MOVIE REVIEW—ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

It’s kind of sad that people other than George Lucas now seem to understand the appeal of Star Wars better than he does. But if that means an ongoing string of good Star Wars movies for the foreseeable future, so be it.

And Rogue One, directed by Gareth Edwards, is a good Star Wars movie.  It follows in the footsteps of last year’s J.J. Abrams-directed The Force Awakens, in that there’s an emphasis on the characters over the special effects, and a concerted effort to avoid the kind of cringe-inducing dialogue for which Lucas was so roundly criticized on the three prequels that he made between 1999 and 2005.

Rogue One, too, is a prequel. It takes place shortly before the events of the original film (now known officially as Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, but it’ll always be just Star Wars to me), and sets up some of the characters and situations that we saw for the first time back in 1977. Some familiar faces show up—and longtime fans will undoubtedly be delighted by those moments—but the emphasis is squarely on new characters, both rebels and agents of the evil Galactic Empire.

The plot is fairly simple. Remember the opening crawl in Star Wars, which explained that a team of rebels had managed to steal the plans for the Death Star and transmitted them to Princess Leia? Well, that’s what this film is about—those particular rebels, and how they got the plans.

Among the most notable of the rebels is Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones. She’s a young woman with a tragic past (which we get to see in the film’s gripping prologue), who is handed a unique and profoundly personal opportunity, one that could help the Rebel Alliance and reconnect her with a long-lost piece of her life. Jones is effective in the role, bringing a nice combination of beauty, strength, determination, and vulnerability.

Diego Luna plays Captain Cassian Andor, a dashing rebel intelligence officer who establishes a bond with Jyn but also has a hidden agenda that could destroy the trust between them.  

Chirrut Îmwe, played by Donnie Yen, is a devout believer in the Force, although he is never established as having been a Jedi Knight. It’s not clearly established whether he actually possesses Force powers, but he is a highly skilled martial-arts master—and completely blind.

The film’s major droid character, K-2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, is a real standout. Like C-3PO before him, K-2SO provides much of the comic relief. And while 3PO can range from amusing to annoying, K-2SO is genuinely hilarious throughout the film. Without a doubt, he gets the best lines, and Tudyk gives him a personality that is fussy, earnest, sarcastic, and irreverent, sometimes all at the same time.

I also have to mention the main villain, Director Orson Krennic, played very effectively by Ben Mendelsohn. Krennic is the head of Advanced Weapons Research for the Empire. He’s undoubtedly a cruel and cold-hearted bastard, and ambitious as hell, but you can’t help kind of feeling for the guy—we can see he’s under a lot of stress, with a major responsibility on his shoulders and several extremely fearsome overlords to answer to, along with at least one notable figure working to undermine him in a big way. Krennic is certainly one of the most nuanced, multi-dimensional, and—believe it or not—relatable bad guys we’ve ever seen in a Star Wars movie.  

Even though we already know that Jyn and her companions will ultimately succeed in their mission, Rogue One works because it’s not really about the outcome. It’s more about who these people are, what brings them together, and what they’re willing to endure to accomplish a monumental task, against all odds. We get to know and understand them and their relationships with each other over the course of the film. We become invested in them.

The fact that this is a standalone movie, one that is not intended to have any follow-ups (other than the original Star Wars) is a real benefit. We don’t know going in what will happen to these characters—the original movie never establishes the fates of the rebels who stole the Death Star plans—so Edwards and screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (working from a story developed by John Knoll and Gary Whitta) have plenty of freedom to take the characters wherever they feel they need to go. And since Rogue One is, at its heart, a war movie, it’s not always going to end happily for the heroes. (By the way, a big kudos to Lucasfilm and Disney for not shying away from showing the real consequences of war. This movie has balls, that’s for sure.)

I should also add that this is a beautiful looking film. There is some truly stunning imagery on display, and the special effects are absolutely top notch. No surprise there—one would expect nothing less than superb work from the wizards at Industrial Light & Magic. And the attention to detail, especially when recreating elements from the original Star Wars, is simply amazing. 

