Dull Wars

Rating: 4/10 (21 March 2017)

Some films can make you feel interested in the main characters within minutes. Rogue One to me is just another of those overly long movies that fails to create any form of empathy with anyone, even at more than 120 minutes. If a filmmaker doesn't care about the characters he is creating, then how could I as a viewer.
The beginning was promising, with Mads Mikkelsen and Ben Mendelsohn having an interesting showdown in a wide poetic landscape. But the longer the film went on, the more I felt that there must be a book titled "How to make a Star Wars film", and some studio executives got their hands on it. That said, the film is very well produced and superficially looks like a Star Wars epic in every way. But the bland acting (Diego Luna especially) and the constructed story line put me in a rather dull mood. Ben Mendelsohn's Krennic was one of the few interesting appearances. There were some good attempts in showing the moral ambiguity of the rebellion, which had some potential to suck me into the story. Unfortunately the fight scenes in the holy city made the Storm Troopers look pretty silly, almost comedic, and took away any sense of menace.
I do think there is an interesting dramatic story at the heart of it, but somehow after decades of film making, Disney seems to have forgotten how to build a gripping tension. When certain decisive moments in the film occurred, like the arrival of the rebel fleet, I just didn't care.
For me, this is a product leeching off the sentimental memories people have towards the original films, me included. I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone above the age of 11, and I surely won't watch it again.
Finally, I found Leia's CGI face pretty horrible, but the film had already lost me at that point, so I wasn't as shocked as I should have been.