I’m one with the film, the film is with me. I’m one with the film, the film is with me. I’m one with the film, the film is with me. I’m one with the – all right, all right, I’ll get to the review now.

So if you watched the original Star Wars, you might have been asking a rather glaring question about the movie; How did the Death Star, a weapon designed to blow up planets in a single strike, have such a weakness that it was blown up by two fighter jets down a vent? That seems like just a stupid weakness that screams plot convenience. I mean, nobody noticed that the super-important superweapon had a tunnel leading down right to the biggest weakness?

Which is where Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes in. Directed by Gareth Edwards and starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Mads Mikkelsen, Donnie Yen, and Forest Whitaker, the film details how the plans for the Death Star got in the Rebels’ hands in the first place, and why there was such a huge flaw in the Star itself.

This was a film that grabbed me right away with the premise; a Star Wars movie that was about the side players rather than the main men, the Jedi and the Sith. For once, we were seeing the war through the eyes of people who couldn’t choke people with their hands, read someone’s mind, or throw objects all over the place. And they can’t even have a lightsaber. But that’s what interested me; a grounded look at the Star Wars universe, at the people who worked behind the scenes to deliver the crucial piece for victory. Did it work? Of course it did. Rogue One is a great movie; in fact, I’d say that this is my favorite Star Wars film, only after The Force Awakens. Stumbled a bit along the way, but still, it was yet another strong addition to the franchise. But let’s slow down a bit and look this over.

Right off the bat, I got to comment on the aesthetics. There are some movies that you must see on the big screen if for no other reason than to get the full visual experience. And Rogue One is one beautiful looking film, with sweeping landscape shots of so many different planets, all with their own diverse identities. One moment, you’re gliding across the vast desert expanses and statues, then suddenly you’re weaving through rocky pillars in the middle of a rainstorm. The CG also does a great job in highlighting the effects of the Death Star. We get a ground-level view of just how devastating the weapon can be, with an entire horizon disappearing in swelling rubble and collapsing mountains. It was a shot that literally had me sweating, which speaks volumes about the film’s visual capabilities.

Performances should speak for themselves. Each actor brings a depth and levity to the film simultaneously, and I found all of them genuinely likable. Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Imwe and Jiang Wen’s Baze Malbus have a true friendship that was quite touching, especially to the end. Jyn and Cassian are capable lead roles, and I like that there was no forced romance between them. It made their camaraderie far more realistic. This is a war, after all; love lives wouldn’t be the top priority on some people’s lists. Then there is K2SO…and I think I found my favorite robot in film. Every line he says just adds to his charm, with his “brutally blunt” dialogue adding a bit of levity to the situation. Sure, BB-8 might currently hold the title as the cutest Star Wars robot, but K2’s one of a kind.

In fact, we have quite a lot of characters here that are likable, which is why I think we should have gotten more of them. But unfortunately, this brings me to one of the two major problems I have with this movie; the lack of characterization. I said above that the performances were done well, but the actual characters aren’t developed as nearly as they could have been. Yen and Wen’s friendship? Yes, it is touching, but it’s implied that they have been partners for a long time, but we never see very much of it. K2SO, for all his charm, also comes off nothing more than a walking quip machine. He’s a reprogrammed imperial droid, which immediately shows potential to explore how he feels about working against his creators now, but that never happens. Cassian shows that the rebels aren’t the squeaky clean heroes that we thought them to be, willing to kill nonchalantly for the greater good, but we never see further than that other that for one outburst about his past he has a Jyn in the middle of the movie.

Jyn herself gets the most development, being the main character, but even that falls rather short. We know that she lost her father to the Empire at an early age, and has grown up somewhat of a rebel ever since, but that is only explained in dialogue, rather than showing a bit more of her life and allowing us to gain a deeper connection with her. She does have a good scene where she is watching a message by her father, and how her normally cool exterior breaks down, but because we never got to understand her that well before, it didn’t have nearly enough impact as it shoud have. In fact, every character in this film has some sort of backstory and potential character arcs that are only said through expositional dialogue or not touched upon at all. Jyn mentions to her ex-mentor, Saw Gerrera, that he abandoned her and that has made her rather bitter towards him, but it’s left as just that – a mention, nothing more. Perhaps a smaller cast would have helped, because I genuinely wanted to see more of what they were like.