Quibbles? I have a few. The rebels, at this stage of the galactic civil war, seem a little too effective when taking on Imperial forces in a major space battle, armed with technology we’ve never seen them use before. (Where was this stuff at the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi, when it would have really come in handy?)

And I must say that as I watched this battle, there were moments when I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it all before. And the reason, of course, is that I had. Make no mistake, it looks fantastic and is very well paced. But I’m afraid there just wasn’t much here that was different or innovative enough to set it apart from similar sequences in the other Star Wars movies.      

Also, I’m not sure the ending flows quite as seamlessly into the beginning of Star Wars as it’s meant to—there are some continuity details that don’t seem to line up perfectly. But maybe a second viewing will convince me otherwise.

But overall, Rogue One is a worthy addition to the Star Wars canon that should please both longtime fans and newcomers to the series.    

© All text copyright Glenn Greenberg, 2016.

A CHAT WITH SEBASTIAN STAN

Captain America: Civil War arrived in stores on Blu-ray and DVD today. I never get tired of praising this thoroughly entertaining movie. To celebrate its release on home video, I'm posting the full transcript of an interview I conducted with actor Sebastian Stan, who plays Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. We spoke shortly after I saw an advance screening of the film, several weeks before it hit theaters. A shorter version of this Q&A appeared on the TIME For Kids website.

GLENN GREENBERG: 

I saw the movie on Thursday and I thought it was terrific.

SEBASTIAN STAN: 

Oh, great. Thank you so much.

GREENBERG:

My pleasure. Thank you! (Laughter)

Were you fan of comic books or superhero movies before you got involved with this series?

STAN: 

Well, the truth is, I didn’t grow up with comic books, so for me it was a very new sort of situation. But I definitely enjoyed getting to know the Captain America story. I’m probably a little biased, but it is my favorite one, because I think it feels the most real, you know what I mean? It’s the most relatable. And I think the movie Civil War reiterates that because it is very relatable to the world we live in now.  

GREENBERG: 

How much did you about Captain America, Bucky, and the Winter Soldier before you got the part? I assume you at least heard of Captain America.

STAN: 

Yes, I’ve always heard of Captain America, absolutely. I didn’t know anything about Bucky Barnes, I didn’t know anything about the relationship. I was educated on all that in a meeting once I got the part. Actually, I didn’t even have the part when they were talking to me about it. I think it’s a great story because they’re the oldest serving POWs. And again, it’s a story that’s always going to be relatable over time. I feel like we’ve always seen the story of brotherhood and family and kind of how war tears people apart and the uglier side of war. All those things, to me, seemed to be themes in the story.

GREENBERG: 

I was actually going to touch upon that. But before we get to that—having seen the film, I can say that in Captain America: Civil War, there are several different facets and layers to your character this time around. You get to play him several different ways. What’s your personal take on Bucky/the Winter Soldier as a character, especially in terms of where he is in this movie?

STAN: 

I think where he is in this movie is very appropriate, in terms of where we have left off at the end of The Winter Soldier. We find him in a place of question. He is questioning his own identity, he’s learning about his past, he’s suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he’s a bit paranoid, paranoid-schizophrenic, a little bit. He’s always wondering if he’s being followed. Who can he trust? So he’s learning about his past and how to live with it, and wondering if there’s a future and what that future entails for him. And that’s sort of the journey that he has in this film—learning to live with the past and starting over.

GREENBERG: 

How would you say that working on Civil War was different from working on The Winter Soldier?

STAN: 

Just more layers to the character. A lot more intricate scenes. Practically every scene I had, [co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo] and I could debate for hours where to go. Does he remember this? Did he know this before or is he remembering this now? How much of him is here in this moment and how much is he completely under the influence of some sort of brainwashing? So there was always a question, a guessing game too. So that made it much more difficult, whereas in The Winter Soldier, it was very clear to me that we were dealing with a machine, so to speak, that’s been very programmed and trained. And here, this was an opportunity to reunite [Bucky and Captain America] and you get to see the Bucky Barnes within the guy but at the same time, you also see the effects of what he’s been through.

