Looks solid, but feels uninspired

Rating: 5/10 (24 March 2017)

Not a long time ago, in our very own galaxy, the filmmakers decided to create a prequel to Star Wars: A New Hope. And they really wanted to do it by the book: by putting in a list of recognizable actors, a plethora of characters and locations and tech, old and new, making the story emotional with the force of family bonds and the sense of duty. They even showed us a glimpse of Darth Vader as a cherry on top. Sounds cool, right?
True, on the surface Rogue One looks very grand. But, as we have learned from the case of Death Star, even grand things may have very small flaws that ruin everything. And for Rogue One those flaws are characters and pacing.
Indeed, with so much bound to happen and with only 133 minutes of running time, you must move quick to cram everything into the timeline. But for some reason Rogue One doesn't feel consistent in its density. At times it's painfully slow and almost boring, with people talking and arguing and debating some more. And at other times it flicks through characters and hops planets like a mad rabbit, causing a degree of "what is this place/person again?" frustration even in a prepared SW viewer, while outright alienating the freshmen (although the same freshmen could digest The Force Awakens just fine).
Another stone pulling Rogue One down is the main characters, or rather the actors playing them. I don't mind Felicity Jones or Diego Luna at all, they are fine actors per se. But they are not fit for the action figures. Jones may deliver a sharp punch at times, but mostly she makes that sad puppy face - and you just quit buying into her fighter spirit. Same with Luna: no matter what he does, he looks awfully tired and overwhelmed, dragging our mood down with him.
Maybe if we had characters as vivacious and fierce as Rey and Finn as protagonists, the whole story would feel different. But we have what we have, and despite all the graphic lushness, a number of nostalgia-inducing moments, characters twisted and conflicted inside, and actual space fights, Rogue One feels like one major drag, where everyone does something, but only the bad guys actually believe in their cause. The space fights are overly long and tediously repetitive, the graphic lushness mostly resorts to cold space or desolate deserts, and even the character twists and development, with an unexpected sense of common purpose and a timely remorse for the former wrongdoings, have a whiff of generic movie psychology. Two slightly redeeming points of this film are the blind monk, but even he gets annoying towards the end with his repetitive chanting and inconsistent potency, and the Ben Mendelsohn's character, who is a typical Mendelsohn's not quite good but not entirely evil guy. As a mirror character of Domhnall Gleeson's General Hux from The Force Awakens, he's done a much better job. Too bad it wasn't enough to salvage the whole enterprise.
When The Force Awakens turned out to be a soft reboot instead of being an independent story, I was hoping that maybe it was for the best and that way the filmmakers would be able to expand on the original story and give us additional depth, the chance that was skipped back in the time of the original trilogy. Rogue One is definitely an attempt to fill the blanks and deliver some background. But so far it's more of a miss than a hit. So hopefully it will be a lesson learned for the SW film crew: that spin-offs require as much effort as the main story films. You were inspired enough to bring the Star Wars back to life - now use that inspiration again and put it to good use.