What Critics Are Saying About ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’

When the last Star Wars movie, “The Force Awakens”, opened a year ago she hosted an event where she dished out Wookiee pies and Princess Leia buns.

Played in the 1977 film by legendary actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, the actor’s face playing Tarkin in “Rogue One” is digitally replaced to look like Cushing. While reshoots are not uncommon for a big film like this, the reported five weeks of reshoots far surpassed the norm. It is a sequel and a prequel and an anthology film and A Star Wars Story.

The story, about a maverick Rebel force who mount an nearly suicide mission to steal the plans for the imperial Death Star, is set just before the very first Star Wars epic, “A New Hope”. So, make sure that if you’re paying a few extra bucks to see Rogue One in IMAX, you’re getting the real deal. In this case, Jyn is the abandoned daughter of the man who would go on to make the Death Star a reality. Now, decades later, we learn what those plans cost the rebellion. Jyn hides and they leave without her.

Diego Luna gets maybe the most iconic role of them all though as Cassian Andor, an intelligence officer in the Rebel Alliance whose morality is a constantly shifting spectrum of light and dark. She learns her father may still be alive and suddenly, Jyn has new objective. Îmwe (Donnie Yen), freelance assassin Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) and Saw Gerrera, played by Forest Whitaker as a lion in winter, a stately fighter whose body is more machine than human, but whose humanity is intact.

Well, Edwards not only found a way to expand that narrative, but he also managed to recapture the magic of the original Star Wars. Galen has contacted the rebels with news of a powerful weapon, and how to defeat it.

Rogue One hits United Kingdom cinemas on Thursday.

The story soon develops into the origin of the Death Star or, in layman’s terms, the Planet Killer, that the plot of the 1977 film hinged on. That’s because filming a scene with Darth Vader is more like “lighting an automobile than a person”. He’s not as likable as BB-8. As a byproduct of his reprogramming, K-2SO says whatever comes to his “mind” – making him a cross between a simpler version of C-3PO and Sophia from the “Golden Girls”.

The one or two Easter eggs connecting “Rogue One” to later events and characters feel a bit like Stan Lee’s routine appearance in every Marvel movie, bestowing little beyond credibility by association. There’s nothing awful about it and it worships at the Lucas altar just as The Force Awakens does. Old Cantina friends show up and there’s plenty of mention of that wonderful Jedi magic.

And as interesting as the individual characters are, they don’t spark the kind of chemistry that between Rey, Finn and Poe carried us through the far sillier “Force Awakens”. Always with a Death Star when these things set out to please the fans.

“I like her determination”, Jones said.

“Rogue One” opens in theaters on Friday.

Lucasfilm also says, the standalone films “not only deepen and expand the universe, but also provide a creative filmmaking platform”. What is not so good about the film? Ditto for Whitaker, who gives a devoted, odd performance as Gerrera that disappears much too quickly.

Otherwise “Rogue One” is a clean slate, all original storytelling and all new relationships.

He told the Press Association: “It deals with people of all different colours, all different cultures coming together after a common cause to help humanity and actually winning and doing so, I think that’s a statement to the world on what we need to do”. It’s a morally complex war film that knows the audience must be invested in the characters to care whether or not they are successful. Tinkering with history is unsafe, especially one as cherished as Star Wars.