The Worst
Where Are All The Women?
In terms of the ethnic diversity of its cast, ‘Rogue One’ marks a terrific, seemingly unforced step up, with veterans like Donnie Yen and Forest Whitaker featured alongside recent breakouts like Riz Ahmed in key supporting roles in a way that feels completely organic. And the Babel Tower of accents that the film represents — British, Chinese, Mexican, Danish, Vaderish, Irish and whatever the hell voice Whitaker is doing — means it also sounds authentically patchworky and colorful. But there is a profound lack of women outside of Jyn, as though having the lead be a female is enough gender diversity and everything else can default back to male. It wouldn’t really have been too hard to have imagined one or several of the other crew members as a woman (and a woman of color would have been even more welcome, with “berobed council member with maybe two lines” being the only speaking part we can recall that goes to a non-white female.) Also, all the villains are male and even though the story is about a daughter as opposed to a son, it’s again the relationship to the father that forms the crux of the plot — making it literally patriarchal. Where are all the resourceful female resistance fighters? Where are all the devious Empire-loyal lady lieutenants? Without them, Jyn’s heroism, while welcome, is still defined in an almost exclusively male context, and we should legitimately now expect more from the ‘Star Wars’ universe.
The First Half Is A Bit Muddled
The deeply boring nature of the space politics of the prequels is thankfully absent here, but there are times in the first half when the plotting feels a bit indistinct. Perhaps it’s a result of the reshoots, but the first act, roughly up to the destruction of Jedha’s city, is a sort of getting-the-band-together vibe, but because the band comes together accidentally, it sometimes lacks a clear goal and movement. You could probably lift Saw Gerrera out almost entirely, and it sometimes feels like there are chunks missing — Riz Ahmed’s character goes from ‘losing his mind’ after being subjected to Saw’s tentacle beast thing to being relatively sane without much of a gap, for instance. In the second half, it all works much more propulsively, and the film’s entertaining enough that it ends up feeling relatively organic, but we almost wish the clarity was there from the off.
Jyn And Cassian Are Underdeveloped
“Rogue One” turned out to be much more of an ensemble piece than we thought it was going to be, and that’s mostly for the best. But some of us did want a little bit more meat on the bones of ostensibly the two leads, Jyn and Cassian. In part, it might be that Felicity Jones, who is a great actress, feels a touch miscast as the heroine: for a tough, survivor street-urchin type, Jones feels a little too prim and proper in places, and it’s hard not to wonder what, for instance, Tatiana Maslany, who reportedly tested for the role along with Rooney and Kate Mara, might have done in terms of bringing a slightly tougher take on the character. Or we’d at least have liked to have seen a bit more of Jones in action before she’s in the prison in which we first meet her as an adult. Similarly, Cassian sometimes feels, for all his ruthlessness, a little bit too much of a straight arrow: only the single scene (in which Diego Luna’s very good) after Galen’s death helps to flesh him out a little bit. Again, we definitely hold the collective more important than the individuals, but the film sometimes flirts with under-developing its heroes.
We Could Have Used More Galen
Aside from just wanting more Mads Mikkelsen (every movie, “Star Wars” or otherwise, could use more Mads Mikkelsen), we felt like the film would have improved with another few minutes of Galen Erso, for plot and character reasons too. The Danish actor and Ben Mendelsohn do such a good job of suggesting that Orson and Galen were former friends whose relationship has become strained (in part because they have a real-life bromance brewing) that we wish they had more screen time together to flesh out that relationship more and heighten the impact of their split. And similarly, Bodhi’s dying words of “This is for you, Galen,” and that it was the scientist that convinced him to defect, suggest a real relationship, but Mikkelsen and Ahmed don’t share a single scene. We see why Edwards wanted to keep things moving along, but it felt like there were a few gaps there.
