My Spoiler-Free Review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Just in case anyone is confused about why there’s a new Star Wars movie featuring Darth Vader and the Death Star, let’s revisit the title crawl from the original Star Wars film. Here’s a snippet:

Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It is the first of a series of spinoff films that are not part of the main Star Wars saga. These don’t have episode numbers at the beginning. Rather, they’re meant to be one-offs that fill in the gaps.

Honestly, when they revealed that the first of these standalone films would be about the team that stole the Death Star plans, I was not a fan. After all, the Death Star plans were merely the MacGuffin that got the plot going in the original Star Wars film. Everything we ever needed to know about the plans is that they were stolen. And then we started seeing trailers and images from Rogue One and they looked incredibly compelling. Also between then and now Disney proved with The Force Awakens that it could make a good Star Wars film, something that hadn’t been done since 1983. So by the time we started seeing all of the marketing for Rogue One kick into high gear, I was ready.

I still stand by my view that this was a movie that didn’t need to be made. The greater Star Wars story wasn’t lacking by it not existing. But now that I’ve seen it, the world of Star Wars might actually be better for it existing. In short, I really liked this film. It’s tight, very focused, well-cast, features beautiful locations, and has some incredible action.

It gave us some great new characters and introduced a lot more nuance and shades of gray into the Galactic Civil War. That’s about all I want to say here, but I’ll have more thoughts over in my spoiler-filled review later.

Let me sum up this way: For the second straight year, Disney hit it out of the park with a new Star Wars movie. This is every bit as good as The Force Awakens and maybe better. I’ve seen a lot of people online calling this the best Star Wars film ever made. I think you need more time and more viewings to make that kind of claim, but Rogue One is definitely among the best of what Star Wars has given us. And, hey! We finally got a good Star Wars prequel! Seriously, go see this movie. I can’t wait to see it again. Check back later for my spoiler-filled review!