It's almost enjoyable

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2016)

It's really difficult to put this movie in the Star Wars context. The original movies were groundbreaking scifi for their time and inspired generations (although not enough it seems since we're still lightsabre- less as a civilization).
On one hand, just about all the new Star Wars movies have been made to explain things from the original trilogy. From the need to introduce a physiological explanation for the Force to a nearly enjoyable story-line about how Darth Vader came to be, their downfall was that they didn't bring anything new to the fold.
On the other hand all movies follow the pattern of finding a rag-tag hero who wants nothing to do with the events they are about to be dragged into.
Same thing applies here.
The very first movie told about about the 'high cost' of acquiring the plans, this movie comes to tell us the story behind that, which is what makes it worthwhile, in theory.
I was always curious about that part and from this perspective it's a story that needed to be told. But what I can say ... it's not like this.
The storytelling starts from being schizophrenic and ends up being ridiculous (which opposes just about all the other movies in the sense that the others were mostly linear or spawning side stories in a controlled way).
The movie starts off by throwing the audience in a bunch of related but isolated settings. There's a guy who started of designing the DEath Star but somehow ran away and now they want to being him back (with no explanation as to why he started in the first place and how come he only realized that later, what did he think the big golf-ball in the sky with a death ray was going to be used for?), a spy killing another spy, and pilot being sent off to a paranoid rebellious lunatic.
We follow through the Star Wars pattern where the unlikely hero finds motivation to get involved and up to a grand finale where they nonsensically cram the death of all the main characters.
However, the characters are quite enjoyable. We have a strong female lead, because when you go about Star Wars you don't want balance but rather going around to the other extreme altogether. Felicity Jones does a good job here (we're talking a good sci fi hero, not Golden Globe expectations).
We have an obnoxious assassin/spy who gets his heart melted for no reason whatsoever.
We have a sarcastic robot (pretty good one).
We have an overly dramatic and intense Whitaker portrayal (I really don't think that this guy can can be act anything else but dramatic and overly intense). He could do a Vader impersonation though, breathing aid and everything.
We have a lot of people sacrificing themselves left and right (quite happily doing so for someone they just met and of whom their own leadership disapproved of) including an entire fleet. Enough to warrant the name Pyrrhic victory for some plans to find a fault that was always going to be there. But hey, Vader did capture a lot of people alive, enough to find out the location of the rebel base later on.
Of course, we have a totally stupid way of data search (much alike trying to grab plushies out of a box with mechanical grappling hooks) ... quite ironic for a system that uses robots a lot. ALso to note that while the empire stored those plans on something that looks like a hard drive of the 80's, the Alliance only needed something like a mini-disc for the same data.
Finally we have history breaking things, like the guy running with the disc containing the plans around the attacked rebel ship (when the first movie made it clear that the way Vader learned about the plans leak was by intercepting a transmission). Speaking of which, they transmitted the data from the planet to a ship, why didn't they send it to all ships? Or, for that matter, why was there a guy running around with the one disc? Why not make 1000 copies AND transmit the data to all ships? Or directly to the rebellion?).
What's offsetting this? Well, there's all the visual magic done by ILM, then there's Felicity Jones, Madds Mikkelsen and Donnie Yen.