Beautifully designed and voiced with droll wit and exquisite timing by Alan Tudyk, he’s the most useful of Jyn’s cohorts, as well as the most entertaining.Īlso engaging, even if the character’s conception is limited and not exactly fresh, is Hong Kong Ip Man star Donnie Yen’s blind swordsman, who is amusingly able to avoid harm’s way while doing expert damage to enemies by virtue of his other heightened senses.
With Jyn from the outset is the droid K-2SO, who’s a more useful, resourceful and sarcastic version of C-3PO. One is an imperial labor camp, another a sort-of Middle Eastern-style commercial fleshpot, some more thoroughly policed by Stormtroopers than others. These far-flung lands provide a nice workout for the production and costume designers, who have labored extensively to give them all distinctive looks.
This job naturally falls to his resourceful daughter, who, in the film’s initial stretch, zooms around to a dizzying array of different planets, where she scoops up misfit warriors to join her long-shot enterprise. It’s not giving away too much to say that the whole plot hinges on Jyn’s knowledge that her father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), has secretly supplied the mammoth man-made war factory with an Achilles heel, a fatal flaw leaving it vulnerable to destruction by someone with the right key. Played by Felicity Jones, who physically could easily pass for the older sister of Force star Daisy Ridley, Jyn Erso has grown up under the cloud of her brilliant scientist father’s reputation as a traitor for having gone over to the Dark Side when, in fact, he was captured and coerced into designing the Death Star.īox-Office Preview: 'Rogue One' Could Blast Past $300M in Global Debut
Shooting in a more spontaneous-feeling manner than his series predecessors that keeps the energy high and both the actors and the audience on their toes, the director builds up to a gigantic third-act showdown that plays like a sci-fi version of the Battle of Iwo Jima, complete with a tropical island.Īs in The Force Awakens, Rogue One screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy center on a female warrior driven by destiny to take on the mightiest power in the galaxy. even if some of its members don’t quite emanate the charisma of their cinematic forebears.īut director Gareth Edwards, whose low-budget debut feature Monsters was more than a few leagues better than his mixed-bag Godzilla redo, knows what he’s up to here. Led by a young woman whose brilliant father was coerced into designing the enormous home base for the evil Empire, the gang of interplanetary misfits here will be compared to any number of Earth-bound cinematic predecessors - the Wild Bunch, the Dirty Dozen, the Magnificent Seven, etc.
Ingratiatingly rough and rugged and decked out with a rainbow coalition of actors from all over the world, in addition to a new 7-foot droid who steals every scene it’s in, the yarn is set at a time when the fearsome Death Star is in the final stages of preparation before its massively lethal powers can be unleashed on the opposition.