The villains don’t get that much light to them either. General Tarkin, while a nice cameo, is incredibly jarring, less because of this performance, but mainly because his CGI-made face sticks out like Jabba the Hut on main street. I said CGI was a strong point of this movie, but Tarkin isn’t a proof of that. Then there is Orson Krennic, whom we got a hefty amount of in the film and fulfilled his role as the deep, enigmatic, charismatic leader of the – HAHAHAHA…sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face on that one. This has to be one of the corniest human villains in the Star Wars saga, who seems to have taken villany lessons from Jupiter Ascending‘s Eddie Redmaye. Soft-spoken one moment, screaming incoherently the next. DON’T GOOGLE IT. PLEASE.

Thankfully, the villains aren’t completely hopeless; after all, they’ve got the one-and-only Darth Vader. When I first heard he was going to be in this film, I was worried he might suffer from what I call the “Suicide Squad effect,” where a hyped up character only gets put in as a completely unnecessary appearance. But now? I find my lack of faith disturbing. Sure, his screen time struggles to reach over five minutes, but when he does appear on screen, we are reminded once again why he’s one of the greatest villains in the Star Wars series, or just films in general. There’s one scene near the end where I could feel the rebels’ hopelessness as they came up against a force (Get it?…I’m sorry.) that they couldn’t overcome.

But my main problem with this movie is that I wanted more from these characters. None of them have enough depth to carry the story. This may seem contradictory to what I said about them before, but there’s a difference between likable characters and deep characters. If the movie had more time devoted to their growth, then it would have been fine, but unfortunately, it felt as if a lot of it was cut for runtime issues.

In fact, that’s my second big problem with the movie, and that it feels at least thirty minutes shorter than it should have been. Thirty minutes that could have been used for smoother plot flow and character development. In fact, this movie feels like it has an entire second act missing. It starts off well enough, but it constantly switches between locations, giving us less than three minutes to see what is going on, before moving onto the next. I get that we had a lot of characters to introduce, but it made the beginning feel extremely disjointed and that may have contributed to the lack of character depth in the movie.

Of course, it gains momentum once Jyn and Cassian begin their mission, and it works well enough until the middle. But then that is where I feel like a huge portion of the film just dropped out. It was established at the beginning that Jyn didn’t really care for the rebellion as long as she was safe and well off; in fact, she was rather angry at the rebellion for issuing a secret order to kill her father. But just moments after, she is suddenly stepping up to lead a group of soldiers to steal the Death Star plans, despite her not really being established as a leader role in the previous moments. Then there’s the fact that the characters suddenly seem a lot closer together with no apparent reason. Even when they were at the imperial base where Jyn’s father was, I didn’t get the feeling that they were a team; it was more like they were there because they had no other choice. But no less than ten minutes after, suddenly every one of the characters is saying that they’re with her all the way. (Except for K2SO, who delivers yet another great line about the situation.)

It’s like a big mac sandwich without the lettuce and tomatoes; Sure, it still tastes good with the buns and the meat, but it doesn’t have the same complete feel to it, and leaves you wishing that a bit more was added in to clear up some sour tastes. I know the movie was already two hours long, but they really should have put in at least thirty minutes more to dive a bit more into the backstories of characters in a smoother way, advance character interactions and development, and perhaps another Darth Vader cameo, though that last one’s more of a nitpick than anything else.

…but man, did that ending make up for all that.

Sadly, I had the ending spoiled to me by someone on the internet a day before I saw the movie (Raging intensifies), so this may sound strange. However, what’s great about Rogue One is that, despite me knowing what would happen to the characters in general, the film still delivered the climax ending so amazingly well that ultimately, the spoiler didn’t matter to me. Take that, random a***** on the internet.

The action is some of the best I’ve seen from the franchise, and proves that you don’t always need to have lightsabers to have a great Star Wars action sequence. In fact, now that we aren’t dealing with superhuman characters here who can movie spaceships with their minds, we now get a better sense that this is a war. There are actual soldiers fighting to the death, both on ground and in the air. This manage to ground the film in reality while still leaving some room for imagination, such as AT-ATs or a planet-busting Death Beam.

I may seem like I dislike this film quite a lot, but on the contrary, I loved it. Like I said, this is my second favorite Star Wars movie at the moment, and I came out of the theater immensely satisfied. But I can’t help but think about how this film could have done even more, even better, and that is what’s souring the experience for me. It still provides plenty of reason to love it, such as a smashing third act and being a beauty to look at overall, but those also serve to make its shortcomings all the more glaring, which leaves me with a bitter aftertaste.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Rogue One‘s beautiful aesthetics and an intriguing beginning and ending narrative more than makes up for its overloaded cast and a conspicuous lack of a solid middle.