Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Something is wrong if you have to wait 131 minutes for the first great scene in a film that is 133 minutes long. This film is not made out of love and fondness for Star Wars, it's made for people who will go to see it out of love and fondness for Star Wars, because any billion in profit is good. A woefully ordinary and completely useless film that doesn't fit in with either the old or the new episodes. (12/16/2016)

The nostalgia for Star Wars: A New Hope doesn't work, and if anything, Rogue One proves only that I need to experience Star Wars with Skywalker, Solo, Kenobi, and others in order to enjoy them. Just the fact that the least important Vader steals the best scene for himself shows that the screenplay is losing in terms of anchoring new characters. I enjoyed K-2SO and Chirrut, but the whole group too willingly and conveniently marches into the role of some magnificent seven, which doesn't make much sense for some of them. If it wasn't for the action orgy in the last act, I would have left the cinema severely disappointed. I expected a much tighter experience, but looking back on the whole story, it could hardly have turned out otherwise. (12/19/2016)

Star Wars for me has always been a saga based on adventure, laughable naivety, likable heroes, and fairly one-dimensional but ultimately fun characters. Rogue One has none of that. Nothing against trying to make a darker story, but the attempts to turn the rebels into sort of bastards who aren't afraid to slaughter innocents because "the ends justify the means" are more distracting than interesting, as are all the other attempts at a grittier atmosphere and the efforts to make this sci-fi flick into a war movie. Although it could work, it would just have to have more interesting characters that we know something about. Not two Asians who are teamed up with the heroes because they happened to meet in the city and became best buddies during a scene that probably ended up in the editing room. No one in the bunch is the least bit interesting, failing to evoke any emotion and just being there, either pretending to be a blind halfling or a fat lover of big guns, and that's where all ends. Nobody is funny, nobody is cool, nobody is scary, they're just there, flying from planet to planet and you're supposed to root for them because the director said so. And the more the minutes tick by, the more tedious and annoying the whole thing gets. Fortunately, Rogue One looks great and pulls a truly epic space carnage out of its sleeve in its last half hour, so in the end I left the cinema not satisfied, but certainly not angry – although I did feel more and more embarrassed with each successive reference to Episodes 4 to 6. A moderately entertaining film and a pretty big step off for the entire saga. I hope it's the last one. (05/15/2017)

The talk of dirty war action is just ruin or unfulfilled wishful thinking, where good characters are absent, or even unbearably obnoxious, giving the impression that whether it's the overacting or if it was built this badly from the start, it's hard to keep a film on such wobbly legs that you know how it's going to turn out. Therefore, any refreshment is welcome, rather than watching a generic blockbuster, of which you have a dozen a year, and it would have been enough to throw away 120 minutes and stick the last fifteen as a prologue to Episode IV. This is because few films this year have had as strong a highlight as the one when the red lightsaber lights up in the shadows. (12/15/2016)

Another Star Wars movie. And a great one at that! Rogue One has a bold and wonderful cast with some lesser known faces, especially in the case of the main characters, who are not chosen Jedis, but just regular mortals whose fate is to fulfil a single, but extremely important task in the saga. A fast-paced story packed with all kinds of fantastically epical action, taking place in beautiful, creatively designed locations (the huge ATATs at the Maldivian “atoll” are a childhood dream come true). Lovely episodes featuring beloved Star Wars characters, the plot of which is well linked to the first trilogy. Finally, an intriguing and powerful dramatic tangle of a large number of characters, each having their own importance and whose actions define the pillars of the first trilogy. You can see that this was written by people who not only love Star Wars, but also know how to work dramatically with characters and stories beyond the boundaries of fantasy. And they do not steal from the mythology of the Star Wars universe, but complement and develop it. Bravo! (12/14/2016)