Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (12a)
What’s immediately clear from the opening scenes is that this is not some embarrassing cash-in; it’s a confident, gutsy, earthy action movie, one that puts the “war” into Star Wars by filtering the classic iconography through the prism of a modern combat movie.
Jones is allowed to dominate the film. Her character has a rich back story, elegantly sketched out in an opening prologue that sets up a complex relationship with her estranged father (Mads Mikkelsen), whose role in the creation of the Death Star isn’t as simple as it seems.
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Hide AdA droid called K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) has an amusingly droll directness in his assessment of any situation, but this doesn’t feel like a movie designed to sell more toys. On the contrary, it’s perhaps the darkest Star Wars film yet, more concerned with showing the devastation caused by the Death Star than celebrating blockbuster destruction. Yet it’s also one of the most exhilarating, a film with a real sense of how to tell a story – and tell it well.