GREENBERG: 

I have to say, you conveyed all of that incredibly well.

STAN: 

Wow, thank you.

GREENBERG: 

I could tell, just from the expression on your face or the look in your eyes, which Bucky we were dealing with—whether it was the brainwashed Bucky, or the Bucky who went to the museum to learn about himself at the end of the previous movie, or the Bucky who remembers everything. And the tone in your voice, the way you performed each version, was really clear, incredibly straightforward, and made it easy to pick up where you were as a character throughout the movie.

STAN: 

Oh, I appreciate that, that makes me feel great. That means I did my job.

GREENBERG: 

Absolutely. There’s a big superhero battle late in the movie, where everyone is there, they’re all fighting one another—were all of the actors together for that scene, or were some of them added in later with CGI and that kind of stuff?

STAN: 

Yeah, some of them were added in later. We had, I think, a day where we had everyone. And that was sort of epic and exciting, and you can tell everybody was getting a little tingly, looking around. “Wow, everybody’s here!” We shot that over the span of four months, that whole sequence, so it was very much out of context at times. We would constantly return to it, it would always be like, “What else do we need?” “We still need this piece and that.” “We should add this and that.” So there was all this stuff, but we were always aware that it was going to be epic and a different fight sequence from what we’ve seen before.

GREENBERG: 

And what was it like, for the brief time that you were all together, interacting with so many other key cast members and players in this growing Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)?

STAN: 

So fun. So fun. It’s one of those circumstances where everybody really gets along and is just very excited to go to work. It’s definitely an experience where you pinch yourself and you wonder whether or not this is real in some way. To have these actors like Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jr., and William Hurt—these are all actors that some of us, myself included, grew up watching. So it’s a real treat to be in the same film with them.

   

GREENBERG: 

Is there a particular message or theme that you think kids will come away with after seeing Civil War?

STAN: 

I wonder about that. They may like more characters after seeing Civil War than they did before. Or they may have different opinions about their own [favorite] superheroes than they did before. The movie sort of raises the question of who’s right. And kids will have the opportunity to choose, and maybe debate after the film and go, “Hey, I think what he was doing makes sense,” or, “Well, actually, I understand why Iron Man is doing this.” So I think it can spark a little bit of conversation, and that’s hopefully what it’s going to do.

GREENBERG: 

One of the things that I really liked was that even though they were at odds with each other, there was still a degree of respect that they had for each other, even when they were on opposite sides.

STAN: 

Yes. Of course. That was the civil part of Civil War. (Both laugh.)

GREENBERG: 

If you get the chance to play the character again, what would you like to see him do? Is there a particular storyline from the comic books, or character bit, or achievement you’d like to play out? Because in the comic books, he got to date the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) for a while, for one thing.

STAN: 

Now that I think about it, I would love one day to explore the origin and history of the Winter Soldier and Black Widow. We get little pieces of it here and there, and it’s continued here in this film. But the kids and the fans are the ones who are going to determine that, and if that’s something they’d really like to see, it may happen. But I personally would like to see that because the Winter Soldier has this other history altogether as an entirely different person, and he was the one who trained Black Widow, so just to see how that dynamic worked, I’d love to see that one day.

GREENBERG: 

I didn’t even know that part!

STAN: 

Oh yeah. He actually trained her. When you first see the Winter Soldier in the MCU, he’s already become a machine, because of the constant treatment that he’s had. The truth is, when he first started out, there was more of a person to him. Which is so crazy, and that’s why it’s like Jekyll and Hyde.    

GREENBERG: 

Clearly I’m going to have to watch these movies again a little more closely to pick up on that! (Both laugh.)

STAN: 

Marvel does that really well. They layer in these little teases, these little Easter eggs. They know what they’re doing!

© All text copyright Glenn Greenberg, 2016.