When it comes to the original Star Wars trilogy, there is a strong argument to be made that “The Empire Strikes Back” is the best film. It’s also the darkest, with the Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and company at their lowest point. “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” seems to have embraced that darkness without ever considering why it worked in the first place. As a result, it’s the least interesting movie in the franchise – prequel trilogy included.
“Rogue One” has two fatal flaws: its story and its characters. Anyone who has ever seen the original Star Wars – “Episode IV: A New Hope” already knows the entire plot of this new film. In fact, it’s one of the first things viewers find out from the opening crawl: “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.”
Aside from adding a subplot to explain why a weapon the size of a moon can be destroyed by a single pilot with a single missile, doesn’t really deviate from those three sentences in the crawl. Consequently, anybody with a passing familiarity with Star Wars knows exactly how the movie is going to end. The film’s non-stop action scenes merely serve to move the audience from point A (the Empire has a death star) to point B (the Rebels know how to blow it up).
This isn’t necessarily a bad plot for a movie, so long as it adds something else for people to get interested in, such as engaging characters. Unfortunately, “Rogue One” doesn’t have any of those. The only character who goes through any sort of a change in the film is protagonist Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones. The movie starts with her resigned to the status quo of the totalitarian Empire in power, but ends with her leading Rebel troops into battle. Unfortunately, this change isn’t so much an arc as a right angle, with Jyn changing into almost a completely different character at the drop of a hat.
The supporting cast is also boring. There are certainly likeable characters, from comic relief K-2SO, a sort of C-3PO on steroids voiced by Alan Tudyk, to Chirrut Imwe, a blind and Force-attuned monk played by Donnie Yen. But none of these folks necessarily grow over the course of the movie, which makes it hard to really care about them. Even the most reviled character in Star Wars history, Episode I’s Jar Jar Binks, emerges at the end of that film different than when we first see him, having evolved because of the events of the movie.
The complete lack of character development in “Rogue One” is largely because of its pacing. The film jumps from a battle to an interrogation to another battle to a rousing speech to yet another battle without giving its stars a moment to breathe. In contrast, the other Star Wars movies had a lot of downtime and it really helped. One of the most memorable scenes in “A New Hope” simply showed Luke staring wistfully at Tatooine’s two setting suns as John Williams score soared. From this, we could gather that Luke feels like he is meant for greater things than moisture farming, and it gave us a reason to be concerned about his fate. “Rogue One” contains no such scenes.
Ultimately, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is a montage of death and destruction with very little to get emotionally invested in. The battle scenes and explosions are cool-looking and some classic characters make cameos, if you’re into that. But unless you’re a Star Wars fan who really needs to know just where Leia got the blueprints of the Death Star, this movie is superfluous and skippable.
ngonzales@durangoherald.com. Nick Gonzales is one of The Durango Herald newsroom’s resident film buffs. He welcomes movie recommendations. Follow him on Twitter @lackingzones.
