Originally written December 30, 2016

Rogue One kind of felt like a breaking point to me with movies as we’ve come to the end of 2016. There are three franchises that I absolutely love in this world: Marvel, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. We got new installments in each of these three franchises in a matter of a month and a half, which is mind-blowing when I take a step back and think about it. However, with each of these three movies, I found myself feeling like the new movies I was watching were just weak entries in franchises that I loved. I still genuinely enjoyed Doctor Strange a lot, it just wasn’t as good as most of the other MCU movies. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was decent, but failed to recapture the magic that I love about Harry Potter. And now here we are with Rogue One, the first big spin-off movie in the Star Wars franchise. And, while it’s not a movie that I hated or anything by any means, I just found myself disappointed with a movie that I already had little expectations for. It’s my least favorite of these three movies that I mentioned, it’s my second least favorite Star Wars movie (seriously, the only one I found to be worse was Phantom Menace), and it’s just a discouragement to me because I feel like franchises that I love are starting to get beaten to death and giving me inferior products to what I’m used to.

So, let’s just get into it now then, shall we? What is Rogue One? Well, as I mentioned, Rogue One is a spin-off movie in the Star Wars universe, and is the first movie to go into untitled episode territory and continue the series in any meaningful way (unless you count that animated Clone Wars movie that no one else seems to anyway). Rogue One isn’t about exploring new territory like the other movies were, but rather is about going more in-depth with an area that Star Wars fans are already familiar with. Chronologically, the movie takes place between Episodes III and IV, when (spoilers for the other movies) the Jedi have all been killed and the Empire is on their rise to power. Through the eyes of protagonist Jyn Erso and some other characters, we’re given a closer look into the mission of the Rebels to destroy the Death Star, an event that came to fruition in Episode IV. We’re given a look at the struggles that went into getting the plans for the Death Star, a story that I personally was never all that interested in myself, but if it sounds appealing to you, maybe you’ll like it more than I did. Needless to say though, if you’re not already familiar with the other Star Wars movies, this one really probably won’t mean anything to you on any level.

I’ll just say outright that the two big things I didn’t like the most about Rogue One are its characters and its plot. These seem like two of the most important things in a movie, and you would be right in saying so, but that isn’t to say that the movie is devoid of any enjoyment. Its uninteresting characters and plot are just its big, fatal flaws that keep it from being a great movie.

I want to start with the characters. First of all, to give credit where it’s due, I found the main character Jyn Erso to be a compelling main character, so she keeps the movie from being a total disaster. She’s still probably the least interesting central protagonist out of any of the Star Wars movies, sure, but she does her part. It’s everyone else that I had a problem with. Not to draw too many comparisons to Episode VII, but I remember feeling like I already knew the characters of Episode VII from right when I started watching the movie. Contrast this to Rogue One, where I don’t even remember the names of hardly any of the characters, much less getting to know them on any personal level. Some of these characters have interesting quirks, like the robot and the blind guy (who, again, I couldn’t possibly tell you the names of from memory), and so they have an entertainment factor to them, but beyond that they’re hardly developed at all. Aside from Jyn, the other biggest character is Cassian, whose name I had to look up since he has no defining features that I can refer to him as otherwise. Cassian is someone that we’re basically told as viewers to be invested in, when in reality there is nothing interesting about him that makes me want to be invested in. I didn’t care about his back story or motivations, and so I didn’t care what happened to him. I think the character that shows the most about what’s wrong with the movie is Forest Whitaker’s character though. This is a guy that I hated from the start and who added literally nothing to the movie from his presence in it.

Characters and plot tend to go hand in hand, because if we have strong characters then we’ll be interested in seeing what happens to them throughout the plot. Since Rogue One doesn’t have strong characters, I found little reason to care about what happened throughout most of the movie. Probably for this reason, I actually remember little that really happened throughout the middle of the movie. Maybe part of the reason I personally didn’t like the plot, though, is that I wasn’t interested in a movie that I already knew what the outcome was going to be. So, like I said earlier, if a movie about stealing the Death Star plans appeals to you, you might already get more enjoyment out of Rogue One than I did, and so maybe that’s my own fault for seeing a movie that didn’t interest me much to begin with. I think this is a problem with a lot of prequel type of stuff though, where it’s hard to get invested in the stakes of a movie when you already know how it’s going to end.

Like I said, the characters and plot of Rogue One are indeed fatal flaws, but I don’t want to make it seem like I hated the movie, because I actually didn’t. What it did do right is connect to the universe at large pretty well, have a strong ending, and have a good theme to it.

As far as universe connections go, there are characters from Episode IV that are featured in Rogue One, and so it ties together to that movie pretty well. I found the most interesting parts of Rogue One to be where we’re seeing more into what was going on behind the scenes before the beginning of Episode IV, and to that end I actually found it to be pretty cool. The ending of Rogue One is actually the beginning of Episode IV, and so it did a great job of tying into the Star Wars universe.

While I did say that I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the middle of the movie, the last 20-30 minutes or so actually does stick out quite well in my mind. The movie has a pretty good climax, and while I would have cared about what was going on more if I liked the characters, it was still well-done nonetheless. The ending actually ties into the fact that the movie has a pretty good theme to it, and that theme is sacrifice. This theme isn’t evident enough throughout the rest of the movie, but once you realize what is happening at the end of the movie, it all becomes clear and is actually a really poignant message. While I didn’t care much about a lot of the other events in the movie, in the end I was actually really interested to see what the characters had to go through so that the Rebels could attack the Death Star in Episode IV.

In the end, while Rogue One isn’t a bad movie, I think it just commits one of the biggest movie sins of being forgettable. Holding it to the standard of a beloved series like Star Wars, this simply isn’t acceptable, and so that’s why I’m being a bit harsher on it than I would with other movies of similar quality. The movie isn’t really that good or bad, but simply average. I think that I might have liked it more had it not had the Star Wars title attached to it, although I would argue that I guarantee most people wouldn’t have even given this movie a glance if it wasn’t a Star Wars movie, because it simply isn’t interesting enough to stand on its own. All in all, I don’t think this ruins the Star Wars franchise or anything by any means since it’s just a spin-off movie, but I do have to say that despite its good qualities, I was still a bit disappointed with Rogue One.

3/5