Movie Review: Rogue One

So much wasted potential. Despite some fun bits in the old Star Wars tradition, Rogue One was mostly blah.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding this movie up to some ridiculous artistic or literary standard; not everything needs to be a think piece. There's nothing wrong with just entertaining people. Entertained was what I wanted to be when I bought my ticket. Unfortunately, Rogue One induced more yawns than thrills, and that in turn induced frustration. What went wrong? Well not a lot, but then again not much went spectacularly right either. And "spectacular" is what I look forward to from a Star Wars entry.

Let's start with the sci-fi aspect of the story. As a little kid, it was the sweeping space odyssey world of Star Wars that initially caught me. Later I'd learn to appreciate its other aspects, story, character development etc (more on that later), but it was the world I fell in love with from the start, and I always look forward to being re-immersed in it with each new instalment. Rogue One was a disappointment here. All said, there are a few moments of brilliance: when the x-wings show up in the climactic battle sequence, it's fantastic. With the head-on view enhanced with modern CGI and 3D it looked better than any previous entry. Another moment of greatness was the way they resurrected the late (very late) and great Peter Cushing. He looked good for a guy who's been dead 23 years. Not only was he reprising his role as Grand Moff Tarkin from the original Star Wars, but he was actually a major character. It wasn't just a long shot of him across the boardroom table; he walked, talked and moved the action forward. The digitally animated corpse was haunting to look at. Whoever brought him back to life deserves an award of some kind. Unfortunately, both the x-wings and Tarkin comprise about 10 minutes of the movie, a spellbinding 10 minutes but only 10 minutes.

So that's the good. Let's talk about the bad. The rest of the action is pretty lame. There's lots of it, but you've seen it all before in other movies or TV shows. Mostly it's a throwback to the 1980's style action sequences you saw on TV. Remember those shows where the cops would raid a warehouse at the end of the episode, and the bad guys came out firing, and everyone took cover behind a car or a crate or whatever? Guys would pop up from behind their oil drum, fire a few shots and duck down again. Every now and then a guy would fall over. Remember that? Well, that's pretty much Rogue One, except instead of the guns going "bang, bang" they go "pew, pew".

The stock action isn't a small technical nerd detail. For me sci-fi is about suspending disbelief, and lame laser fights that look like a set piece from the A-Team don't help me buy into the world one bit. They can fly through space but they can't develop better weapons? Why not a shotgun that shoots nanites instead of pellets? Even if you miss the nanites could -- I dunno -- burrow into the nearest human target within a 10-foot radius of where they land. You could just shoot the ground beside a crate and presto! No more rebel! How about a small portable drone a stormtrooper could just chuck in the air like a lawn dart; it could hover over the enemy and fire down on them from above and behind? Hell, how about a damn grenade launcher? (As far as I could tell all grenades in Rogue One are hand tossed, WW2 style.) It didn't help Rogue One that the night before I'd watched John Wick. The latter is a flawed movie, but it's much better entertainment than the former. John Wick wields his pistol like a samurai sword. The action's short, sharp and elegant. Just like Keenau's suit. You won't see anything like this in Rogue One:

Well, so much the sci-fi elements. Time to move on to the narrative. When I became a teenager, the coming of age story in the original Star Wars started to matter a lot more to me than the blasters and light sabres. For all of its flaws, it was a better story than what Rogue One has to offer. Briefly, the latter movie centres around Jyn (Felicity Jones) who's the daughter of the guy who designs the Death Star. Separated from him at a young age, the story catches up with her in her twenties (?) where the Rebel alliance pressures her join them in order to get access to a turn-coat Imperial pilot who's smuggled out a message for the alliance from her father. They need her because turn-coats in the custody of another rebel faction (the Provisional Rebel Alliance?) whose leader (a very underused Forest Whitaker) is too crazy or something for the mainstream rebels; bottom line, they don't get on, and so they need Jyn to appeal to captain crazy because it turns out he's the guy who kept her safe when pops got hauled off to work on the Death Star. So that's how things kick off. The classic coming of age storyline of A New Hope appealed to me because as a teenage boy, straining to get out and see the world, I could relate to Luke. I can honestly say my father was never hauled off by stormtroopers.

Another problem with the narrative is that we know how it ends. It doesn't take long to establish that Rogue One is about getting the Death Star plans to the rebels, and if you've seen A New Hope you know Rogue One has to end with "Mission Accomplished." It tends to dull any kind of suspense.

So there's the bad. Now the ugly. The bad made me yawn, the ugly made me laugh. There were a few moments of unintentional comedy that lightened the boredom, but did, ultimately, destroy the entire illusion of the movie.

The first bit of absurdity is the way Jyn and her leading man (Diego Luna, who has all the smouldering sex appeal of a young Neville Chamberlain) are forced to interact. It's grotesque the way the characters are forced to live out a stereotype in contradiction to their own storyline. It's made pretty clear from the beginning that Jyn's prime motivation is finding her father. When this becomes impossible, you'd think she'd be interested in chatting with the guy who knew her father best; the guy her father trusted -- above all the thousands of people working on the Death Star -- to smuggle out his message. This is the turn-coat pilot, not Neville, but Jyn barely acknowledges his presence. It was bizarre and I'm not the only one who thinks so. The whole thing just reminds you there are lazy writers at work. Instead of something interesting we get: "boy meets girl; boy and girl can't stand each other;..." I don't really need to finish that do I? Instead of seeing a "galaxy far, far away...," my mind's eye sees, "two writers meet in Hollywood to make a movie with explosions but need to have their main characters say something..."

There were a few other bits that made me laugh: the fact they need to use a hand-operated gizmo to retrieve a tape / memory cell / thingy from the archive. Even in the 60s when computer archives were new, the operator didn't need to use a two handed joystick to grab a tape form the datastore. Instead of creating suspense, again, all I saw were the writers. You can almost hear them pondering. "Hmmm... it's been five scenes since our mains were in real peril. We need something here... hey I know..." (I won't even start with the "Master Switch.")

The archive joystick gave me a chuckle, but le pièce de résistance was Jyn's climb up the archive ladder. On her way up she encounters a malfunctioning horizontal door that keeps opening and closing. Can she get through it without being cut in half? Clearly, the writer wants you to sweat over that dilemma. As soon as I saw it I laughed out loud, drawing a couple of looks in the process. The door is so conspicuous -- it even looks like a door that could cut you in half -- that it reminded me of the following. Ms. Weaver's character pretty much speaks for me.

Loose Ends.

Robin Isard