Rogue One is the eighth big screen movie in the Star Wars universe and slots right before A New Hope. It tells the story of the unknown rebels who were brave enough to embark on an almost certain life-ending mission to steal the Death Star plans from the hands of the Empire.Let me start by first saying that I enjoyed the movie a lot, more so towards the final act as I think it was a very satisfying finish. The space combat between the TIE fighters and the X-Wings was amazing to watch and I believe Darth Vader showed his devastating power for the first time in this movie even including his fight with Luke Skywalker in my opinion. You get to see exactly why he is the most feared in the entire galaxy. Gareth Edwards did a good job in telling a new story from the ground up with new characters and no physical reliance on the force even though you could feel its subtle presence amongst those characters. After all, isn't the Force something that surrounds and binds us? As promised, this proved to be a war movie (not to the Saving Private Ryan extent) and as is true with war, many characters suffer death on and not just from the bad side. In fact, the lead character Jyn Erso's father (played by Mads Mikkelsen) dies from the explosion from one of the Rebel X-Wings. I do wish it went a little more into how a war like this affects the people on both sides. Felicity Jones was great as Jyn and so was Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. The standout though as is usually the case with Star Wars was the defected Imperial droid K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk). His typical droid humor brought some light joy to the otherwise serious movie. Ben Mendelsohn as the Director Orson Krennic was menacing and calm while being that which brought an extra sense of fearsome and to think that he was scared of Darth just notifies you the order of power in the Empire. Vader's costume looks childish to me sometimes (forgive me people) but his actions just make up for it ten folds.
Among other positives, I also noticed few moments where the color palette change sometimes and it felt like I was watching the 70s Star Wars films and that was excellent to see and the shots of the different planets at the start looked beautiful.
For my negatives, the CGI faces for Governor Tarkin and Princess Leia at the end quite clearly took me out of the movie. Some of the dialogues also felt a little cheesy (as was in the trailers too) and it was a little hard for me to invest my emotions into them. The first act of the story where they jump between different planets to set up different storylines felt too quick and it would have been nice to invest more time with characters like Mads's (Galen Erso). I would have liked his death to be more emotional to me. But that I guess is a problem with all stand alone movies like this. I also could have done somewhat without Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen's characters as they did not serve the story a lot in my opinion.
Overall, a wonderful addition to the Star Wars universe and I am looking forwards to more of these.
What a year for Disney this is turning out to be!
Overall Rating: 8/10