- UK release: December 2016
- Director: Gareth Edwards · Writers: Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy; story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta
- Studio / distributor: Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios
- Genre: Space opera / war film · Runtime: 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything) as Jyn Erso; Diego Luna (Y tu mamá también) as Cassian Andor; Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom) as Orson Krennic; Donnie Yen (Ip Man, Hero) as Chirrut Îmwe
- IMDb: 7.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 84% critics / 86% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
A year on from The Force Awakens, which played the hits with great affection and not much risk, Lucasfilm has done the braver thing. Rogue One is the first live-action Star Wars film with no Skywalker, no opening crawl, and no real interest in the mysticism that drives the main saga. It exists to answer a question the films have left dangling since 1977: how, exactly, did the Rebel Alliance come to be holding the Death Star plans at the start of A New Hope, and why is there a fault in that battle station big enough to drop a torpedo down. The answer turns out to be a war film, and a grimmer one than the franchise has tried before.
The setup
Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) has spent her life running from her name. Her father Galen is the reluctant architect of the Empire’s planet-killing weapon, and when the Rebellion realises a defecting pilot is carrying a message about it, Jyn is pulled out of an Imperial labour camp and handed to intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) for a mission nobody expects to survive. What follows is a heist dressed as a war film: a scratch crew of rebels, defectors and zealots assembling to steal a set of technical plans before the Empire can erase the only evidence of its weakness. The stakes are spelled out plainly, and the film never pretends the cost will be small.
The cast
Jones gives Jyn a wary, closed-off quality that takes its time to thaw, which is the right instinct for a character defined by abandonment, even if it leaves her a touch underwritten in the middle stretch. The real surprise is Diego Luna’s Cassian, an intelligence officer who has done ugly things for the cause and carries them. He gives the Rebellion something the saga rarely allows it: moral compromise, the suggestion that the good guys have a body count of their own. Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic is a fine study in middle-management ambition, a man who built the thing and resents everyone above him taking the credit. Around them, Donnie Yen’s blind warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe supplies grace and the closest thing to faith on offer, Jiang Wen brings dry menace as his heavily armed companion, and the reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, walks off with most of the laughs through sheer flat honesty.
The craft
Gareth Edwards made his name on Monsters and Godzilla by shooting the colossal from ground level, and that instinct pays off here. He treats the Star Wars universe as a place soldiers actually live and die in: rain-soaked beaches, troops dug into sand, an AT-AT looming through tropical haze like a Vietnam-era gunship. The production design is lived-in and grimy in the way the original 1977 film was, full of scuffed metal and improvised kit, and the climactic ground-and-space battle is one of the most coherent action sequences the franchise has staged. Michael Giacchino’s score, written quickly after a late change behind the camera, leans on John Williams without leaning too hard. There is a stretch in the middle where the geography of the plot gets choppy, the marks of a famously reworked production, but the final act pulls the whole thing taut.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is A New Hope, which this film slots into so precisely that its last half hour plays as a direct prologue to that opening. But the truer ancestors are war pictures. This is The Dirty Dozen with blasters, a suicide squad assembled for a job too dirty for the regular army, and in its back half it reaches for the desperate, attritional feel of a beach assault out of Saving Private Ryan. Set against the main saga it is less mythic and more human, a film about the foot soldiers rather than the chosen ones, and it is the better for refusing the usual machinery of prophecy and destiny.
Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm and broadly agreed. Critics are sitting around 84%, audiences a little higher at 86%, and the praise lands on the war-film tone, the design and that final act. The standard reservation is that the character work is thinner than the spectacle, that the ensemble is assembled faster than it is developed, and there is something to that. A couple of the squad are types more than people. But the complaint underrates how much weight the film is carrying as a standalone, and how cleanly it makes you feel the price of a single line of the original film you have known for years.
Verdict
This is a strong fit for what I look for. It is intelligent franchise film-making that respects its world, it is built on espionage and sacrifice rather than destiny, and the world-building is textured enough to reward a rewatch. The middle sags, one or two of the crew stay sketches, and Jyn could use another scene of her own. None of that outweighs a final hour that earns its grimness and recasts the saga’s oldest plot point as the result of people dying in the dark to deliver it. It is the most confident thing Lucasfilm has made since the handover, and the rare prequel that makes the film it leads into feel better. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find for the final act; a Blu-ray and digital release will follow in the spring.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Diego Luna’s Cassian was spun off into Andor (2022), a slow, serious espionage series that retroactively makes his work here look like the tip of something much larger, and it has done a great deal to lift Rogue One’s standing. The film has settled in as the strongest of the Disney-era Star Wars pictures and the one most often cited when people argue the franchise works best away from the Skywalkers. It is now on disc and 4K, and streams on Disney+.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent gunfights, use of hand-held weapons, explosions and aerial dogfights between spaceships. Blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
Threat and horror: Occasional scenes of mild threat include an interrogation and gun threat.
Injury detail: Blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
Theme: A young girl witnesses her mother’s murder.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
