Rogue One is the first Star Wars film of its kind. It looks like we’ll be getting a new Star Wars movie once a year, alternating between a stand-alone film and a film in the main saga. This year we’ll get Episode 8 and in 2018 we’ll get a Han Solo film. But for now, we have Rogue One. Felicity Jones stars as Jyn Erso who leads a group of rebels that band together to steal the plans for the Death Star. I was really excited going into this film. The Force Awakens was good, but it was basically just a rewrite of A New Hope. Rogue One showed more potential because of the plot. Since it wasn’t a story in the main saga, I thought the writers might have more freedom for the script. And the film we got was definitely very different from any other Star Wars movie. However, the film seemed a little unfocused to me. It should’ve been a story about how the rebels stole the Death Star plans. Instead, it was more of a story about the characters. Before you read any farther, there will be spoilers.

The first thing I noticed about Rogue One was that there was no opening text scrawl. Each Star Wars film starts out with yellow text coming out of space setting up the story. And I really liked that Rogue One left it out. It shows that they’re trying to set it apart from the other Star Wars films. The whole film also had a grittier tone than we’re used to. But the biggest problem was that this story focused really strongly on the characters that didn’t really matter. For example, a lot of the dialogue at the start of the film was about a man played by Forest Whitaker, named Saw Gerrera, who never really ended up doing anything. Most of the characters in Rogue One had the same problem. In fact, you could take some of the characters out of this movie and nothing would change. But the film still took a lot of time to expand on these characters that didn’t even matter. Rogue One was really more about the characters, than the actual story. However, my favorite part of the entire film was the ending. After the death of literally all the main characters, the rebels get the plans. They get them onto a disc, and then Darth Vader boards the ship. This was by far the coolest scene that Darth Vader has ever been in. Without saying too much, he destroyed the rebels. They barely escaped with the plans and the film ended right at the beginning of the first Star Wars film. Then finally closing with a Princess Leia cameo, the ending has a new meaning with the death of Carrie Fisher.

As much as I complain, I still enjoyed Rogue One. The grittier tone of the film worked well with the darker story. I also liked that they were able to expand on stories in the Star Wars world that we’ve never seen before, which is what I’m hoping for with these stand-alone films. However, I was still disappointed. But in the end, the film was still enjoyable and was a successful  first stand-alone film for the Star Wars franchise.

3/5