Peter Cushing: Resurrection

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2017)

Expanding upon the opening crawl in George Lucas' "Star Wars", director Gareth Edwards and Disney opts for an overwritten plot verging on incoherence. A simple enough premise (Rebels winning their first battle against the empire and spies making off with plans of the Death Star) spread out over a big loaf of father-daughter drama, stepfather-daughter drama, defecting imperial pilots, off-shoot rebel factions, Imperial politics, remorseful intelligence officers, Darth Vader fan service and much more. One Murky establishing shot after the next, depressing planets and facilities one after another, Edwards struggles to find a momentum.
The cast is rather flat--demographics clearly the biggest concern here--Some talent slips through for sure, but their skills are mostly wasted, the characters a group of bland ciphers with hardly more than their look and weapon of choice to distinguish between them and lacking any chemistry or interesting dynamic. Ironically, the most "human" character in the film is a robot, a "funny-droid-character" that feels very out of place. It offers a big chunk of the humor (admittedly humor of low quality) and compared to its human comrades comes of as a living thing.
A positive about the film would be its aim to create an overarching theme of self-sacrifice. A neat idea if you ignore the complete lack of investment in the characters. It's interesting considering George Lucas' six films (nor "The Force Awakens") struck me as having a straightforward, unifying theme for each picture, but felt more sprawling with its widespread allegories and homages. Perhaps a byproduct of this being a standalone affair while the others all part of trilogies?
Proclaimed as a "war-film" and lauded for being different to earlier entries in the series, the film nonetheless soaks in fan service, winks and callbacks which compounds on the tone. What at times feels like the lighthearted space adventures we've seen before, sometimes feel like a darker and more somber story about "good people" committing atrocities during time of war and oppression. Among other things, there's a blind, stick-wielding force user with a sidekick gunslinger, completely out of place in a supposedly "gritty war-film". Stuff like this reeks of studio control and careful reverse-engineering for the sake of accommodating the crowds.
Edwards' action on the ground is what you might expect considering the war-film-tag: A pseudo-documentary style approach using lots of hand held camera work that computes with the supposed gritty tone (it feels like you're really there on the ground with these people!). What doesn't compute is the continuation of the terribly inefficient troops in the Empires' employ. The ability to eventually hit something is there, but considering the amount of shots missed and all the Storm Troopers mowed down it feels like a contradiction. In space things are naturally more fun and light (if only because its really hard to feel that something is "gritty" when dealing with laser-shooting space ships) yet lacks tension and a great score by John Williams (Michael Giacchino's score in contrast feels incredibly bland and derivative).
So despite its pretensions to being fresh and different I think it's easy to spot how limited the film is in that regard. True, we don't have a John Williams' score anymore, just someone else trying to make something similar to what he did, an opening crawl isn't needed anymore because we're making movies from previous crawls and CGI-Tarkin has now replaced Governor Tarkin.
----Dull characters, convoluted plot and shaky tone mixed with lots of explosions and nostalgia----