Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Our Review

The first standalone Star Wars story is the best film Disney’s era produced, and nobody at the studio seems to have understood why. Gareth Edwards built a war movie inside the galaxy far far away: no Jedi destiny, no Skywalker lineage, just spies, soldiers, and one impossible chance to steal the plans the whole original trilogy depends on. Knowing the ending does not soften it. Everyone on this mission dies, and the film earns the right to make you care anyway.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a criminal recruited against her will, with a flinty weariness the saga had never allowed in a lead. Diego Luna’s Cassian shoots an informant in the back in his first scene and the film never pretends the Rebellion is pure, which is the most grown up thing Star Wars has done since Empire. Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic, a mid manager of doom fighting for table scraps of Vader’s approval, is a wonderfully petty villain. And K-2SO, Alan Tudyk’s acid droid, gets the funniest and saddest lines in the film.

The third act is the strongest sustained stretch of any modern Star Wars film: a beach assault, a data vault raid, and a space battle where a Star Destroyer gets shoved by another one. The Vader corridor at the end is the most terrifying sixty seconds in the franchise. Weak spots exist, the first act hops between planets with title cards like a travelogue, and some reshoot scars show in Tarkin’s uncanny face. But as a story about ordinary people paying for hope in advance, it is superb. Nine out of ten.