Star Wars: Rogue One review: It’s rousing and entertaining but the force isn’t really with it

The fast-paced Star Wars spinoff, direted by British director Gareth Edwards, is entertaining but a bit of a letdown after the huge success of ‘The Force Awakens’

Felicity Jones stars as Jyn Enso in 'Star Wars: Rogue One'

The latest instalment in the Star Wars saga is reassuringly familiar – yet another story from a galaxy far, far away in which the plucky Alliance rebels tussle with the big, bad Empire apparatchiks. It hits all the notes that fans will expect and its British director Gareth Edwards ensures that it moves along at a very rapid clip. Rogue One features stirring action scenes, vivid characterisation and one or two truly eye-popping explosions.

Nonetheless, what it lacks is any real originality. It seems more an act of homage to its predecessors than a film with a mind of its own. Whereas JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens managed to break new ground (in spite of featuring many of the original characters), Rogue One feels like a formulaic retread. It’s rousing and entertaining but the force isn’t really with it. You can’t escape the dispiriting feeling that we’ve seen it all before.

The film begins promisingly enough. Brilliant scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is tracked down to the remote rural outpost where he is living modestly with his family. The Empire wants him back, to finish designing the Death Star, the ultimate weapon of destruction. The stand-off between Galen and his old colleague Orson Crennic (Ben Mendelsohn) plays like something out of a Sergio Leone western. Crennic and his thugs are ready to kill women and children to get their way. Mendelsohn gives a memorably lupine and sinister performance as Crennic. “You’re confusing peace with terror,” Galen warns him of his plans to use the Death Star to keep the rest of the galaxy cowed. “Well, you have to start somewhere,” Crennic purrs.

We are then whisked into the future. Galen’s daughter Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is now an adult. Like Daisy Ridley’s Rey in The Force Awakens, she’s a fiery and rebellious character. Jones plays her with plenty of gumption. Jyn learnt her survival skills from Saw Gerrara (Forest Whitaker), a wheezing, limping rebel commander.

There are multiple changes of location.We’ll be in Wobani Imperial Labor Camp one moment and on the desert moon of Jedha the next. We’re taken from planet Eadu to Sacrif, where the Death Star is being built. New characters are introduced all the time. The ensemble includes blind warrior-monk called Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), who chants “the force is with me and I am one with the force” as if it is a religious mantra,” Baze Malbus (Jiang Wien), a ferocious and shaggy haired rebel with a passing resemblance to Oliver Reed in The Three Musketeers, and K-2SO, the lovable droid that every Star Wars film needs. Diego Luna plays the dashing but lethal rebel captain Cassian Andor, who disapproves of Jyrn Erso but can’t help being attracted to her. He has a distinct Spanish brogue while Felicity Jones’s Jyn speaks in best BBC English. (The range of dialects and accents across the Star Wars universe is never explained.)

In spite of all the changes of locations and the many different protagonists, the plot itself is relatively straightforward. A missing cargo pilot (Riz Ahmed) has smuggled out news about a potential flaw in the Death Star (a “weakness deep within the system” that will cause it to self-destruct.) Jyn is desperate to rescue her father. The Rebels, though, aren’t sure that Galen can be trusted. After all, he is one of the chief architects of the Death Star. The film culminates, as every self-respecting Star Wars movie should, with a prolonged action sequence in which rebel spaceships attack an Empire outpost.

Sometimes, characters here utter lines that sound as if they come from some Flash Gordon-style B movie. “Tell me you have a back up plan!” we hear someone exclaim when a mission goes wrong. K-2SO’s polite, dryly humorous interventions (“congratulations, you are being rescued - please do not resist”) soon become a little grating. There is tussling between Crennic and rival villain Grand Moff Tarkin (played by an actor who looks uncannily like the late Peter Cushing) over who should claim credit for The Death Star.) They both speak in very portentous fashion, taunting each other with lines like “be careful not to choke on your aspirations.”

Rogue One is nothing if not lively. There are very few moments of repose. Michael Giacchino’s orchestral score is every bit as rousing as the music that John Williams wrote for the earlier Star Wars films and it sometimes seems as if the characters here are scrambling to keep up with the tempo Giacchino strikes. The film has many of the hallmarks not only of its predecessors but of old fashioned Hollywood swashbucklers. Alongside the scenes of spaceships whizzing through the galaxy, there are lots of chase sequences and plenty of hand to hand combat. The actual Death Star explosion is eerily beautiful, rekindling memories of footage of nuclear blasts. Director Edwards generates maximum tension from the race in the final reel to find the 'master switch' and for the rebel pilots to get to their destination in time before the 'window' to the planet is closed on them. Hi-tech and low-tech are thrown together. The most precious information is on a computer file that must be kept away from Darth Vader at all costs.

Although some familiar faces from earlier episodes are seen here, there is a feeling that this isn’t the Star Wars A-team and that the series is in a holding pattern, before the big names return for Star Wars: Episode VIII next year. Rogue One is entertaining enough in its own right but seems a little anti-climactic after the revitalising triumph of The Force Awakens.