It’s those moments and perspectives that make the movie worth watching, and while Rogue One is enjoyable on a surface level as a fast-paced series of action set pieces, it’s also an affecting political statement ( despite Disney’s protests to the contrary). The relationship between Jyn and her father is effective as the story's beating heart and the emotional beats all pretty much manage to land, but Rey, Finn, and Poe all have undeniably better chemistry as characters-I very much doubt that anyone will ship any Rogue One characters quite as much as they ship Finn and Poe. “I’m the pilot,” says a dazed Bodhi while introducing himself to the others, and sadly we don’t dig very much deeper into most of these characters than that. It's that they’re only vaguely sketched in before we dive headfirst into the action, and that action only occasionally lets up enough to allow for character building. Rogue One's main problem isn’t that any of these characters are bad or unlikeable or that they’re badly cast-every performance is solid-to-excellent, and Rogue One’s cast features more diversity and representation than any Star Wars film to date. Inside the space of 20-or-so minutes, you meet the rest of the supporting cast: die-hard Rebel Alliance intel officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), sardonic reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO (voiced by Firefly alum Alan Tudyk), defecting Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), Rebel extremist and Jyn’s onetime mentor Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), blind-but-vaguely-Force-sensitive Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), and his friend, protector, and Heavy Weapons Guy Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen). Once you flash forward to the main action of the movie and meet an adult Jyn (Felicity Jones), things get more hectic.
Galen is taken, Lyra shot dead, and Jyn hidden away, left in the care of a family friend.
Unfortunately for the Erso family, the request is not optional. Where Episode VII gave us instantly memorable characters in a movie that suffered because it so meticulously replicated the story arcs and emotional beats of A New Hope, Rogue One gives us a more engaging story populated by characters who would benefit from a little more breathing room. But it's also the inverse of The Force Awakens. The good news is that Rogue One is a mostly successful attempt to tell an interstitial Star Wars story, one that in some ways is even more powerful than the main entries because it has to really roll around in the blood and the dirt. But more important for the franchise, Rogue One kicks off the true beginning of Disney's effort to change Star Wars from a traditional franchise that tells one big story into a Marvel-esque money-printing machine that spins a web of smaller interconnected stories that come out one or two times a year.
Rogue One is the movie version of those two paragraphs. The opening crawl of any Star Wars movie is quickie table-setting, a sort of lazy but efficient way to establish some stakes so it can drop us into the action. Those lines are from the opening crawl of the original Star Wars film released in 1977, before it spawned a decade-spanning mega-franchise and before it had even picked up the "Episode IV" tag that implied that we were picking up in the middle of the story. Further Reading Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a great starter film for a new generation