Rogue One

So, I finally got around to watching the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One. (2016)

Yeah yeah, I'm a year late, but better late than never. So this is what I thought of the film. I'll skip spoilers as much as possible, but treat this as mild spoiler territory, just in case.

In a nutshell the story is this: a group of rebels attack an imperial base to retrieve the plans to the original Death Star. Sure, there's a lot more to it than this, but that's the really important bit. Rogue One is set a few days before A New Hope (1977) and goes almost right into it.

Much like Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One is a very pretty movie. The effects are gorgeous, and really solid. The acting is good, solid work all around. The music is wonderful, even though it's not by John Williams. Fun fact: some scenes are unused shots from Episode IV: A New Hope, and some outfits were recycled from the original trilogy. This is smart as it gives a subconscious connection to the original trilogy.

Speaking of the original trilogy, Governor Tarkin has a prominent spot in Rogue One, but as you may know, the original actor - Peter Cushing - died in 1994 so they couldn't really use him. They could have used another actor like say, Charles Dance, but instead they digitized Cushing's face onto an actor. For being computer graphics spliced into a live action film, they did a marvelous job. It is a tricky job to say the least, but they got very close to pulling it off. They also tried it with another character but that looked really awful. Mixed success there.

The script is mostly good, but they couldn't resist putting in scenes paralleling the original trilogy. You'll recognize them when you see them, and I wish they hadn't bothered. Also, some scenes are needlessly dark which makes it hard to see things, but they weren't too many.

My biggest complaints about the movie are as follows:

• A ship jumps to Hyperspace way too close to a planet, something that goes against deeply established Star Wars lore.
• They manage to communicate long distance while in Hyperspace. This would be impossible as the signal would have to travel faster than the ship.
• If you push an object in space that's bigger than you, it takes considerable energy, and if that object rams into another thing, that thing should move, not break. Also, the energy originally needed, would at the very least double, but apparently the laws of physics are very different when you're far far away...

These things are small, and you may think that they are excessively petty and ultra nerdy. And yeah, maybe they are, but fixing them would have been so easy, and it seems so sloppy to leave them like they are.

I could go on nitpicking, but I won't. The other things I could complain about are more or less a matter of taste, so I'll leave it to you to decide.

At the end of the day, Rogue One is an entertaining film, and I had a good time watching it. If you like Star Wars, there's no reason not to watch this film.

Other fun trivia: this is the first and (so far) only Star Wars movie without the yellow text scrawl in the beginning, as well as the only film in the franchise that never mentions the name Skywalker.

I'll stop ranting here, and until next time, have a great week!