Rogue One (12A)

three stars

Dir: Gareth Edwards

With: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn

Runtime: 133 minutes

THERE’S a moment in the new Star Wars film, Rogue One, when a certain someone with a mask and breathing problems who has been held back for most of the film is finally released, like a Doberman that hasn’t been fed for a week. Suddenly, the door of a freighter opens and there he is, black cape flying, lightsabre flashing and bodies flying all over the place and, in a second, 1977 has met 2016 with the pang and surge of nostalgia and childhoods resuscitated. There’s no doubt about it: it’s exhilarating.

But that exciting moment, right in the dying minutes of the film, cannot distract from the problems at the heart of the movie - even when combined with other exciting moments such as the reappearance of the AT-AT walkers from The Empire Strikes Back and a brief, if weird, appearance by a character from the original film right before the closing credits. It is undoubtedly wonderful to hear all the familiar Star Wars riffs (“Red Leader standing by” “I have a bad feeling about this” etc) but is the tune good enough?

The problem there is that Rogue One is essentially playing the same tune that all the Star Wars films have been circling around for 30 years: the Empire has something that has to be stolen or destroyed and the Rebels must steal or destroy it. They steal and destroy with great flair of course – and the dogfights between the X-wings and the TIE fighters are as exciting as they ever were – but we now know how these films are going to go (a ship will be stolen, a forcefield will be taken down). It also doesn’t help that the heroine of Rogue One, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is too much like Rey from last year’s The Force Awakens. Her sidekicks, compared to Obi Wan, Luke or Han, are pretty insipid too.

Jyn’s backstory does have potential though, as we discover early on that she is the daughter of the man who designed the Death Star, although she hasn’t seen him for years. In fact, she likes to see herself as an orphan rather than the daughter of a traitor who has created a weapon of mass destruction (“I like to think he is dead – it makes it easier”)

This is potentially fertile ground because if Star Wars is about anything more profound than adventure, it is about absent fathers, beginning with Luke Skywalker’s, but none of the potential is realised in any kind of engaging way. The contradictions around Jyn’s father Galen are also hard to take – should a man who is prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to save one person, his daughter, really be seen as a hero? But then, from the moment Luke blew up the Death Star in the first film, Star Wars has always taken a pretty casual attitude to mass killing.

Where Rogue One does get interesting is down on the ground where we see the realities of living under an evil empire. In many ways, Star Wars is the ultimate American film, and yet the early sequences of Rogue One have clearly been inspired by US-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan which raises an interesting question: could the Empire in question be America?

This is not as unlikely as it might first appear – in fact, one of the strengths of the Star Wars series is that the films have become more and more anti-establishment with each one and Rogue One, with its leads cast from minorities, is the apotheosis of it. It’s why the alt.right movement hates this film so much and why that other great minority – science fiction fans – will probably love it.

But will they see past the problems? The staggering fact, for instance, that Rogue One’s best asset – Darth Vadar – is in just two scenes. And the fact that Peter Cushing’s character from the first film, Grand Moff Tarkin, has been recreated using computer imagery and from the start it looks weird and fake.

There’s also a problem with the imagery in Rogue One and that fact that, after eight films, it is now overly familiar. Where are the new spaceships and monsters, the new images to excite and enthral? The makers of the Star Wars film may feel that they don’t need them and that they can just rely on what has gone before – and they may be right. But eventually even the hardest fans will tire of the same old riffs. Star Wars needs a new tune.