Gareth Edwards
Rogue One

I swear: it's not to be a contrarian, but I didn't like Rogue One. For heaven's sake, I understand it might have thrilled the fans, but I struggle to consider it better than The Force Awakens. Edwards's film is outrageously linear, flat, lacking depth in both characters and dynamics: a predictable and almost embarrassingly foreseeable script, living almost solely on fan service, citations, callbacks, and connections with previous and following films in the Star Wars universe chronology. In fact, I want to say more: watching it, I didn't have the impression of watching an artistic or auteur work, even though it has a strong commercial attitude. Instead, I perceived the manifestation of a mechanically conceived and realized product, a coagulation into an object void of personality of many corporate agendas imposed from above. Rogue One doesn't express a directorial personality, not even remotely: it is the result of meticulous polishing work of a purely mercantile mold. It doesn't matter if within this Disney cage some decidedly enjoyable moments are doled out; once you perceive the coldness, the pure calculation, the absence of risks and strong choices, the vision becomes tainted and thus ruined.

Let's take a step back: it was almost impossible to go wrong with the premises of Rogue One. A period of the saga chosen ad hoc to exploit the figure of Lord Vader, the presence of disposable characters, absent in chapter III as in IV, the possibility to fully exploit the vigor and contradictions of an Empire in the process of consolidation. The only difficulty: to manage to give substance to a plot that could have seemed way too skeletal in the premises. In fact, the protagonists just need to steal the Death Star plans, all the rest could have been character building, adventures, diversions, fun.

The screenwriters do well regarding the rigorous and almost scientific aspects of the expanded universe. Connections with the before and after, presence of historical characters, explanations of how the various Death Star weapons function, (simplistic) representation of the internal conflicts within the Empire's hierarchy, tributes to Darth Vader. Rogue One is rigorous, precise, mathematical. But it completely lacks its own engine, an internal thrust to make the plot function. It all seems like a pretext to pay homage to the past films, to tickle the emotions of the most passionate fans. And so, despite the great precision of internal references to the saga, the new story is of disheartening emptiness. The characters are introduced without interest in giving them three-dimensionality because it's not worth it for the production house: why should I spend energy and talent in the construction of characters I can exploit for just one episode? Much better to stuff the film with shootouts, spacecraft duels, chases, and quips in the corridors of an Imperial base; they're much easier to make compared to a good character.

And so we have a completely useless protagonist, a team of two-dimensional helpers, a Mads Mikkelsen underused and misused, a series of secondary characters playing standard roles without any variation. And then the spectacle, the much-vaunted war sequences: I didn't appreciate them that much. The space ship shootouts don't seem to mark new quality levels, they're decent and nothing more, while those in the Scarif base between rebels and Imperial troops are unbearable, as in all other episodes. Sure, all things considered the ending works, especially for the exotic setting and the war interlocking between ships and ground forces. But even there, the outcomes are quite predictable: [spoilers] it quickly becomes clear that these protagonists are sacrificial and they're systematically killed off one by one, mechanically. Being a soulless film, even this potential is reduced to an algorithm that knows no variations or nuances. One of the last scenes, with the protagonists kissing and getting wiped out moments later, could have been unforgettable, but it arrives when even the walls have figured it out in advance. Not that beautiful things are only those unexpected, but here the absence of emotional jolts is really remarkable.

The Force Awakens left me lukewarm, but compared to this, I remember it as a great film. Without characters, there is no cinema. Besides the poor characterization, the writing also disappoints in most of the dialogues: they are almost all cloying, except for K-2's excellent lines (imported from Miyazaki's Laputa). Finally, the soundtrack, which I found annoying and intrusive in many sequences. The brief scenes with Darth Vader are nice, but frankly, it was impossible to get them wrong: the character shines on his own, Edwards made brief remakes of things already seen.

5.5/10