Leading to the Jedi

Rating: 6/10 (20 December 2016)

Rogue One takes place prior to Star Wars: A New Hope and it finishes with events leading up to the first film. It is a stand alone film that focuses on the rebel alliance before Luke Skywalker joins them.
Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is the daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) the man who has been forced to complete the Empire's Death Star, the planet destroyer but he has also designed a weakness, an Achilles heel.
The Rebel Alliance sends Jyn and a team led by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to steal the designs for the Death Star so they can exploit its weakness and destroy it.
After 2015's The Force Awakens it was a risk to go back to a time before The New Hope given how underwhelming the prequels are regarded.
At an entertaining level the film works, it is well paced, lots of action, plenty of humour especially from a robotic character, a personal journey for Jyn and plenty of appearances to keep Star Wars fans happy including some stirring bits of John Williams original themes. However it is cynically placed there to keep fans happy and bask in some nostalgia, a blink and you miss them CP30 and R2D2. The biggest surprise is a Grand Moff being digitally resurrected and Darth Vader definitely showing his dark side when he goes all out with his lightsaber.
On a production level there are some good grimy bits, the rebel alliance have that industrial rust that such a scavenging group would have, clothes being old and ripped for a start.
There is some interesting use of location photography, desert photography in Jordan, shooting in Iceland and also some shooting in the Maldives which certainly is different as it is so seldomly used for movies.
Yet the movie is no more than disposable entertainment, maybe that is how it should be. The film has too many characters, some paper thin characterisation and plenty of plot conveniences straight out of the Steven Spielberg book of action movies.