Star Wars Suicide Squad

Rating: 8/10 (11 April 2017)

Director Gareth Edwards does a fantastic job with the slimmest of story lines, which consists of the rebel alliance stealing the plans for the Death Star that lead into the original Star Wars, A New Hope.
The Good: The cast is excellent, and the new characters are hugely likable. The best of these are Baze and Chirrut, one a badass warrior and the other a blind monk with some serious skills and a love of The Force. I could easily have watched a whole movie featuring just these two as the protagonists. Felicity Jones is believable as Jyn, the daughter of the Death Star's chief architect who joins the rebellion to lead a rag-tag team to retrieve the plans for the Emperor's ultimate weapon. Diego Luna and Riz Ahmed also bring their A Game. The droid K-2SO is also a welcome addition to the crew, a classic Star Wars droid if ever there was one. Ben Mendelsohn is a decent villain, if a little one note, and both Forest Whitaker and Mads Mikkelsen provide good support.
The battle scenes are fantastic, possibly the best I've ever seen in the Star Wars universe. Even the smaller street battle scenes are masterful and expertly crafted. The Death Star has never been better or more fearsome. Its destruction of a city is just visually stunning. The space battles are pure old skool Star Wars and full of excitement and tension. There's one scene in particular where a ramming ship pushes one Star Destroyer into another and it just looks incredible. But all this eye candy aside the ultimate scene is towards the end when Darth Vader makes a last ditch attempt to retrieve the stolen plans and takes out a whole squadron of rebels single-handedly in a small corridor, in a scene so badass it will surely become iconic.
The Not So Good: There's not much here I didn't enjoy, and it feels harsh ragging on such a great movie, but it wasn't the greatest idea to include a CGI Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. He just isn't convincing, and it was giving me bad flashbacks to some of the terrible CGI in The Phantom Menace. If they'd used him for one small scene maybe shaded in darkness it could have worked, but he appears in quite a few long scenes and it really takes you out of the moment. Princess Leia looks even worse, and again was there really any need to show a close up of her badly computerized face? Maybe a long distant shot would have worked better. Small complaints though, and they don't spoil an otherwise hugely enjoyable experience.
Leia's final words in Rogue One are "hope". Well this movie has given me hope, hope that those soul destroying prequels are fading into the ether and the Star Wars franchise is back on track.