Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Among various other unfortunate ideas powering Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latest, er, chapter in the now-endless Star Wars saga, easily the worst and most jarring is to replace some of the original first-generation actors with CGI replicants, which makes watching the film as similarly unnerving an experience as it would be to watch some of the figures at Madame Tussauds trying to hold a conversation.

That's hardly the lone example of ways in which the film takes a deep detour south and never recovers. Rumors had it that the production was troubled from the get-go, and reshoots under the hand of Tony Gilroy suggested that the producers had something of a flying turkey on their hands. Despite Gilroy's extensive pedigree as an excellent writer and screenplay sensei, the characters never become the least bit real, the story never gels into anything particularly interesting, and the whole thing comes across more like a shameless cash grab than any further enrichment of the canon.

The concept behind the film -- the manner in which those famous Death Star plans were acquired by Princess Leia and the rebellion right before the original Star Wars film (now annoyingly known as, sigh, Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope) -- is actually pretty sound, but if you're planning on telling a story whose outcome is already thoroughly well established, you have no choice but to make the characters and situations leading up to that success so riveting your audience forgets the outcome they already know by heart, and Gareth Edwards' film, as dark and gritty as the cinematography is, has nothing of any particular interest to add.

Sure, there are a slew of new characters, including our main heroine, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), one of the original, albeit reluctant, architects of the Death Star. When we meet her, she's a girl, living with her parents on a remote farming planet. (Side note: In the Star Wars films, we've had desert planets, snow planets, Amazon jungle planets and flowing lava planets, so I suppose it was high time we had the dank, dark, overcast cold of a Sheffield planet on display.) Years ago, her father had left the project and gone into hiding, but is eventually tracked down by the evil Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), in his flowing white capelet, who insists the engineer return to the project, shooting down Jyn's mother to show how serious he is. The girl runs off and is taken in by Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a half-mad warrior whom even the rebellion doesn't quite trust.

Eventually imprisoned as a young woman, Jyn is rescued by a rebel group lead by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a scruffy, decidedly non-nerfherder, who's as serious as a gravestone and about as emotive. Eventually they are joined by a blind semi-Jedi monk (Donnie Yen) and his BFF (Wen Jiang), who fires multiple bursts from a power gun that every kid in creation will want in their Christmas stockings this year, and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), a former fighter pilot for the Empire who has defected in order to give Jyn a message from her father about the secret flaw he's built into the super-weapon he's been forced to develop.

The team gallivants across the galaxy -- indeed the film's first 45 minutes features no fewer than a half-dozen planetary changes of scenery, which leaves the film feeling choppy and unfocused -- and encounters several red herrings before settling on their plan to infiltrate the Empire's archive, hidden away on a distant planet, and steal these top-secret blueprints.

Forgetting for a moment the inherent plot holes in such a system -- why in the living hell would the Empire bother to have a physical archive that could be targeted when all they would need to keep the rebellion out of their business is a high-quality server with top of the line cryptology -- the story gives way to the grinding of plot gears with no real sense of danger, tension or escalation (and no, proposed romantic tension between Jyn and the humorless Cassian hardly counts). What's worse, and most dooming of the film, though, is none of these characters resonate, save K-2SO (voice of Alan Tudyk), a reprogrammed Empire battle droid that accompanies the team and has many of the precious few moments of genuine humor based on the idea that he says whatever he thinks completely unfiltered.

Suffice it to say, if the filmmakers had actually put up this tangle of a screenplay to K-2SO to rate his opinion, it wouldn't have been encouraging. The formula that George Lucas created in 1977 was relatively simple, but has proved remarkably difficult to re-create. You had strong, witty characters thrown into a far-reaching escalating narrative, whose asides and interactions were laced with the simple fact that their personalities didn't terribly well match. It was funny, warm and endearing, and Lucas was able to create indelible characters that have far surpassed what's come before and since in the timeline.

You can't blame Disney for setting our course into the sun with these films, as last year's The Force Awakens made more money than the gross domestic product of several countries. They bought the franchise for just this sort of saturation bombing with the Star Wars universe, creating another cash cow alongside the ubiquitous Marvel Comics universe if Diz isn't careful, they'll be sitting on their giant pile of money alone in a cavernous room with nothing but their echoing voice in the darkness to sustain them.

MovieStyle on 12/16/2016