Darker But More or Less of the Same

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2019)

26 December 2016. Without giving too much away, consider the dilemma of trying to tie in a prequel to the original Star Wars movie, and you'll get some of the darkness that this movie might entail. Missing are all the epic, royal court melodrama and trappings of the Empire. The audience only gets flashes of what is about too come, almost not enough. The beginning is a hodgepodge of flittering scenes that almost require a voice-over to explain what is going on along with a loud musical score to retain audience interest in these initial less than spectacular scenes.
What this episode attempts to present is a substantive storyline about sacrifice, parent-child loyalty, betrayal, and most of all "hope". There is no Harrison Ford persona to capture theater replaced by an evolving one in the form of a young girl transforming into a young adult. Overall, this episode is more about terror and rebelling against it at small odds and a lot of shooting, explosions, and killing, and dying. The premise that the larger the better as is profoundly used in this movie, may not always be better than the quality of the story.