Jyn Monologuing
Normally, monologuing — defined by “The Incredibles” as the villain giving their secret plan away to the heroes out of ego and hubris — is something that happens with bad guys. But there’s a bit of a moment towards the end when Jyn does it — revealing to Orson Krennic that the Death Star has a secret flaw that will allow them to destroy it. And that turns out to be fine, because everyone who knows about the plan ends up being blown up on Scarif. But Jyn doesn’t know that the Death Star is on its way, and it would have been quite easy for Krennic to survive the end of the battle, and go and put up extra defences, or fix the backdoor that Galen built in if he had. It’s a slightly false note in a film that has pleasingly few of them otherwise.
CGI Peter Cushing
It seems to bother some viewers more than others, but to at least this viewer, the single biggest misstep in “Rogue One” is the CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. Aside from the “The Congress”-like ethical concerns over the idea (which are considerable), the effect, when we first meet him (played in motion-capture form by actor Guy Henry) is less than convincing. There’s something rubbery and not quite out of the uncanny valley about it, and the film seems to know it, often cutting around him to show him from behind in order to diminish the time on screen. Given that some other roles were re-cast, like Mon Mothma (admittedly to an actress who played the part in the prequels) it’s hard to make the creative argument beyond that Cushing is so iconic, and it would be easy enough to find someone other than Tarkin to play the role in the story.
Whatever It Is That Forest Whitaker Is Doing
Saw Gerrera, while narratively a little redundant, is kind of an awesome character: a rebel so hardcore that he’s broken off from the rest of the group, an eerie echo of Darth Vader in needing breathing apparatus and having robotic limbs, and a man so paranoid that everyone he meets could be a spy. But Forest Whitaker makes some… interesting choices with the part, his second unidentifiable accent of the year after his kind-of-Boston in “Arrival,” and some fairly offbeat line readings. We appreciate him swinging for the fences, and it certainly makes his scenes lively, but it sometimes feels like he’s walked in from a different movie. Like, say, “Jupiter Ascending.” Given that his scenes appear to have been among the reshoots (he has an entirely different haircut in the trailers, we wonder if he played it a little more grounded in the earlier version.
The First Vader Scene
The proper return of height-of-his-powers Darth Vader to the screen for the first time since “Return Of The Jedi” was arguably the big “Rogue One” selling point, and as we saw above, it doesn’t disappoint. Eventually, anyway: as good as his second scene is, his first is something of a disappointment in some respects. The introduction is strong: Vader as we’ve never seen him before, really, limbless in a bacta tank out of his suit and helmet, and then the famous Vader silhouette approaching Krennic. But the scene that follows feels a little off somehow. It’s not even the “choking on your ambition” pun, which actually feels off a piece with something that Vader would do elsewhere, and it’s not Mendelsohn’s performance, which is strong. But the scene sort of stops the film dead in its tracks, and perhaps because there’s someone else in the suit, it never 100% feels like it’s truly Vader. We might be nitpicking a bit, and we’re glad he does better the second time out, but it’s hard not to be a touch underwhelmed at first.
Krennic’s A Bit Impotent In The Final Battle
We suspect, again, that this is a reshoot question — early trailers show Orson Krennic on the beach heading into action. But for all the strengths of the brilliant third act, it doesn’t find a very good way to incorporate the film’s main villain into the action. For much of the sequence, he’s yelling in a control tower, only working out what’s going on quite late, and then belatedly rushing back to the Death Star plans, but failing to kill Cassian. Even at the end, when he catches up to Felicity Jones, he feels like he botches it, stopping to ask who she is rather than shutting everything down. It’s an issue mostly because he’s otherwise such a good bad guy: we really do wish the movie did him more justice by the end.
The Council Of Peak TV
The casting of the “Star Wars” movie is mostly strong in this new era — hiring either newish faces or chameleons to join the cast. But we have to say that there’s one scene where this somewhat falls down, which is when we met the Rebel Leadership, who mostly seem to be made up of actors eminently recognizable as supporting players in popular prestige cable dramas. Mon Mothma aside, we have Barristan Selmy from “Game Of Thrones, Jimmy Smits, Hugh Laurie’s right-hand-man from “The Night Manager,” Ben Daniels from “House Of Cards,” Jonathan Aris from “Sherlock” and Fares Fares from “Tyrant,” and it’s a rare moment where the fourth wall cracks open and the reality is broken.
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