The narrative of Rogue One is sufficiently simple to explain. We join a group of dissidents as they look for plans that will eventually help Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star. Rogue One is more than just a prequel. It works both as a standalone film and as a form of fleshing out the existing Star Wars franchise.
Let’s answer the question anyway. Such rare creatures will find something like a self-contained narrative. The movie opens with Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a director of weapons research for the Empire, arriving with the eagerly anticipated "Death Troopers" at the home of martial engineer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). The Star Wars films have always had clear samurai and Wild West influences. The opening tends more to a Western than Kurosawa as Krennic drags Galen off while Jyn Erso, the captive’s daughter, watches terrified from nearby rushes.
Jyn is rescued by a muttering Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and spirited away to the life of a mildly criminal nomad. Galen Erso is forced into designing the Death Star, but he has not turned to evil. Jyn Erso falls in with a gang of hooligans who, in defiance of Rebel command, set out to locate the plans Luke will one day require.
Star Wars fanatics needing commentary on and references to the wider canon will not be disappointed. Minding the current hysteria about spoilers, I will be no more specific, but we can safely praise the computer boffins for two creations that, even in this time of digital wonders, fairly take the breath away. Laamu Atoll in the Maldives provides a beautiful closing location that looks to have been peeled spectacularly from the cover of a golden-era science-fiction paperback.
K-2SO, the franchise’s latest robot, voiced elegantly by Alan Tudyk, is so charmingly lugubrious – part Iron Giant; part Marvin the Paranoid Android – that one can’t help but yearn for a reboot somewhere else in the universe.
Rogue One’s greatest selling point is, however, an old-fashioned, 21st-century human. Felicity Jones is endlessly charming and spirited as the grown Jyn Erso: a brigand who can’t sustain the amoral pose. Jones’s achievement is all the more remarkable given the blandness of the dialogue.
Other members of Jyn’s posse struggle to establish any sort of personalities. The great Donnie Yen is there. The equally fine Jiang Wen is here. There is a lot of potential with the characters but they failed to succeed anything further than one dimensional personalities.
Happily, the final conflagration is sufficiently punchy to push thoughts of such underdevelopment from the mind. Gareth Edwards shoots that sequence in the style of a second World War battle. Almost to the same quality of Saving Private Ryan.
