Rogue One: A Worthless Story

Rating: 3/10 (8 January 2019)

As is customary when reviewing a Star Wars movie, I am obligated to begin by explaining my own connection to the franchise. I love Star Wars, but I am of the opinion that George Lucas' six-part saga is the only story worth mentioning in the cinematic history of the franchise. I find the post-Lucas sequels to be a disgusting affront to what is left of artistic originality and creativity in Hollywood. A hostile corporate takeover of what was essentially a uniquely auteur piece of pop art. I am against Disney/Lucasfilm's fan fiction on principle, but that doesn't mean I can't still enjoy it for what it is; Disposable science fiction action with a Star Wars branded coat of paint. That is especially the case with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Unlike its big Disney brothers, Rogue One doesn't try to pretend to be part of the same ongoing saga. Instead, it does what I might've hoped Disney's fan fiction would; fill in the gaps with a unique, smaller scale trifle whose purpose is only to entertain. Still, even with tempered expectations, I got little out of Rogue One. The sad fact is, this is a bad movie, littered with terrible decision after terrible decision, leading to a trite waste of the Star Wars name.
Rogue One is a different kind of "Star Wars Story". As a tangential "one-off" story about a group of Rebels only mentioned in A New Hope and their mission to capture the plans to the original Death Star, Rogue One is not aiming to be a new chapter in the saga. It is more like an attempt to recreate Marvel's reliable pattern of standalone films that bolster the "main storyline". And like those films, it feels unashamedly manufactured. There is a lot of heavy speeches and overblown melodrama, but really, this movie is only superficially "big". The story is small-scale all the way through; A tension-free, low-stakes, TV-style lark for action buffs. And all of this is despite the fact that director Gareth Edwards pulls out all the visual stops to make Rogue One feel like a war epic.
I understand that Rogue One wants to be a war epic, but the visual style of the film, for the most part, is a major disadvantage. Edwards does scale well, and the extended, multi-layered battle that takes up the film's last half hour is pretty spectacular. It's everything else that took me out of the experience. Edwards and DP Greig Fraser are obsessed with close-up, out of focus, handheld camera work, and the film's color palette is disgustingly drab. With the exception of that final battle (which takes place on a beautiful tropical military base), Rogue One is awful to look at; closer to a moody TV ad than an epic war movie. The visual style is a major miscalculation, but it is one of many.
Most notably misjudged are the characters. From the writing to the casting to the acting, this thing is a disaster when it comes to portraying people we are supposed to care about. Felicity Jones plays the protagonist, Jyn Erso, an insipid take on the lazy "orphan-turned-leader" formula that gave us Rey. She meets, among others, Forest Whitaker, Diego Luna, and Riz Ahmed. I don't find any of these actors particularly appealing regardless, but all of them give bad performances here. Whitaker makes some truly bizarre decisions as a Rebel extremist, and Jones is even worse. Her face lacks anything but a blank, detached, dopiness, and when she is forced to give grandiose rallying cries, it's impossible to not roll your eyes. The only one in the whole cast that comes out relatively unscathed is Donnie Yen as a blind wannabe Jedi with a pointy stick.
There is not much keeping Rogue One from being a mildly enjoyable sci-fi action flick. The story, as trivial as it is, is enough to hang some battles on and call it a day. This film should have been, at least, exciting. The final battle is, but the journey there is filled with far too many ridiculous errors in judgement. For all the production designs and cutting-edge CGI, Rogue One can't keep from shooting itself in the foot. The characters stink. The cinematography stinks. The dialogue stinks. If these aspects were merely tolerable, the action (directed quite well by Edwards) might have been fun. But there is so much that is not tolerable, so many distractingly bad elements, that it is hard to lose yourself in the battles. Even when Darth Vader shows up at the end, I could only get partially giddy. If you must exploit the Star Wars name, it has to be more worthwhile than this.
35/100