Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

This was a bad movie. I know you nerds are going to freak out when I say this. Hear me out. Just because a movie is in the Star Wars universe, doesn’t mean it’s good. To assume that anything that is cashing in… err… I mean, totally necessary in Star Wars, is a great movie by default, is silly. Sure, there were some good scenes, but on the whole, this wasn’t a good movie. As always, I’ll get to spoilers, but I’ll warn you first.

Rogue One takes place between Episodes 3 and 4. It’s about how the Rebel Alliance got the plans to the Death Star. Here’s my main problem with the movie. There are so many random things in it. It feels more like a shitty fan fiction that somehow got a blockbuster budget. I guess the writers used the Jedi mind tricks to FORCE the studio executives to make this movie. Oh. And you can drown in the FORCEd easter eggs and call backs. They really tried to FORCE it down your throat. There are cameos. Some were great. Some were cool. One was absolutely terrible and out of place and FORCEd.

Sure, there were some great action scenes, especially with the Star Destroyers. One thing that I liked about this movie was how you got to see things from a different perspective, which was refreshing, and added to the feel of the movie. The characters were exciting for the sake of being novel, but in the end, the only ones I actually cared about were the robot (K-2SO), and maybe Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso. The rest felt like filler to me. Like they probably had cool back stories, but that wasn’t shown. Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor was trying WAY too fucking hard to be mysterious. Was he a good guy, was he a bad guy? It felt like he was trying to portray a bad guy trying to be good. Also his accent was so thick that I couldn’t understand what he was saying until an hour into the movie.

Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Îmwe was amazing. Flat out. I’ll get into this later once I get into spoilers, but I’m pretty sure he was a god in this universe. He also had some muscle, in Wen Jiang’s Baze Malbus. They worked well together, but Baze was clearly just there to shoot things that Chirrut couldn’t. They were like Rocket and Groot, from Guardians of the Galaxy, but in a galaxy far far away. K-2SO, voiced by Alan Dudyk, was funny, and entertaining, and clearly was what C3PO should have been.

Forest Whitaker makes a surprisingly short appearance as Saw Gerrera. The main protagonist is Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic. There were other people in it too, but they didn’t matter.

And now we get into spoilers.

Ok. Seriously, this movie was like a poorly written fan fiction. The entire time, it felt like a 7 year old explaining a dream he had. “And then there was a ninja, but he was blind, and he couldn’t die. And he used a laser bow and arrow, but with more accuracy than anyone with eyes ever could. And there was a robot. He was a bad guy but now he’s a good guy. And there’s this guy with two metal legs. And he has a mind control alien. And…”

The rest of the movie was like the writers had seen a bunch of other movies, and decided to steal their plots. There’s a little bit of Dirty Dozen/Suicide Squad in the final half of the movie. But it’s not like they are villains. Just rebels who decided to rebel against the rebellion and do something to help the rebellion. They were just Red Shirts and don’t have speaking parts. Also, yes I did just make a Star Trek reference in a Star Wars review. Because fuck this movie.

OH MY KEANU, does this movie steal from the Mission Impossible plots. Every single step of the way, they want to do something, something goes wrong, they get through it, and then something else goes wrong. That’s the movie. That’s it. They need to find Jyn’s father who is working on the Death Star. But first, they need to check with Saw to get his help, but then the Death Star happens. So they go back to the base, to convince the Rebels that Jyn’s father is actually a good guy. And that doesn’t work. So then the Dirty Dozen decides to go anyway. They get to the plans, but then the power goes out. So they get them manually, but now they’re trapped on the planet. But they can’t get a signal out, because the shield force field thingie is still active. So they need the Rebels to turn it off. but they can’t tell them. So they have to run an extension cord to the other thing. Then… nevermind. It just never ends.

One really amazing thing about this movie is Darth Vader, with one caveat. This movie shows something that was hinted at in the other movies, but never shown. That is Darth Vader being a bad ass. If you watch the original trilogy, you only see people scared of Vader. They TELL you he’s evil and powerful, but never showed it. This movie does. And it’s delightful. The caveat is when Krennic goes to see him, and Vader says “Don’t choke on your ambition” while Force choking him. Fuck that scene made me cringe.

Chirrut, the blind ninja was fucking awesome. Like I would argue he could have taken Vader on. He took down 10 Stormtroopers with a stick, and walked into battle without getting lasered. I really think he was a god in this movie. Like a literal supernatural entity.

Jyn was the emotion of the movie. You see her go from scared child, to prisoner, to nihilist, to sad daughter, to hero. It felt like they were FORCE-ing a romantic link between her and Cassian, because… headliners, I guess, but luckily, they didn’t get too far into that. K-2SO…

and for the love of fuck, it’s annoying trying to type these names. I didn’t remember any of them, and I’m having to check IMDB to figure out how to spell them. Why are there never any aliens named “Bob”?

… Anyway, Better C3PO, was the very much needed lightheartedness of the movie. Though his back story was stolen from Terminator. He’s a bad robot who gets reprogrammed to be a good guy.  He has a running gag of telling the Suicide Squad how likely they are to fail. Then they succeed, anyway.

What about the cameos? So Vader is in it, obviously. They did a CGI of Governor Tarkin. Some complained that the CGI was distracting, but I barely noticed. He fit well into the story, because he’s in the original trilogy. R2D2 and C3PO make a quick appearance and I hated every millisecond of it. It was so out of place and FORCEd. There was another cameo, but I had no idea it was in the movie, and was a surprise, so I’ll leave it for you. It’s at the very end of the movie, and I think it was well done, though this time, I did notice the CGI.

The fight scenes were good. I liked the gritty “real war” feel to them. I didn’t like the AT-ATs though. You get this gorgeous sprawling introduction to the planet and the base, which is clearly just a bunch of tiny islands tied together with roads. How is there enough room for the AT-ATs? Where were they hiding? It goes back to the 7 year old’s dream. “And then there were AT-ATs…”

The space battle was great, but then you see the Rebels use some sort of weapon on a Star Destroyer that disables it. WHERE THE FUCK WAS THAT IN THE OTHER MOVIES? Like seriously? That would have been a pretty important weapon. Did they even mention it anywhere else in the movies?

One final flaw in this movie, is totally a nitpick, but it was very distracting. Saw. He wears a sleep apnea mask that is plugged into his kidney or something. Fine. He only uses it before he says something scary. It’s silly, but fine. Then, right before he dies, he looks at the oncoming destruction of his Bond Villain cave hideout thing. He takes his mask off. First off, the problem I had, was it goes through a metal loop, but during this scene it’s not through this loop. Like he took the mask out of the loop, just so that when he unplugs the mask, it will fall to the floor, dramatically. He didn’t know he was going to die. He must have taken the time to take the mask through this loop, just because. Secondly, what purpose did that serve? He sees a huge wall of death coming at him, so he takes the mask off… to… what? Intimidate the explosion?

In the end, the movie was almost pure fan service to milk the die hard Star Wars fans of some money and sell some toys. Maybe I’m just bored of Star Wars. I was never that big of a fan in the first place, but with Disney planning to release one of these movies every year for the foreseeable future, I’m kind of done with Star Wars. The action sequences were good. The plot annoyed me. The characters were boring. I give this 2 out of 5 stars.