Review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) by Meritcoba — 28 Jan 2017

Rogue One is a movie that sets the focus low. The heroes are not Jedi or members of some ruling elite. Rogue one's cast has more in common with Han Solo than with a Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia. The message of the movie: little acts of bravery can have important consequences.

The MacGuffin that makes the movie go is to find the weakness of that big death star moon build by the father of Jen. Find the father, find the weakness. A message from dad reaches the rebels in the form of a pilot and so Jen has to be found as to gain access to dad by way of Saw Gerrera, a rebel so extreme that even the Rebel Alliance frowns on him. Since he happens to be Jen's surrogate father it might be that he listens to her instead of pulling the trigger.

Does that sound overtly complex? Well, it does, but if you just tag along with the movie it is just one of points in the tale that you get dragged along. And tag along is the only thing that you can do as the movie does not let go. I would say, it keeps almost the same frantic pace as that crazy movie Fury Road. And that is the main weakness of this movie. Despite interesting characters there are too many of them and not enough time for any of them. The upshot is that you don't care if someone sacrifices his life, which happens a lot in this movie. They join up and they get killed. Next! Even when there is an important emotional moment in the movie it quickly gets trampled over in a desire to keep the pace. Without some dwelling on emotions heroes become two dimensional figures and their sacrifices have no emotional impact.

Still, Rogue One one is one of the better Star Wars movies in my opinion. It would have been better if there had been some more time spend on character development and less on jumping from one place to the next out of fear that some moments of reflection will scare the audience out of the theater. A pity because the essence of this movie: little people can bring hope loses a lot of its emotional currency.