The highly anticipated star wars film, Rogue One has made it’s release this week, being the first offical standalone film in the star wars universe. It’s basically a prequel to A New Hope, telling the story of a group of rebels attempting to steal the plans for the death star.
As a huge star wars fan I had been incredibly excited to see this film return back to the timeline of the beloved original trilogy. Its been by far my most anticipated film this year, with that being said it also means I inevitably went in with incredibly high expectations that were going to be very hard, but possible to fulfil and after finally seeing the film I have to admit I couldn’t help but find it gravely disappointing.
I completely understand and respect that i’m in the minority on this but as a film reviewer I have to give my utterly honest upfront opinion on anything I review and with being said I didn’t like this movie at all.
It’s not a bad film by any means, in fact I’ld still consider it pure gold compared to those utterly dreadful prequels. Many aspects of this movie are amazing and I really respect the way they made this film with as little CGI as possible. Even though I didn’t enjoy this film I loved how they made it look as much like the original trilogy as possible while still doing his own creative take on the franchise.
The special effects and cinematography are spectacular. In fact I would even go as far to say that Rogue One has some of the most well shot scenes from a star wars film and offers by far the best cinematography and special effects. This is the main aspect of the film that many people will love and adore as Gareth Edwards completely nails all the visual aspects of this film.
What made it so disappointing for me was its utterly boring and bland characters that I just couldn’t get invested in as there’s little to no character development for everyone except Jyn Erso resulting in most characters just feeling uninteresting. Most of the characters personality just felt lifeless as many characters didn’t have any interesting characteristics to make them different to everyone else. This mixed with a really slow pace in the first two thirds resulted in the film being incredibly boring for me. Many of my favourite movie characters are from the star wars universe and those characters are what make the franchise special to me, so as a result I can’t help but find it really bothersome that all these new characters are all boring and underdeveloped. I’m completely ok with new characters being introduced to the universe and explored in their own feature star wars films as long as they’re interesting and unique in their own way, and most importantly properly developed throughout the films. This is what Rogue One utterly failed at doing for me.
Of course there’s plenty of references and throwbacks to aspect’s of the original trilogy that fans are going to gobble up in delight and they’re for the most part very well done and surprisingly not oversaturated. If you’re seeing this film just for Darth Vader you may be a little disappointed, as his role in this story is incredibly small, which if you think about it makes sense since it isn’t really his story. The scenes he’s in however are absolutely great and are guaranteed to put a giant grin on your face.
The incredibly dark tone may put some of the younger audiences off from enjoying the film as it does result in a much more mature, violent, and gritty story which some kids may find off-putting. However most people will appreciate the much darker and violent tone, as it was necessary for this story.
The story itself takes a long time to build up, which can result in an large chunk of the film being very boring, mainly because the characters are completely uninteresting. However the third act rapidly speeds up in terms of pace, presenting some fantastic action sequences, maybe even some of the best we’ve seen this year. The action scenes are truely spectacular and will be adored by many fans as truely memorable scenes, however for me it was nowhere near enough to make up for it’s problems.
Overall Gareth Edwards had the right idea of how to do this film, however couldn’t quite achieve creating interesting characters to implement in the story and develop them throughout the film, while also failing to pace the movie at a rate that keeps it interesting. I know lot’s of people will disagree with me on that, but it’s just my opinion so please don’t get to heated up about it. I just found this film to be so heartbreaking because they had the right idea of how to do it and was so close to succeeding if only they created better characters and improved the pace of the story. Its not bad, it just had the potential to be so much better. I’ld say it’s still defiantly worth seeing in theaters, you just may find aspects of it to be greatly disappointing.
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