Utterly moving, most powerful 'Star Wars' story since A New Hope

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2016)

A sequel to 'Revenge of the Sith', a prequel to 'A New Hope', 'Rogue One' is essentially a bridge that resembles to a colossal effort to accomplish three functions: explain the past, predict the future, create a tangible link between them, the last of which, this Gareth Edwards-helmed sci-fi giant is able to pull off with a brimming sense of nostalgic sentimentality. Often dark and brooding, there is an appealing force that emerges from its layers, continuously drawing us into the depths of 'Star Wars' cosmic saga that started to storm the box office, four decades ago. The 'force' persists in its riveting presence all throughout the film's visceral development, a monumental feat that itsTony Gilroy and Chris Weitz-written screenplay is able to preserve, even in the absence of the Jedi and Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks and the iconic opening crawl. In effect, the stand alone film manages to break down barriers, provide solutions to old puzzles, while practically presenting new ones that even non-religious spectators would be engaged to solve. That its motives is primarily enforced by the breathtaking visual renders of the film's explosive sequences, is out of the question, but the singular element that propels the film into action, is the story's protagonist, herself, and what she represents.
Driven by a female hero at its reins like last year's 'The Force Awakens', this 'Star Wars' story revolves around petty criminal Jyn (Felicity Jones) and the band of misfits she gathered- -one that includes rebel spy, Cassian (Diego Luna), a reprogrammed imperial droid named KS2O, who shares the biggest chunk of the film's comic effort, and a blind monk whose martial arts-adroitness seemingly dares to put Matt Murdock's echolocation expertise to shame--to steal the plans to the 'Death Star', a deadly weapon, so powerful it can obliterate an entire planet. The emotional weight of the narrative is gathered across the length of Jyn's ambitious mission, which the film's primal campaign itself, labeled as a 'rebellion built on hope', a screaming hint to the looming much bigger movement led by Princess Leia, that sets the whole course for the original trilogy.
Faithful to the tradition of female- centric narratives, Jyn's motivations is largely fueled by the traumatic childhood she endured: she saw her mother died at the mercy of an imperial superior, and the capture of his father who was forcefully recruited to engineer the empire's deadliest weapon--the Death Star. In the absence of an initiative, she courageously leads a highly-volatile expedition of recovering the plan to the Death Star, whose small but utterly significant flaw--one that could help the Rebel Alliance stop its cataclysmic power--is revealed by her father.
Save for Jyn's uninspiring fight- for-freedom speech, only because it sounds monotonous, the whole run of 'Rogue One', is a glaring testament of what a mere hope can muster in the wake of a ruling authoritarian regime. The film then becomes a picture of a political atmosphere, infested with injustice and oppression, that bears a striking recognition. 'Trust the force', says Jyn's mother, in a tone that almost makes us believe that a movement always remains smoldering, only waiting to be ignited by small but resilient flames in the hands of courageous beings, awakened to rise by the screaming social malignance and political malfunction around them.
The first of 'Star Wars' stand-alone films, 'Rogue One' is bold and moving with its lingering sense of humanity, nostalgic in its almost flawless integration with the saga's established structure, and ingeniously innovative in creating a whole new sci-fi space-war narrative that isn't devoid of the familiar 'the- force-is-with-me' sentiment. At its final moments, the film practically inserts a missing piece between the end and the beginning of the second and first trilogies, ending with a powerful one-second scene that can potentially make a voice in every spectator's head chant "I am with the force; the force is with me".