I finally saw Rogue One over the holidays, and I quite liked it. It certainly did have some problems – I’ll say more about those in a moment – but it more than held my attention for its entire length. I appreciated the fact that it’s set in the same era as the original trilogy, and that it involves what I call the “classic” Empire as opposed to the degenerating Republic of the prequel trilogy and the neo-Imperialistic context of the sequel trilogy. It also struck me as being a more adult movie than The Force Awakens, and indeed quite a dark, modern-style war film in many respects. I managed to avoid learning very much about the film before seeing it, so that I could watch it with as few preconceptions as possible, but I wasn’t suprised when the only “happy” part about the ending was that the Rebel Alliance (as we already knew decades ago from the opening scroll of Episode IV) sucessfully got its hands on the Death Star plans, an event that would eventually lead to the destruction of the Empire’s ultimate terror weapon. It was appropriate that this accomplishment would be purchased at a very high price.
That said, there were a few things about the movie that were problematic, though none of them got in the way of my enjoying the film. The storyline was somewhat clumsy, and I was perplexed by the lame “well, we might as well throw in the towel” reaction of the Rebel Alliance leadership when they learned about the Death Star. A few picky details annoyed me; for example, there was the fact that the Imperial Stardestroyers and the AT-AT walkers seemed much mure vulnerable to weapons fire in this film than we saw in the opening half-hour of The Empire Strikes Back. I also kept wondering why an Imperial pilot who had recently defected would have long and unkempt hair worthy of a rock musician; I had always assumed that TIE fighter pilot had neat crew-cuts under those helmets of theirs. Less annoyingly, because I found his dry humour appropriately calibrated (in contrast with Jar Jar’s annoying slapstick in the prequel trilogy), I got the impression halfway through the movie that the reprogrammed Imperial robot was more or less a cross between a Star Wars droid and Marvin the Paranoid Android from the old TV version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the (depressed rather than paranoid) robot who keeps complaining with lines like “The first three billion years were the worst.”
All in all, though, a movie that I liked and that I’m planning to get for myself when it’s released on DVD – which is more than I can say about The Force Awakens, or the entire The Hobbit trilogy.