Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in cinemas now, but is it any good?
WARNING: This review does contain spoilers for the film. Go watch it first, and then read on…
Ever since Disney released the first photo (a group shot of the Rebels, lead by Jyn Erso) for this standalone Star Wars story, I was happy.
Happy at the tone of the film, happy with the actors involved (including Birmingham Kings Norton Girls’ School alumni Felicity Jones) and happy that, once again, we were to be given a lived in, grubby and real Star Wars universe free (mostly) from the over-reliance on CGI.
I had faith in Gareth Edwards, even when the internet imploded with the scandalous rumours that reshoots had been ordered from the higher-ups in Disney because of fears that this was going to be a ‘dark’ film. And it is, and all the better for it.
My first hope had always been that while the full-on Star Wars series could very well ape what had come before (and boy, did Star Wars: The Force Awakens ape the original Star Wars film beat for beat), this – and subsequent Star Wars Stories – could be their own thing; their own brattish offspring shaped and moulded to leave the fingerprints of the director (in this case Gareth Edwards) all over it. Having seen his low budget debut, Monsters, as well as the over-bloated Godzilla, I was impressed that Edwards could do scale.
Birmingham actress Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Photograph: Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.)
Epic, gargantuan scale; and he does. Star Wars is all about the epic; the vast long shots that establish not only planets but environment, topography, alien life and culture.
Jedha, the shot up and shat out war-torn world so important to the mining of kyber crystals Jedis had once used in their lightsabers, feels suitably lived in and worn out. It’s a world on the brink of annihilation because of the Empire’s Machiavellian machinations and also the planet on which Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) brings together – more by accident than by design – a rag-tag team of down and outs that has something of the Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai about them. But then, that’s the point.
Lucas was deeply influenced by the visionary director Akira Kurosawa, and it is well known of the many, many narrative and visual cues he took from films such as Hidden Fortress and others. In fact, when I first saw the green Naboo vistas upon which the Gungans and humans battle for their planet in the dreadful Phantom Menace prequel, it reminded me of the same lush green vistas of Kurosawa’s King Lear epic, Ran. Lucas wears these influences proudly, as does Edwards.
Rule one for making a successful Star Wars film: borrow from the best. And, as a Seven Samurai in space, this does just that, with similar end results to the story too.
Actor Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Photograph: Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.)
Darth Vader returns in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Photograph: Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.)
Just like Seven Samurai, the film opens with the saving of a young Jyn by an ageing Ronin like rebel, Saw Gerrara (Forest Whitaker) on a very Kurosawa-esque planet, Eadu.
Eadu looks and feels like the Mount Fuji based Throne of Blood, all washed out, ashen, damp and dark. The very place you would go to hide from an evil Empire keen to reacquaint themselves with Jyn’s father, and Death Star guru, (Mads Mikkelsen), Galen Erso. The set dressings here, as elsewhere in the film, looks and feels very familiar.
Rule number two: keep it familiar but add your own twist. Erso’s moisture farm stands in antithesis to Lars Owens’ own moisture farm on the desert planet Tatooine and Jeddah’s bustling city is chock full of the same kind of ‘scum and villainy’ as Mos Eisely.
There are a fair few familiar faces that crop up in cameos throughout the film too, that help add a smile to fans in a film that, on the whole, is the darkest (if not the darkness) addition to the franchise. Only fleeting in many cases, but satisfying nods to fandom nonetheless.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was directed by British film producer Gareth Edwards on a budget of $200 million (Photograph: Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.)
I’ll let you look out for them for yourselves, but one in particular – and not advertised – has a rather larger part than others. Indeed, this one character, as well as the revelation of another fond and familiar face at the very end of the film, brings me to my only gripe with the CGI usage.
While CGI is used to enhance the film on the whole, adding depth and detail to the fantastical environs of the many planets we visit during the film, this character is totally GCI powered and as such just doesn’t come off as believable. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief that much. But, as I say, this is but a minor gripe.
But, the one cameo everyone was keen to see has to be Darth Vader in all his glory. And, while brief, he doesn’t disappoint. His commanding presence is only enhanced when we visit what seems to the his home – a fiery Mustafar-like planet suitable for this Sith Lord to call home. A place to escape and be at one with the Force, it would seem. His powerful presence is all the more strengthened because of the ineptitude of Rogue One’s main bad guy, Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn).
British actor Riz Ahmed portrays Bodhi Rook in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Photograph: Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.)
While Krennic starts the film off looking like a man in control; successfully procuring Galen by force and in the process killing his wife, he is very soon revealed as a toadie with ‘vaulting ambition’ (Macbeth I.vii) but not the intelligence or power at his command to ensure this. He is a good indication that, even now at its zenith, the Empire is not as invulnerable as it would want the galaxy to think it is. And, Krennic spends a lot of the film trying to either cover up or suck up. Sounds like a lot of management in the modern era to me.
Overall, this is and isn’t a Star Wars film. It is, because it has all the same old familiar design elements and battered, frayed edges. It has echoes of Kurosawa sown through it, maybe even more than Lucas ever did, but it is also Edwards’ own film too.
It is dark, tragic, grim. It starts off, quite literally, with bang and no crawling exposition that has traditionally started every single one of the other seven films. The ending may leave you emotionally drained too, be warned, but it is also a reminder of what is just waiting around the corner; a bright young farm boy with big ideas and even bigger dreams and the return of the Jedis!
The dark before the breaking light of dawn is always the darkest, but as Jyn constantly reminds us, hope is on the horizon, a new hope.
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Olly MacNamee
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