Also back is Grand Moff Tarkin, once again portrayed by Peter Cushing, who has been dead for 22 years. Make no mistake, Vader’s most explosive scene in any of the Star Wars films occurs late in Rogue One. With James Earl Jones once again providing the voice, Vader is as menacing as he was in A New Hope (with no Emperor hovering around him, pulling the strings) and is given an opportunity to show why he was so feared.
Vader doesn’t have a lot of screen time but he makes the most of his few scenes. It limits the emotional impact of the inevitable denouement.ĭarth Vader’s heralded return is triumphant. The battle scenes are excellently rendered and the narrative is solid but, aside from Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Rogue One doesn’t give us anyone to care about. With the exception of perhaps two characters, everyone else is window dressing, getting a nice scene or two with little background and less development. Maybe I’ve seen too many Dirty Dozen-inspired productions but this one isn’t among the strongest. The weakest link is the war story, which is irregularly paced and at times a little too obvious.
Using those goals as a barometer of his success, I’d give the filmmaker 2.5 out of 3. If The Force Awakens was a loving but ultimately disappointing recycling of the original Star Wars’ greatest hits, Rogue One is a more solid and better realized vision because, rather than trying to bend and twist Lucas’ universe to fit his interpretation, director Gareth Edwards ( Godzilla) allows his narrative to take place “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”Įdwards came to this project with a three-fold mission: make a war movie with Star Wars trappings, pay tribute to Lucas’ hexalogy, and figure out how to neatly dovetail this story into A New Hope. And, although Rogue One, the first so-called “ Star Wars anthology” movie (a story not focused on the Skywalker family), lacks an opening crawl and the rousing musical fanfare at the beginning, it still uses “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” For that reason, it doesn’t take long for us to feel like we have been transported into the milieu created by George Lucas 39 years ago. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Perhaps those words don’t mean as much as they did a couple of decades ago but they still have the capacity to raise goose bumps.
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