A very different, but very welcome, take on the Star Wars universe

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2017)

What I liked most is that Rogue One puts in the foreground the toll the Empire takes on the lives of the people who live under it, or struggle against it. Jyn Erso, the lead -- charismatically portrayed by Felicity Jones -- is one of these people: living on the run from the Empire since childhood, raised a rebel cadre before the cause abandoned her and she abandoned it, the story is essentially the tale of her coming to terms with her past and trying to fulfil her work, to make sure her father's last gesture against the Empire doesn't come to nothing.
The people gathered around her are the flotsam and jetsam of rebellion and resistance, people who've traded parts of themselves (in some cases literally) to the pay the price of battling the Emperor; some of them have retained a sense of at least gallows humour about all this (Donnie Yen's Chirrut is one of the most instantly memorable characters ever to appear in a Star Wars movie because of this), others have been largely broken by it (brought out beautifully in Forest Whitaker's portrayal of the paranoid and hollowed-out Saw Gerrera), or remain driven by the need to have the terrible things they've done in the name of the rebellion mean something (which provides a passable excuse for the relatively stock Stoic Hero character Cassian). Everyone is damaged in some degree and looking for some kind of redemption, some way of striking back.
These people, and the tone of the story they inhabit, are considerably different from -- and darker than -- anything we've seen in Star Wars before. I think this lies at the root of the otherwise baffling claims in some quarters that the film lacked "interesting" story, characters or emotion; if you come in expecting the light-hearted, bantering space opera adventure tone of something like A New Hope or The Force Awakens, that's decidedly not what this is. I'm okay with that, because Rogue One is ditching (most of) the light-heartedness in favour of what is essentially a species of relatively grown-up "war movie" style storytelling in Star Wars clothing. it gains more from the trade-off than it loses.
That's not to say everything is perfect. I'm not entirely convinced by the way the hero team coheres by the end of the film, and Cassian in particular does not really hold his own as an interesting protagonist across from Jones' excellent work as Jyn Urso. There are nitpicks to be had with the way the action is handled from time to time (Rogue One really does bring up the eternal questions of why exactly stormtroopers wear armor that apparently is useless), and sequences that don't quite make sense (Saw Gerrera's tentacle moster).
But there's so much more tastiness here: Mikkelsen, Whitaker, Yen, Alan Tudyk's priceless turn as the cynical droid K2SO, a fun and smarmy baddie in Krennic, a badass guest appearance by Darth Vader, the digital wizardry used to resurrect Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin and to give us a glimpse of a young Leia. Sauced with excellent action sequences and clever fan-friendly nods and easter eggs, I found Rogue One to be tremendous fun on the whole.