprise because Peter Cushing had been dead for a while, and the movie made a realistic CGI version of him.
The movie really explained how the Death Star was created and why there was a weak spot to it in the first place.
I really liked how Rogue One didn’t pretend to be an average Star Wars movie. When I was watching it, I felt like the movie was a true war movie — the battles were more grounded and involved less use of the Force. Of course, like most war, action-based movies, Rogue One had a lot of death, and I mean A LOT of death. It was as if you felt the pain of the main character, Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones.
Now, everyone was happy and excited about the Darth Vader cameo, voiced by James Earl Jones, but, he wasn’t often in the scenes until the end. I would’ve made this a con, but the final scene where we see Darth Vader in his prime completely wreck the Rebel forces made me think Vader could’ve single-handedly defeat the Rebellion.
The ending was perfect.
(SPOILER) In the final scenes, Princess Leia retrieved the plans of the Death Star and escaped in her ship. At first, it did not seem significant, but I realized it played into the opening scene of Episode IV: A New Hope where you see Leia’s ship being attacked by a Star Destroyer. It was a whoa moment.
The Cons:
Rogue One made me fall in love with main characters like Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, but it never really gave a true backstory to either character. Sure, in the beginning, it gave us a scene of Jyn as a child and how she was “separated” from her parents, but that’s it. We don’t know what she did as teenager to make her into the butt-kicking character she turned out to be in the movie or do we know what her life was like during that time period.
(SPOILER) As for Cassian, he claimed he joined the Rebels at the age of six, but that’s all we got. No scene, no monologue from Cassian, nothing.
There’s also way too much action for my taste and not enough character bonding or development. It really made it feel like certain character deaths were insignificant overall and had no effect to the main Star Wars story.
Lastly — and this is a big one — there was no opening crawl. That’s Star Wars’ thing. They’re known for that. All previous movies in the Star Wars franchise had it, but not this one. It really didn’t make me happy.
Final Verdict: All in all, it was a great movie and very enjoyable overall. I’d recommend this film to any Star Wars fan and almost guarantee they’ll enjoy it.
Rating: 7.8/10
