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This is not your average Star Wars movie


         Rogue One: A Star Wars Story we can all see is a goofy title. Honestly the production should have just gone with the shorthand “Star Wars: Rogue One” that most have been using. There are also surely going to be fans upset over the fact that this is the first Star Wars movie without an opening crawl. Once they get over that however, they’ll find there’s little in this film to be upset about.
          A brilliant scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) after years in hiding is found and forced by the Empire to design their super-weapon, the Death Star. Years later his daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones), recruited by the Rebel Alliance on a mission to retrieve a message from her father, learns that the Death Star has a weakness. Hunted by Imperial Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), she and a party of rebels seek to find the plans and give the Rebellion a fighting chance.
          Rogue One is an engaging story, based though it is on only a couple exposition lines from the original movie. By focusing on new characters and a plot that doesn’t impact the series in a major way, it allows for a more unconventional direction. In its’ dark tone and characterization, this is not your typical Star Wars. 
          Despite the series’ title, the “war” part of Star Wars has mostly been downplayed with the saga being much more about character and mythology. Not in this film. This is certainly the grittiest that Star Wars has ever been and in how its shot and built it feels like a war movie. There’s a welcome griminess to the world. This is especially noticeable in the first act where Jyn is trying to contact a disgraced Rebel now leading his own insurgency called Saw Gerrera (Forrest Whitaker). Gerrera’s Partisans are quite clearly a terrorist group and as they fight Imperial soldiers on a desert terrain, it’s almost as familiar to current warfare as The Hurt Locker.
          Adding to this sense of realism is the fact that none of the main characters in this film are good or evil -all are shades of grey, which makes them much more interesting than many of the characters in previous Star Wars films. Gerrera though anti-Empire is an extremist and his actions are reprehensible. Yet he’s also the guy who saved Jyn when she was young. You see this moral ambiguity from other characters too, like Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) who often gets his hands dirty fighting the good fight. Galen is a tool, but the Rebellion wants him dead not knowing he had no choice in his actions. And of course Jyn feels no loyalty to either the Empire or the Rebellion, and you can understand why. These characters are so fascinating you want to know more about them. 
          Another reason these characters work so well is because the cast is top notch. Felicity Jones is absolutely terrific. Diego Luna and Mads Mikkelsen are as usual pretty great. Whitaker’s strange performance I don’t like as much, but Riz Ahmed is good as an Imperial defector, and so is Jiang Wen as a mercenary. Alan Tudyk is a lot of fun as the film’s comic relief, a snarky droid called K-2SO who gets many of the best lines. And Ben Mendelsohn plays Krennic’s frustration superbly. Donnie Yen plays perhaps my favourite character, Chirrut Imwe, a blind Force-sensitive warrior who in his spiritualism, great skill in spite of his disability, and good humour feels like someone out of a Kurosawa film. His action scenes and character moments alike are among the best the movie.
          The visuals are really good too. Once in a while there’s a ship or an alien that looks abundantly CG, but most of the worlds and battles are brilliantly shot and large in scale. This is no surprise as director Gareth Edwards supervised similarly decent effects on Godzilla. He’s also a Star Wars fan and so you may be able to spot a number of in-jokes and references. Speaking of which there’s a technique used in this movie that’s eerily good. It isn’t perfect and is definitely distracting when overused, but it’s nonetheless astonishing what it may mean for CGI in movies to come. I can’t go into detail but you’ll know it when you see it.
          Maybe the downside to Rogue One is that unlike any Star Wars film before it, it’s a very grim film, more violent and dark, possibly to the degree one should reconsider taking children if they’re a certain age. This is a film that depicts torture, terrorism, and large-scale death in a very identifiable way. But at the same time it’s a sign of Star Wars expanding their horizons. It’s got problems of course; there is some poor pacing and some of the team could’ve been developed more. There are also a handful of pointless scenes. It doesn’t capture the Star Wars spirit like Force Awakens, though it’s not meant to. If Rogue One was meant to prove that spin-offs in this series could work and and do things that the regular films can’t, it’s definitely succeeded. With great characters touching on interesting themes, a last act that’s all kinds of awesome and a grittiness I never thought I’d see in Star Wars, it can no longer be said there are no good prequels.

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